Biodynamic Composting Workshop

...e. Erik Knutzen is the author, with his wife Kelly Coyne, of The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post Consumer World. He blogs and produces a podcast at www.rootsimple.com. Cost: $20 per person. Space is limited to 20 attendees. Children are free and welcome to participate under the supervision of their parents. Register in advance here. What to bring: hat, gloves, sturdy shoes – be prepared to get your hands dirty! Refreshmen...

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Virtuosic Bread Shaping

...ds on Facebook: Post by Akhilesh Sharma. Back to learning a difficult skill. In the case of shaping dough it’s often best to practice with a sacrificial lump of flour and water that you’re not going to eat. It takes the pressure off and you’re free to try and try again. This applies, of course, to many other skills. Once you get the basic motion down, than it’s time to put some pressure on and try it for real....

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Neil deGrasse Tyson, GMOs and Risk Management

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ecT2CaL7NA I can understand why Neil deGrasse Tyson made these off the cuff remarks about genetically modified organisms. There’s a lot of tin foil hat thinking on the anti-GMO side. But his comments also reveal that Tyson does not understand the difference between conventional plant breeding (something human beings have been up to for thousands of years) and GMOs. For me, the best argument against GMOs come from...

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2,000 Year Old Bread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYTuNXq1eBk A Root Simple reader sent me a link to this video from the British Museum showing a chef recreating a 2,000 thousand year old loaf of bread found in one of the ovens of Pompeii. Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Bread A Global History by William Rubel. Rubel puts forth a couple of theories about the history of bread. One, that there’s nothing new about white bread. The elites have been eating white brea...

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