Essential System #10 – Shelter

...ures into our policy of having a back-up system for every necessity at our urban homestead. We like things lightweight for our grab and go bags, so we purchased a three pound backpacking tent, the two person MSR “Missing Link”. This tent is spacious for its low weight and uses either hiking polls or trees to stake it out. On the down side, we’re not sure how this thing would hold up in high winds and it requires a lot of room to stake out. The “Mi...

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On the Problem of Food Storage and Hoarding

...ditional storage always leads us down the path of over-consumption. If the Food Network ever makes a foodie hoarder reality show, we could have been on an episode thanks to the shelves we added to the utility room. Those shelves quickly filled with aspirational but never used ingredients such as tapioca flour as well as mediocre food preservation projects that I just couldn’t admit defeat on. Our kitchen’s ample built-in cabinets. When it came tim...

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Too Good to Go?

...ech company monetizing something that would otherwise have gone to, say, a food bank, a gleaning service like Food Forward or to employees. A worker at one of the bakeries assured me that this food would have ended up in the dumpster so, perhaps, Too Good to Go is at least a neutral service. Salvaging the food waste stream is a neighborhood organizing project waiting to happen that would be nice to take away form the tech people. That said, I don’...

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I Ate 100 Power Bars

...ropriated as the latest buzz-phrase by large food companies. Every natural food product is labeled either “pro-biotic” or “pre-biotic.” If one could distill all those booths down to one item you’d end up with a pro-biotic turmeric, kimchi, kombucha, paleo sports bar grown “regeneratively,” whatever that means. But I’m getting cranky again. On a more positive note I met a nice Root Simple reader who works for Q Drinks, an Oakland, California based...

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