Much more appetizing and healthier than bugs for sure. Bugs have some similarities to shellfish in that they carry some weird stuff in them such as parasites, since we dont really cook them parasites can live on in you. Re the sprouting, I would add to use unbleached or naturally bleached paper towels, sorry if I missed it if you mentioned. Dream like visualization for fun; Imagine if your whole living area was used to grow sprouts, a giant chia pet apartment all surfaces, everywhere. Except maybe the bed, that would be too weird. And the toilet seat, too weird. I have seen a vid of someone using abandoned car tops to grow food, maybe it was entire cars...oh, here it is...https://www.wapcar.my/news/thailand-taxi-companies-are-growing-food-on-abandoned-cars-to-feed-outofwork-drivers-33872
As an apartment dweller, I have no access to a garden or any other kind of outdoor space for growing, so I turned to sprouting. In addition to several seeds types mentioned above, I've also had great results sprouting lentils, which are very cheap and grow very quickly. I usually do four days in the dark, one day in indirect light. Nice flavor and very filling. In any case, I have been using mostly jars up to now; I like the look of those trays... Thank you for this very useful post!
Magical stuff thank you. If it's any help to you, I posted below about lots of forage foods that are extremely healthy and available free and organically free of pesticides, although I try to avoid forage close to busy roads. Dandelion leaves are everywhere; nettles too; and nutritionally dense. Love your point about lentils thanks. I imagine you know far more than me about all of this, so forgive me if my comment is any way unhelpful. I've learned a lot about sleep too, and the importance of not eating late, to allow hormone balancing (leptin and grelin, which regulate hunger). I was suicidal for several years, unrelenting, (medication-free I add) until I discovered the magic of diet and sleep. Now, peace. Lots of love and gratitude to you.
everyone should look into making their own sauerkraut (or kimchi for some adventure). It's dead simple. you can turn a cabbage into a delicious gut biome treat in a couple of days on your kitchen counter. hated the stuff when I was a kid. i just don't remember it tasting so good. goes very well with meat. the basic process is to break down the cells of the cabbage with salt by hand in a large mixing bowl, pack in a large glass / porcelain jar with a weight to hold the cabbage below the level of it's own liquid created when you mixed by hand with salt. that's it really. Add your favorite spices and you've got a tasty nutritional side dish in a couple of days. Lots of recipes online. highly recommend!!
We've run a couple of kimchi experiments. They were okay, but we're still working to find our taste. We love the Korean grocers who aren't far away from us, so that probably decreased the motivation to make it work.
my batches are becoming more hit than miss as I get better at it. cumin over caraway seems to be the winner, but that's a personal choice. there are a couple of very tasty homemade kimchi shops not too far from the house here. problem is it seems near impossible to find someone who doesn't load them with sugar (me - reversed Type II, but still on a journey). best thing about making your own, you know what's inside. And if you run across some red cabbage, grab it. I've only gotten a hold of it twice, but it turns out delicious.
Traffer, this info might interest you : Dr. Jason Fung (out of Canada) explains why the diet is the most important factor in type 2 diabetes and how we can use dietary methods to reverse type 2 ...
I think commercially prepared kimchi and sauerkraut would have killed off any beneficial enzymes. There is a lady online who gives her Russian mother's sauerkraut recipe and it is the only one that works for me.
I love home lactic-acid fermenting and have tried all kinds of things. Ironically, sauerkraut is the one I prefer to buy at the supermarket. Where I live, organic sauerkraut is so cheap it simply isn't worth the trouble of making it at home. So I ferment carrots, beets, garlic, and few other things.
I love that! Broccoli is supposedly second only to wheatgrass, health wise that is.
Wheatgrass requires a press but if I’m not mistaken 1oz of it=34 oz of a mix of fruits and vegetables. But that’s an old stat I was told at a health food store a while back, so grain of salt. It does make sense, when one drinks it, it feels like pure chlorophyll... IMHO, it’s the other “blood” of nature. But, broccoli sprout supposed to have anti carcinogens.
Jul 26, 2022·edited Jul 26, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
Broccoli sprouts are said to have the highest levels in any of the cabbage family of a powerful anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory nutrient known as sulforaphane. Some resources:
Beautiful! We have tried sprouting in Thailand (watercress) but in the ground and with our chickens/duck they had to be carefully covered with palm fronds. We had good results and some very edible salad greens for a few weeks. I remember sprouting wheat grass in a windowsill back from my LA days...it was all the rage back then. Generally we have too many established fruit trees here but it's great for a small area thanks for the tutorial!
Thank you. You've inspired in me an urge to go and find my Freshlife Automatic Sprouter, which is currently somewhere in my junk room, under a mountain of actual junk!
I started growing microgreens back in 2020, during our lockdown here in Australia. I have a couple of different seed trays, including your #2 (which indeed is a bit large for one planting for 1-2 people, but is otherwise quite good). I made my own out of some of those disposable mushroom trays, by putting a lot of holes in the bottom with a small soldering iron, and using an intact one as the drip tray. I line my trays with pieces of fibreglass insect screening cut to size, covered in a thin layer of coconut coir. These trays, and the insect screening, are resusable, and the coconut coir is cheap, easy, & retains water. I never bother with soaking the seeds. (Well, I did try it once, and it was a real pain to spread the wet seeds evenly. So that was that.)
My favourites are broccoli & red cabbage (I usually sow these in the same tray, half each, because they have similar sprouting & growing times), and most recently, peas (both snow peas and regular peas - the shoots are much the same, mild-flavoured and tender), black sunflower, buckwheat, and chard (a couple of mixes, eg rainbow chard, but all are good).
I don't like kale. Or kale sprouts. It's a matter of personal taste...
I've also tried bok choi (pak choi) and sorrel, & plan to repeat these as good eating salad greens.
Full grown bok choi is a bit strong for me, but the microgreens are lovely.
Recently, in Australia we have had heavy rain & flooding which have devastated our food-bowl areas, and lettuces have been either impossible to get, or very expensive.
So I was very, very glad to have my little bench of microgreens, which actually make a much nicer & easier substitute for lettuce!
I use hydroponic fertiliser rather than water, once the seeds have sprouted, and this does make them grow faster.
I've also tried growing some salad greens hydroponically, in Kratky buckets (google it!), which is a bit more work, though I have managed to grow basil very successfully, and some types of lettuce.
I live in sub-tropical Brisbane, where it is a bit warm for lettuce (especially in summer, when you most want it!)
So microgreens work really well for me, and the chard, pea sprouts, and sunflower produce enough bulk to make a decent salad.
I grow mine in 750ml plastic drink bottles with the tops cut off, and 1L yogurt containers with holes in the lid (to fit 2 inch netpots). It is probably more trouble than it's worth - but gives me one more way to produce my own food in case of need!
Loved this, and the photos were a great addition. I've sprouted for years, but love the extra ideas you had that I hadn't used. I plan to revamp my own approach. Thanks!
Fabulous. I enjoy dandelions, nettles and other free herbs, mint, sage, especially, from the garden and countryside. The countryside and small pockets of greenery and nature offer all sorts of free organic fresh food. Significantly when we eat more naturally we need to eat much less. Much of the 'developed' world's problems, especially chronic diseases (which did not feature in mortality rates 150 years ago) and people's addictions and fundamental enslavement by banks etc., are because powerful wealthy corporations learnt how to leverage trauma and humans' evolved propensity to become addicted to sugars, etc., that served us well in the foraging hunter-gathering millennia (before 10-20,000 years ago, with the obvious exception of Native American Indians, now challenged enormously by obesity = metabolic syndrome and diabetes, because just a few generations ago all they ate was bison/buffalo), but since then basically our evolved susceptibility to food addiction has become our undoing. LiveWildLiveFree.org Also HealthResults.com and LowcarbFreshwell.co.uk are real examples of the new ground-upwards new health economies emerging (increasingly everywhere), and reversing the harms of the past centuries.
When I initially subscribed to RTE, all e-mail notices of new articles showed up in my gmail inbox. Now they are regularly showing up under the "promotions" tab, this forces me to go look for them and move them to the inbox. This also happened to Alex Berensen, and boriquagato. It appears lists are being made and certain information sources are being shuffled into invisibility via those lists.
I set up a gmail filter to move all substack articles to a specific folder and archive them rather than putting them in the inbox. been slowly setting up subfolders with filters to organize authors.
note: best control over filters is in the basic html version of gmail, their "standard version" kinda sucks for anything but mass selection of mail to delete it.
I've not had any issues with them being misplaced since setting up the filter.
Thank you for this! I have been using a sprouting lid and jar for years with broccoli sprouts. Recently they've not been doing too well. I may need to try the tray method.
We used to do sprouting of many of these same seeds, but after a couple months with things working OK, we started having mold problems, where the seeds would mold before they had sufficiently sprouted/grown shoots. Tried using dilute peroxide in the water to no avail. Finally gave up. It was a commercially made sprouter tray (plastic) that we were using, but I don't remember the brand. Have you ever had problems with mold, and if so, what did you do about it?
It isn't mold while storing the seeds. The problem we had was mold growth while sprouting. Or are you suggesting that the seeds get mold spores on them during storage (at room temp) and then that mold grows while the seeds are sprouting? And freezer storage prevents that? If so, that's an interesting idea and worth pursuing. Thanks!
Growing food is the ultimate act of resistance and it's incredibly rewarding by so many measures including fresher taste that's unbeatable. It wouldn't be me without a reminder to choose organic and heirloom seeds rather than assume all seeds are equal. Also try to avoid Amazon that feeds Bezos and go straight to the source and support the many small farms directly. Every dollar is a vote so vote for the small, pure, local options. Organic Consumers has some tips & sources.
Much more appetizing and healthier than bugs for sure. Bugs have some similarities to shellfish in that they carry some weird stuff in them such as parasites, since we dont really cook them parasites can live on in you. Re the sprouting, I would add to use unbleached or naturally bleached paper towels, sorry if I missed it if you mentioned. Dream like visualization for fun; Imagine if your whole living area was used to grow sprouts, a giant chia pet apartment all surfaces, everywhere. Except maybe the bed, that would be too weird. And the toilet seat, too weird. I have seen a vid of someone using abandoned car tops to grow food, maybe it was entire cars...oh, here it is...https://www.wapcar.my/news/thailand-taxi-companies-are-growing-food-on-abandoned-cars-to-feed-outofwork-drivers-33872
This made me laugh! I too prefer bean sprouts to crickets :)
Great link 👌😊!
Thanks so much for the brilliant information Mrs C!
As an apartment dweller, I have no access to a garden or any other kind of outdoor space for growing, so I turned to sprouting. In addition to several seeds types mentioned above, I've also had great results sprouting lentils, which are very cheap and grow very quickly. I usually do four days in the dark, one day in indirect light. Nice flavor and very filling. In any case, I have been using mostly jars up to now; I like the look of those trays... Thank you for this very useful post!
Magical stuff thank you. If it's any help to you, I posted below about lots of forage foods that are extremely healthy and available free and organically free of pesticides, although I try to avoid forage close to busy roads. Dandelion leaves are everywhere; nettles too; and nutritionally dense. Love your point about lentils thanks. I imagine you know far more than me about all of this, so forgive me if my comment is any way unhelpful. I've learned a lot about sleep too, and the importance of not eating late, to allow hormone balancing (leptin and grelin, which regulate hunger). I was suicidal for several years, unrelenting, (medication-free I add) until I discovered the magic of diet and sleep. Now, peace. Lots of love and gratitude to you.
everyone should look into making their own sauerkraut (or kimchi for some adventure). It's dead simple. you can turn a cabbage into a delicious gut biome treat in a couple of days on your kitchen counter. hated the stuff when I was a kid. i just don't remember it tasting so good. goes very well with meat. the basic process is to break down the cells of the cabbage with salt by hand in a large mixing bowl, pack in a large glass / porcelain jar with a weight to hold the cabbage below the level of it's own liquid created when you mixed by hand with salt. that's it really. Add your favorite spices and you've got a tasty nutritional side dish in a couple of days. Lots of recipes online. highly recommend!!
We've run a couple of kimchi experiments. They were okay, but we're still working to find our taste. We love the Korean grocers who aren't far away from us, so that probably decreased the motivation to make it work.
my batches are becoming more hit than miss as I get better at it. cumin over caraway seems to be the winner, but that's a personal choice. there are a couple of very tasty homemade kimchi shops not too far from the house here. problem is it seems near impossible to find someone who doesn't load them with sugar (me - reversed Type II, but still on a journey). best thing about making your own, you know what's inside. And if you run across some red cabbage, grab it. I've only gotten a hold of it twice, but it turns out delicious.
Traffer, this info might interest you : Dr. Jason Fung (out of Canada) explains why the diet is the most important factor in type 2 diabetes and how we can use dietary methods to reverse type 2 ...
I think commercially prepared kimchi and sauerkraut would have killed off any beneficial enzymes. There is a lady online who gives her Russian mother's sauerkraut recipe and it is the only one that works for me.
If you can get fresh kimchi that tastes the way you like from a shop, go for it! Making it at home can be hit or miss.
I love home lactic-acid fermenting and have tried all kinds of things. Ironically, sauerkraut is the one I prefer to buy at the supermarket. Where I live, organic sauerkraut is so cheap it simply isn't worth the trouble of making it at home. So I ferment carrots, beets, garlic, and few other things.
I love that! Broccoli is supposedly second only to wheatgrass, health wise that is.
Wheatgrass requires a press but if I’m not mistaken 1oz of it=34 oz of a mix of fruits and vegetables. But that’s an old stat I was told at a health food store a while back, so grain of salt. It does make sense, when one drinks it, it feels like pure chlorophyll... IMHO, it’s the other “blood” of nature. But, broccoli sprout supposed to have anti carcinogens.
Thanks for that.
Broccoli sprouts are said to have the highest levels in any of the cabbage family of a powerful anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory nutrient known as sulforaphane. Some resources:
https://presearch.com/search?q=brocolli+sprouts+sulforaphane
Thanks!! I knew I was somewhere in the ballpark!
Appreciate that, Collin!
Beautiful! We have tried sprouting in Thailand (watercress) but in the ground and with our chickens/duck they had to be carefully covered with palm fronds. We had good results and some very edible salad greens for a few weeks. I remember sprouting wheat grass in a windowsill back from my LA days...it was all the rage back then. Generally we have too many established fruit trees here but it's great for a small area thanks for the tutorial!
Thank you. You've inspired in me an urge to go and find my Freshlife Automatic Sprouter, which is currently somewhere in my junk room, under a mountain of actual junk!
I started growing microgreens back in 2020, during our lockdown here in Australia. I have a couple of different seed trays, including your #2 (which indeed is a bit large for one planting for 1-2 people, but is otherwise quite good). I made my own out of some of those disposable mushroom trays, by putting a lot of holes in the bottom with a small soldering iron, and using an intact one as the drip tray. I line my trays with pieces of fibreglass insect screening cut to size, covered in a thin layer of coconut coir. These trays, and the insect screening, are resusable, and the coconut coir is cheap, easy, & retains water. I never bother with soaking the seeds. (Well, I did try it once, and it was a real pain to spread the wet seeds evenly. So that was that.)
My favourites are broccoli & red cabbage (I usually sow these in the same tray, half each, because they have similar sprouting & growing times), and most recently, peas (both snow peas and regular peas - the shoots are much the same, mild-flavoured and tender), black sunflower, buckwheat, and chard (a couple of mixes, eg rainbow chard, but all are good).
I don't like kale. Or kale sprouts. It's a matter of personal taste...
I've also tried bok choi (pak choi) and sorrel, & plan to repeat these as good eating salad greens.
Full grown bok choi is a bit strong for me, but the microgreens are lovely.
Recently, in Australia we have had heavy rain & flooding which have devastated our food-bowl areas, and lettuces have been either impossible to get, or very expensive.
So I was very, very glad to have my little bench of microgreens, which actually make a much nicer & easier substitute for lettuce!
I use hydroponic fertiliser rather than water, once the seeds have sprouted, and this does make them grow faster.
I've also tried growing some salad greens hydroponically, in Kratky buckets (google it!), which is a bit more work, though I have managed to grow basil very successfully, and some types of lettuce.
I live in sub-tropical Brisbane, where it is a bit warm for lettuce (especially in summer, when you most want it!)
So microgreens work really well for me, and the chard, pea sprouts, and sunflower produce enough bulk to make a decent salad.
My brief attempt to grown lettuce hydroponically (mason jars) was a bust, so interested to look at the Kratky bucket idea. Thanks!
I grow mine in 750ml plastic drink bottles with the tops cut off, and 1L yogurt containers with holes in the lid (to fit 2 inch netpots). It is probably more trouble than it's worth - but gives me one more way to produce my own food in case of need!
Loved this, and the photos were a great addition. I've sprouted for years, but love the extra ideas you had that I hadn't used. I plan to revamp my own approach. Thanks!
Fabulous. I enjoy dandelions, nettles and other free herbs, mint, sage, especially, from the garden and countryside. The countryside and small pockets of greenery and nature offer all sorts of free organic fresh food. Significantly when we eat more naturally we need to eat much less. Much of the 'developed' world's problems, especially chronic diseases (which did not feature in mortality rates 150 years ago) and people's addictions and fundamental enslavement by banks etc., are because powerful wealthy corporations learnt how to leverage trauma and humans' evolved propensity to become addicted to sugars, etc., that served us well in the foraging hunter-gathering millennia (before 10-20,000 years ago, with the obvious exception of Native American Indians, now challenged enormously by obesity = metabolic syndrome and diabetes, because just a few generations ago all they ate was bison/buffalo), but since then basically our evolved susceptibility to food addiction has become our undoing. LiveWildLiveFree.org Also HealthResults.com and LowcarbFreshwell.co.uk are real examples of the new ground-upwards new health economies emerging (increasingly everywhere), and reversing the harms of the past centuries.
Off topic but relevant to the blog:
When I initially subscribed to RTE, all e-mail notices of new articles showed up in my gmail inbox. Now they are regularly showing up under the "promotions" tab, this forces me to go look for them and move them to the inbox. This also happened to Alex Berensen, and boriquagato. It appears lists are being made and certain information sources are being shuffled into invisibility via those lists.
I set up a gmail filter to move all substack articles to a specific folder and archive them rather than putting them in the inbox. been slowly setting up subfolders with filters to organize authors.
note: best control over filters is in the basic html version of gmail, their "standard version" kinda sucks for anything but mass selection of mail to delete it.
I've not had any issues with them being misplaced since setting up the filter.
Thank you for this! I have been using a sprouting lid and jar for years with broccoli sprouts. Recently they've not been doing too well. I may need to try the tray method.
great article, and very appropriate for the times.
We used to do sprouting of many of these same seeds, but after a couple months with things working OK, we started having mold problems, where the seeds would mold before they had sufficiently sprouted/grown shoots. Tried using dilute peroxide in the water to no avail. Finally gave up. It was a commercially made sprouter tray (plastic) that we were using, but I don't remember the brand. Have you ever had problems with mold, and if so, what did you do about it?
I keep mine in the freezer - they sprout just as well and I haven't had problems with mold.
It isn't mold while storing the seeds. The problem we had was mold growth while sprouting. Or are you suggesting that the seeds get mold spores on them during storage (at room temp) and then that mold grows while the seeds are sprouting? And freezer storage prevents that? If so, that's an interesting idea and worth pursuing. Thanks!
Yes, I read that it happens, so I just stuffed all my seeds in the freezer. They germinate just as quickly.
I've read that a baking soda solution helps with mold.
double posting article link here in this response because it's relevant: https://web.archive.org/web/20210620134835/https://homeguides.sfgate.com/grow-wheatgrass-kelp-powder-29685.html
Worth a try! Thanks.
I forgot to mention, kelp powder can be used as a fertilizer and baking soda to prevent mold.
details: https://web.archive.org/web/20210620134835/https://homeguides.sfgate.com/grow-wheatgrass-kelp-powder-29685.html
(archive link, because now the URL leads to an article on pebbles for landscaping)
Growing food is the ultimate act of resistance and it's incredibly rewarding by so many measures including fresher taste that's unbeatable. It wouldn't be me without a reminder to choose organic and heirloom seeds rather than assume all seeds are equal. Also try to avoid Amazon that feeds Bezos and go straight to the source and support the many small farms directly. Every dollar is a vote so vote for the small, pure, local options. Organic Consumers has some tips & sources.
https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/tip-growing-organic-food-inside-your-home-year-round
ps try switching to brown, unbleached paper towels & skip the toxic load of bleach paper.