I am definitely trying this, thanks!

I see most of the comments discussing efficiency, the inability to have your own garden, or other limiting factors. And I believe all of them are missing the point. There are many and good reasons to shorten your food chain, and efficiency is not one of them. I would expect to at least see some people (there was one exception) considering the value of doing so in their lives, but nope.

So… Not very long ago, most of the people were actually living as farmers. Eric Hobsbawm, in this book, has done a great job describing what it took for the shift to happen, during the industrial revolution. For the people to actually be forced to abandon their land and start accumulating in urban environments where having your own garden is practically impossible for most of them. And it was not good. Child labor, people starving to death, extreme poverty, extreme exploitation of human labor. Many things changed, and most of them did not actually benefit the majority of the people who were forced to abandon or sell their land in order for people who could actually afford more efficient farming approaches (through machines) to replace them while accumulating wealth in an unprecedented manner. Maybe it’s worth examining this shift. Both the argument of efficiency and limiting factors, are not exactly new and are not exactly serving most of us either.

Besides the historical aspect, the how did we get here, of the long food chains. There are other aspects that make them harmful. The ones that allow for a term like “banana republic” to exist, when most of the people who use it don’t pause and think what it actually means for so many people that actually get exploited so they can have their bananas, cheap and available all year (as if potassium is not abundant in every single plant food). The ones that allow for people to have access to food without actually moving at all during the day (CVD, obesity, cases where being inefficient, like… spending energy to live your life, actually improves your health, like walking, carrying some weight, cycling). The ones that allow for food to be consumed weeks, months or even years after it is produced, dramatically reducing it’s quality while actually raising the cost (storage facilities, freezers, transportations through various environments).

But still, most comments at the moment and upvotes are not about those things. Except one. Interesting…

I love dark soy sauce!

Been experimenting with different kinds of fungus the past few months, mostly because they take less time to work their magic (like the one in tempeh), but I will definitely try fermenting my own soy sauce at some point. Everything else I tried to make myself so far has been way better than store bought products. If that’s true for soy sauce too…

Commenting just to drop a link of the process in case you are interested.

Salivating uncontrollably while reading the comments…

So, since it’s not mentioned yet, I 'll go with mushroom powders. Flavor and properties depend on which kinds of dried mushrooms are used, but they are just an incredible ingredient to add!

Frozen works great too with oatmeal. I am terrible at dehydrating fruit like berries, so I go this way (have quite a lot black currants for my oats).

How do you do it? Dehydrator or… ?

Wash them, let them dry, separate in portions, freeze them. They are good to consume for many weeks. Then, whenever you feel like it, take one out, drop it (frozen) in the blender with greek yogurt, blend and you have a delicious yogurt with great color and flavor. I do this not only with berries (strawberries a personal favorite), but pretty much with every type of fruit I like and I either got too much or is going out of season (well, not grapes or similar fruit).

To drive down costs, the meat industry relies on practices that can increase the spread of disease, like overcrowding and intensive breeding, which can trigger the need for gruesome practices like feedback to work around the problems it’s created.

Americans eat more animals than practically any other country — around 264 pounds of red and white meat, 280 eggs, 667 pounds of dairy, and around 20.5 pounds of seafood per person each year.

Insane amounts, horrible -mostly unseen- reality to support them.

Besides, if one does not see certain actions, those actions might as well not be happening at all. If only there was a way people who cause the greatest harm to control what gets reported in mainstream media, effectively shifting people’s attention away from the harmful practices of their businesses…

As a tall guy who wanted to read and write poetry and also enjoyed moving my body a lot, which included dancing while being quite shy, I 've been called “closeted straight” when I was young.

I agree with everything you wrote, especially with the books > videos. Beside the space a book provides for the author to express himself clearly, it is also a quite active mode of engagement with content, since in following the narrative, imagining and understanding it, who we are is actually quite important too.

Oh, and Fahrenheit 451… what a great book!

Do you make yours? If so, what coagulation agent do you use?

@OP, looks great. I usually just pan fry mine with a little olive oil until it gets golden-golden/brown on the outside, which is when I drop the soy sauce. Veggies and spices I stir fry on their own.

This article attempts to provide some reasoning.

As for the neighbouring area, since it’s mentioned near the end of this article, a related fact from wikipedia:

Notably, opium production in Myanmar is the world’s second-largest source of opium after Afghanistan, producing some 25% of the world’s opium, forming part of the Golden Triangle. While opium poppy cultivation in Myanmar had declined year-on-year since 2015, cultivation area increased by 33% totalling 40,100 hectares alongside an 88% increase in yield potential to 790 metric tonnes in 2022 according to latest data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Myanmar Opium Survey 2022[283] With that said, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has also warned that opium production in Myanmar may rise again if the economic crunch brought on by COVID-19 and the country’s February 1 military coup persists, with significant public health and security consequences for much of Asia

More often than not, ethnic disputes are just leverage used by people in power to achieve their goals.

Besides the brutality of mentioned in the OP, there have been tens of deaths in the area during the past few months.

For most people, eating bugs is only natural.

So, while we globally enjoy this heat wave, most of us hoping for lower temperatures. While some discuss the political aspect of this, which really is large, already established, economic interests resisting alternatives. I am just going to quote something near the end of the article.

Insect farming is arguably much more efficient than cattle production. One hundred pounds (45 kilograms) of feed produces 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms) of beef, while the same amount of feed yields 45 pounds (20 kilograms) of cricket.

The mortality rate was highest in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal.

Which are places where the cost of electricity has gone dramatically up the past few years making air-conditioning less and less accessible.