Lead in Backyard Eggs: Don’t Freak Out But Don’t Ignore the Issue

...elevated lead levels in our soil when we did a series of soil tests back in 2011. Thankfully our egg results came in at 1.02 ug, just under the average level in the study. You’d have to eat a lot of eggs as an adult to go beyond the Federal Drug Administration’s maximum recommended lead intake level, though you could bump up against it if a child ate more than three eggs a day. I’d suggest that if you live in an older urban location, next to a gas...

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137 Corona Crisis With Johnny of Granola Shotgun

Johnny’s bulk grain. Image: Granola Shotgun. Johnny Sanphillippo of the blog Granola Shotgun dropped by the Root Simple podcast today to talk about a lifestyle that’s proving useful in our troubled times. I decided to put this podcast out quickly so please excuse the less than ideal audio on my end. During our conversation we discuss Johnny’s most recent blog post, “Recipes for Disaster,” which covers his tips and tricks for living frugally and b...

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2013 in Review Part II

...I take a baking class with Craig Ponsford who’s a famous advocate of whole grain baking. Ponsford inspires me to orient all cooking/preserving projects on this blog towards good health. Look for more blog posts on healthy food in 2014. We also participated in Stoic Week 2013. Stoicism is a philosophy that helps us deal with the ups and downs of life. And I got my Ham license–KK6HUF. December I harvest one big-ass squash out of the straw bale garde...

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Thomas Pynchon on Pizza

...a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover. Pynchon being Pynchon, pizza appears frequently in his novels as a multi-valiant symbol. In Vineland it’s a symbol of the Dharma...

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