Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

In August the US FDA started allowing distributors to irradiate produce for market. Stores do not have to label the stuff so treated. What will that do to consumers after years of eating it? If any testing has been conducted it will be as reliable as the FDA drug tests. Worthless!
A local food bank often gets loads of produce to pass out, and I get the poor surplus stuff to feed my animals. Some of it may look good but even the pigs wont eat it. I have tried to save seed from some of that stuff but it will not germinate. I presume it has been genatically engineered.
I have purchased organic potatoes and tried to germinate them to plant as seed potatoes. They were labled organic but would not send out eyes, even after a month. I have tried to sprout dry beans from the market and they will not sprout, only rot.
Frozen fish from the market has no flavor and often the texture is bad. Most of it is from off shore places like China or Thailand. This tells me that the fault is not stricktly US. Out of season veggies or fruit are usually from countries across the equator. They to are flavorless and hard if not contaminated by pathogens or disinfectants.
A baby goat will die if fed bottled whole milk. Pasturizing and homoginizing it has removed all vitality and most enzymes. This stuff will not even make yogart, it needs to be decontaminated by simmering first. It has such a colony of bacteria that it will not yog.

To rant about any of the above will do no good. It is all about the money. We have the best government money can buy. Our only recourse is to grow our own and avoid purchasing this junk as much as possible. Then we have to fight with other agencies to get permits to raise fish and animals.

It's bad hey.

Nothing like an apple that has been in cold storage for a year. Looks good on the outside - but is rotten from the centre out.

Im growing my own veggies, fish, and beef. I decided that the gov will never do what is best for me or right morally. So I stopped complaining about it and started making my own

We live in orchard country - trees on every hill. Around the fire one night last Summer I was asking our neighbor how they make applesauce year-round if they harvest everything in the Fall. There is an applesauce factory just down the road. She said all around our area are storage barns, that are air-tight and they put some kind of salt or something in there with the apples that keep them in stasis year-round. When the applesauce factory needs more, they call up one of the farmers with stored apples and tell them to break the seal. The apples are perfectly good.

Nothing at all wrong with irradiation. Do a little reading and you'll find that gamma radiation can not make anything radio-active and all it does is kill the germs. It does not covert stuff to frankenfood. If the Taco Bell had used irradiated produce, the food poisoning would never have occurred. With all the imported food fertilized with human waste, we should be demanding irradiation.

I've had a lot of irradiated milk in my time in the US Sub Service. They zapped the milk and then it didn't even need to be refrigerated. Having fresh tasting milk after being at sea submerged for 4 months is a real treat. I wish all the dry goods were irradiated. At the end of a deployment the crackers would have weevils.

You can't get fresher food than live weevils! Irradiation would have deprived you of that!

Still, there are pros and cons to everything. Gov't protection, however in-business-pocket (and it is: witness USA gov't pushing sugar and tobacco abroad), is better than being "protected" by the free market (see "the Jungle" by Upton Sinclair for a few examples). Still, it would be nice if they would take Pollan's idea and upgrade the definition of food to exclude "edible foodlike substances" like American cheese and twinkies (to name two of thousands of examples).

I'm shocked that you can get beans etc at the store than don't sprout. Perhaps they were grown in an area with pests they didn't want to export. We always get lentils off the supermarket shelf and sprout them, no worries.

There have been no long term studies of the effects of irradiated food on humans. Studies are inconclusive of the short term effects on animals. What is known is that the process does kill a portion of the vitamin content in fruits and veggies. It also is known that free radicals are produced within the food by the radiatrion. Further the dead pathogens are still in the food. Lengthened shelf life will kill even more vitamins. With todays over processed prepared and fast food consumption people are already short of vitamines and long on free radicals. One way to stay healthy has been to consume more fresh fruits and veggies. Without labeling of irradiated food even that option is hampered. The best remaining option is grow your own foods.

I stopped drinking milk in 1960 on my first ship board taste of "recombined milk". During the later part of my 16 years at sea I kept activated charcoal tables to combat food poisoning out of ship board galleys. I still keep them handy. If you get to aching all over and have the squirts out both ends, two or three charcoal pills will have you back to normal in a few hours. Charcoal will disolve 3000 poisons. I have had to make do with burned toast but it is hard to get down.....still worked. Irradiated food may well reduce this sort of thing.

This last spring I wanted to plant pinto beans from the market. The first batch must have been old or sprayed because they failed to sprout. I bought fresh organic pintos and they worked but I lost some of the season and had poor yields. As it got colder I moved some of the plants into the GB in the green house and they are giving lots of beans. I have some old mung beans that I wanted to sprout and give the chickens and they would not sprout. I just soak them to soften but if soaked to long they will ferment.

Irradiation kills living things. There are advantages and disadvantages to this.

If you need to have stuff on a sub for 6 months, irradiating it can keep it from evolving. On the other hand, there are a lot of good things that it kills too.

I have noticed that I can drink an unlimited amount of raw milk, and have no problems. But when I drink more that a glass or two of pasteurized and homogenized milk, I have digestive problems. I believe that there are biological components in the milk that aid in digestion, that the treatment of the milk by pasteurization and homogenization make the milk less useful to your body. I also remember how raw milk sours. Pasteurized milk does not sour. It lacks the bacteria that allow it to sour; it spoils -- it rots.

Irradiation is like pasteurization on steroids - it kills all biological activity.

The advantage is that the little nasty bugs don't grow and reproduce in it. The disadvantage is that none of the good biologicals are around either -- grains won't sprout, the beneficial enzymes and bacteria etc. are dead. I think that the closer you are to the original, the better. There are things that we must do to our food to keep it until we can eat it, but the more we do to extend it's shelf life, the more we do to reduce its vitality.

Another thing that all this sanitization has done is to reduce our immunity to pathogens. I'm not advocating wallowing in or consuming sewage, but I've noted that kids that play in the dirt don't get sick, and the ones who get sick the fastest are the ones with the overly protective parents that sterilize all their stuff to keep them "safe".

Go AP! 0 food miles, no treatment, all the vitamins present - no need to preserve!

I agree SR. Seems to be closing in more and more sometimes it feels.

There is a reason there is so much ill-health around and fatigue is such a wide-spread malaise. So much food these days just isn't real food.

Heard it said on a documentary once that it used to take a few cabbage leaves to get what a whole cabbage now gives in nutrients. People are fat often cos just plain HUNGRY! Keep eating till get enough nutrients....

Is one main reason I am so fascinated with AP. Think it is a real answer. Can be done on a small enough footprint and fresh to pick and eat that day.

our bodies are filled with all sorts of living organisms. i don't remember exactly but i remember reading that 1/3 or the non-water content of our poo is other bacteria. we have symbiotic relationships with a bunch of bacteria... good stuff too! please don't kill my little friends... please... please?

Between our dirt garden and AP we raise all of our veggies. We have yet to raise all of our fruit. We raise 85% of our meat. Soon we shall start harvesting fish for the table. Even so the soil here in the Mohave desert is poor and lacking in some minerals. To make up for that difficency we are growing and juicing wheat grass. Google it and see the benifits. We also juice any surplus veggies and fruit. We may need the vitamins and minerals contained in a whole cabbage but that is difficult to eat in one day. Juicing that cabbage With an apple will give all the benifit except for the roughage and give two glasses of a refreshing drink. The pulp adn trimmings goes to the animals and improve the eggs, milk, meat.

Really neat solution to lower nutrients in a cabbage... juicing I used to do it a lot... Reckon I must start again!

Super how self-sufficient you are getting! What do you raise for meat?

You got pics of your place anywhere SR?

To heck with the poo! I heard on NPR that human cells are outnumbered by bacterial cells in our bodies, ignoring those in our intestines! Kind of scary, but interesting.

"Come one, come all! See the human-shaped bioreactor! More bacteria than man, yet it wears clothing and walks and talks like any one of you!"

We do seem to be going backward. A lot of people get sick because they limit the amount of real food in there diet. We take a tablet for any problem we encounter. And the pri*k that invented that darn flu shot hopes I never find out where they are. Never had a cold until that thing killed off my immunity to colds as a kid. And the needle hurt as well.

For meat that we raise: Older laying hens that no longer lay eggs regularly for stewed chicken and dumplin's. Rabbit for frying, baking, or slow simmer in solar oven in wine. Also hossenpeffer(sic). Turkey for holidays. WE have only an acre so our pigs are the small vietnameese. We tried to keep them for the young as suckling pig, but after many failed birthings we are harvesting the four remaining and next spring go with a regular feeder pig. We have goats for the milk, cheese, butter. When the kid gets to eight months of age he goes into the freezer. Lots of cutlets and stew meat, ribs and hocks....just like venison. Kids are usually born in February or March, two or three per doe. Will leave them on the tit for a couple of weeks then start milking the nanny and sharing with the kids. As soon as they show any interest in hay we wean them.
Our grocery bill is very light but our feed bill is about $200 a month. We have no pasture, all the critters are pened in large spaces.