What do you suppose is the best thing about finding out how to make once-traditional foods for yourself? There is the joy of discovery and learning, you never lose these things once they are yours. There are the health and wellness benefits of eating foods that are fresh and natural, and maintaining healthy weight is a great reward. The best thing though, is spreading the new knowledge to interested people, near and far. Sharing is what I like the most.

I love blogging, but you can’t beat food coming up in conversation and the opportunity it brings to share rare information about how to do something for yourself. It started with easy things like braising meats for barbecuing. Later I learned to do more interesting, but easier things like making my own mayonnaise from scratch. Now I have evolved to brining and preserving pickled vegetables from fresh veggies in their bountiful season for later eating, when the days are short and nothing fresh can be found from local sources.

The whole idea of growing or buying in season depends on the knowledge of what to do with sixty pounds of tomatoes before they spoil.. Real food doesn’t keep forever, so knowing how to can, pickle, dry and smoke foods would be life-sustaining labor if we couldn’t count on farms from half way around the world and freighters full of not quite ripe fruits and vegetables during the winter months.

Spreading the word is the hardest part of all though. Even though I blog every day and my readership is growing, and even though the words are online from now on for people to read and share, this way is not very self-satisfying. Talking about food and nutrition face to face is the most mutually beneficial way to evangelize about these topics I am so passionate about. When conversing, the person I am speaking to can ask for clarification, can help to direct the conversation into areas that they are interested in. This is why I think I will be working on developing workshops to conduct on food topics later this year.

My wife will be opening a wellness center this year, the center may be a place where I can conduct workshops and talks about health and nutritional wellness. I know people that do it currently, I read about people that do it in the newspaper, like this lady who teaches fermentation from a bus. I don’t think I would even want to charge anything, but of course if there were material costs I would want to recoup those. I feel that getting the word out is more important than asking for a reward for my time. Spreading the news is more of a reward than money would be. Perhaps I can find a way to tape these sessions and put them on here so that people could watch the presentations, and the give and take that they would create and I could reach people that couldn’t easily get to Kansas City for a workshop. That is a bit of a grand goal, but it might come to pass.

I think the most important place to start would be showing people how easy it is to live without having to eat carbs, how important it is to our collective futures that we stop eating processed foods and sweets in every bite.