Over the last several years I’ve talked with punks who would work on organic farms through the summer, and I listened to their tales of farm life. I’ve since met people who have gone further with that desire to leave the cities and all the trappings of the modern world. Some have gone to work on farms, some just left the city for smaller communities, and there are those who made the leap and are truly living off the grid.

Over the next several weeks we will feature some of their stories. Here it Gretchen’s.

Escaping the Cesspool

By Gretchen Fawkette

What’s so punk about living in the bush? Sitting around twiddling your thumbs in isolation. The city is where the fun is. It’s where the action is. There’s shows, bike rides, dumpsters, Food Not Bombs, people to bum change off of, people who share your ideologies about Anarchism, Feminism or Equality, plus there’s lots and lots of punks.

On the other side, there’s also cops, yuppies, pollution, gentrification, drug problems, cops, pavement, landlords, garbage, and way too many cops. And if these things start to get you down, you can just drink your worries away. And if shit gets hairy you can always take to the rails, blast through some nice scenery and go hang out in another city for a while.

That’s what I did. It’s all I knew. Where I grew up, Nashville, I just saw the country as full of deliverance-style rednecks and meth labs. Why would I ever go there? And when I escaped that place I just travelled from city to city. Sometimes I would settle down for a bit, but soon enough I would get itchy feet and have to take off again. Rural living for me was living on a train for 3 days as I went from Minneapolis to Seattle.

My first experience living outside of a city was spending four months on Denman Island, one of the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. I lived in a trailer outside of a hay barn in the middle of a sheep field. My rent was to feed the sheep and the horses everyday. It was a lot of fun. It totally changed my mind about country living. I loved it, but wasn’t quite ready to give up city life just yet. There were still towns to explore, bands to join, shows to go to and punk houses to destroy. So I left and went back to the travelling, city-dwelling life.

A few years down the road I found myself in Montreal, living in an old warehouse turned into shitty lofts and crawling with punks. It was winter and I was in a huge slump of depression, drinking shitty 40′s everyday, mostly by myself, so that I wouldn’t care about anything. I saw how fucked up the world is, how cruel we are to each other and how stupid we are for trashing the earth to a point where we’re making it inhospitable for ourselves. And I realized that after all my activism, all the protests I went to, being vegan (and then being a conscientious “post-vegan”), and all my well-wishing ultimately did fuck all. TOXIC NARCOTIC’s lyrics pretty much paralleled my mood. “We’re all doomed, what’s the use? Fuck the world and pass the booze.” I saw myself falling hard and I knew something drastic had to happen in my life.

I got a job tree-planting in BC in the spring but I left Montreal a month early so I could spend some time with my partner who was living in Winnipeg. While I was there I went to a PROPAGANDHI show and bumped into some old friends who said they were living on their father’s land an hour outside Winnipeg and invited me out for a visit. Always up for an adventure, I left with them the next day.

Being out there for that week changed my life. They lived off-grid in a glorified shack. They heated their house with wood, which they had to cut themselves. They also cooked their food with a wood cookstove, something I had only ever seen in museums. An artifact of a bygone era.

I kept myself busy helping them do the spring cleaning and hauling in wood from the bush. They kept horses, and while I was there we got completely snowed in, so we took the day off to take a five hour sleigh ride to the beer vendor and back. Epic fun.

But, after a week I left, and when I got back to the city I felt gross and out of touch with reality. It was a shock. It was -10°C (about 15°F) but it was so warm inside. No stove to stoke, no wood to stack. Just turn a dial and pay a bill. To this day that still shocks and disgusts me. For me, heating your house and cooking your food with wood that you cut, hauled, stacked, and seasoned by yourself is by far my favorite aspect about living in the bush.

Fast forward to now. I’ve been living outside of cities for the better part of two years. I’ve lived in a few different places and have learned a multitude of different skills. Where I live now is in a community of homesteaders on 80 acres of isolated bush in Manitoba, close to the Ontario border.

I found the transition to bush life very natural. I don’t find it too hard to stay connected with my friends. I’m only an hour and a half from Winnipeg, which surprisingly has a pretty wicked punk scene. I still come into town every few weeks to catch a show or visit some friends, but I’m quite content to live out here in the bush.

I have serious anxiety issues and I find that being out here is so calming and chill, which is so good for my mental health. I also barely ever have to work because I barely ever spend money. I grow a very large amount of my own food, so I hardly ever buy groceries.

I live off-grid in a small house. I have a very humble 12-volt solar power system – just enough to power a few lights and an old car stereo I hooked up. You would think that living without all the conveniences of civilized life would be hard but I actually find it quite liberating. Everything I do, I do myself.

I used to be a bike mechanic and a welder, but I’ve found those skills pretty much useless out here. The closest bike shop is probably in Winnipeg. Tragically, biking just doesn’t make sense out here unless you love touring. It’s something I’ve had to come to terms with. Bikes were my passion when I lived in the city. Now I’ve slowly started replacing my old skills with auto mechanics, blacksmithing, bow-making, tanning hides, wildcrafting and gardening.

Honestly, the thing that’s probably the hardest for me is the lack of punks around. Punk culture is something I hold very close to my heart. My Irish, Welsh, Ukrainan, and Dutch heritage is just a random grab bag to me, places on a map I’ll probably never visit. I’m nothing more than a mundane White settler. But to me, settler culture is everything I despise: Wal-Marts, video games and exploitation. Extreme waste.

I also have no real home. Born in Alberta, raised in Tennessee, I feel no alliance to those places and I have no desire to return. I also haven’t lived in a place for more than a year since I was 17. No culture, no hometown. All I have is punk. Punk culture isn’t something I was born into, it’s a path I chose. So I hold onto that, very tightly and defensively.

Interacting with locals is sometimes amusing. There’s a Hutterite colony very close by (Hutterites are similar to the Amish except they allow electricity and tractors) and a large Mennonite Christian community in the area. A lot of them don’t get out much, so when they see a girl walking around town wearing skimpy, crustie clothing and covered literally head to toe with tattoos, some of them get their minds blown. However, a lot of people don’t give a shit, and try to make me feel welcome in the greater community. I’ve made some genuine friendships with folks who I would never have talked to in the city because they weren’t in my anarchist/punk bubble.

Since moving out of the city, I’ve become less of a drunk and much more creative. I’ve started drawing, bow-making, archery, tanning animal hides, and I’ve picked up the banjo. Lately I’ve been making jewelry with bones, claws, antlers and sinew.

For years, even before I moved out to the bush, a lot of my friends have always talked about leaving the city, and how they’ll move out to the woods someday. Very, very few of them ever take steps in that direction, and I’ve grown tired and annoyed with their lack of action. They see all the problems and the inherent unsustainability of urbanized areas, realize they should do something, but never act on it.

It’s obvious to me now that cities are festering cesspools of greed, consumption and garbage. Urbanized areas and industrialization (which go hand in hand) destroy so much more than the ecosystems that once existed in the surrounding area. Forests are stripped away and prairies tilled to create food to feed them, completely destroying the ecosystems that once existed there as well.

Where I live, in a transition zone between where the rocky Canadian shield ends and the flat prairie lands begin, there used to be some of the largest trees in Canada east of the Rockies. I’ve read accounts of old timers describing trees more than four feet in diameter commonly found in this area. 150 years later, all of those big trees are now gone – used to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 19th century – replaced with fields of wheat, flax, canola and soy.

I live on the edge of this farmland. Where I live and east of here is too wet to be farmed, so it was logged and then left alone. It was able to grow back into the beautiful and humble forest it is now.

I wish punks who talk about leaving the cities behind will take the step of connecting with the land and not be afraid of looking like a bunch of hippies. Living in the country is fucking epic. It’s a big step but what you get is amazing.

If that’s what you want to do, take action and do it.

–

Feel free to contact me:

Gretchen Fawkette

Box 622
Ochre River, MB
R0L 1K0

or by tech-no mail:

gretchenfawkette@gmail.com

If you would like to share your story of leaving the city, contact zine@profaneexistence,org

PE:  Varix! I remember your first show, and how ready, excited, and nervous you all were to be a band. Since then, it seems like you’ve all exploded with creativity, confidence, and punk ambition. Knowing you all personally, I’ve just got to say what stand-up, rad womyn you all are, and how stoked I am to know ya! Alright…. enough of the flattery, time to inform the punx about VARIX! First things first, who are you, and what do you do in the band?

Emily: I’m Emily, and I play the bass.

Angie: I’m Angie, and I play the drums.

Stacey: I’m Stacey, and I…. sing? (laughter)

Ashley: I’m Ashley, and I play guitar.

PE: How did you start up VARIX and come together as a band?

E: Very drunkenly….

Ash: Interesting question, don’t really remember, you were there, Manda! (laughter)

Ang: Well, I learned how to play a D-beat. Then Emily had a riff, and Ashley had power chords and distortion, and we were drunk, and that pretty much did it.

Em: We wanted to sound gross. Nasty.

Ash: We accepted early on it was going to be nasty.

Em: We embraced the nasty. (laughter)

Ang: But then at a point we worked on it and realized we had some songs and should get a vocalist. We really didn’t want to have a girl vocalist because we didn’t want to be a “girl band. J.P. Toulon (RIP) was actually going to be our singer early on. We saw Stacey could do it and we realized we were being sort of sexist not wanting her to do it at first because she was a girl. (laughter.)She came to a practice, yelled, and it was really great.

PE: What are your musical backgrounds? Did you play any instruments prior to this or in any bands? Or is this your first go-about?

Em: I played trumpet in middle school (laughter). I lived at the Rathole with a bunch of musicians, so it was intimidating to start playing music. My roommate Tony who is now in AGITATE started learning drums, and I started jamming with him playing bass. From there, we started ANNELIESE with our friend Matt. We played loud hardcore and eventually broke up, so I had nothing to do! Shortly after, VARIX started jamming and it was sick.

Ang: I’ve played bass for some years, in QUESTION, GANGLION, and ANIMALES &

BEASTS. Some harsh family stuff happened about 2 years ago where I was holed up with my mom in the suburbs and my brother, who is a drummer, gave me a shitty, stripped down, really basic kit that I just sat at and started playing. For a week straight, I played for 8 hours every day, trying to figure out how to play a D-beat, a 1/2 beat, figure out a fill, get the symbols in there, and eventually it worked out to doing that for like 12 minutes at a time. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten with drumming.

S: I half-assed played the drums at some point and played the piano when I was younger. I’ve always been on the other side of playing music, hosting bands and setting up shows.

Ash: I played bass when I was younger. It was a similar situation where my best friend wanted me to play bass for a band, so I just did. I was in voice lessons from age 8 to 16. And now I’ve picked up guitar.

PE: So where were you at as individuals when you first started out? You mentioned briefly you were having a hard time and came together through madness, frustration and anger, but also it seems like you were all just wanting to have a good time.

Ang: For me, it was definitely both. My dad had just died and things were pretty intense. I didn’t work for a little bit and when I went back to work it wasn’t full time and I wasn’t in school. I had all this time and intensity and felt I needed to do something with it. Also, I just needed to have fun. At first, we practiced just to play and have a reason to get together every week and hang out and do something constructive while we drank. It progressed from there. For me personally, that was a really fucking rough year and VARIX was the thing I looked forward to every fucking week. It really kept me together. It was an outlet for everything. It was always so much fun though, too-even when we started and had so much trouble just playing our instruments. Well, besides Emily, she was fine. (laughter)

Ash: I definitely picked up guitar when I was in a bad spot. Angie was like, “You gotta do something with yourself, why not play guitar?” It’s about bettering yourself while in positions of sorrow.

Ang: It’s fortunate that we genuinely wanted/want to play really stripped-down music, so that any limitations we might have with technical ability aren’t really a problem…

Em: That was awesome though, ‘cause when we started, I had been writing more complicated riffs for ANNELIESE . For me, it was challenging just writing punk riffs and to simplify. It took some work creating pumped-up punk music and getting the hang of raw punk, which I love.

PE: Tour? Releases?

S: We toured at the beginning of this year. We went straight south and back. On top of that, we’ve done some weekend warrior stuff in the Midwest.

Ang: We have a demo tape out. This new label called Double Dutch did an LP comp with the most random DIY bands from Minneapolis. It’s a strange assortment, but I like that. In Minneapolis you get these DIY shows that are totally mixed bills and I think that comp totally reflects that. We’re about to be on a Profane Existence comp coming out, and have a 7” coming out on Discos Basura Records in a month or two.

S: The Profane comp’s all local too, with KONTRASEKT, FAVELA RISING, COGNITIVE DISSONANCE, IN DEFENSE, and PONX ATTACK.

PE: What kind of crazy stuff happened on your tour?

Em: Stacey has another dog now….(laughter)…VARIX has a mascot. The name is Torpedo.

Ash: We found a miniature wiener dog outside of Dallas, Texas that was abandoned at a truck stop. After a thorough investigation, Stacey decided to bring him home.

Ang: We were all outside, and this adorable wiener dog came up and put its head in Ashley’s lap as she was just sitting there and we were like,”OH MYGOD IT’S SO CUTE!” And so sad! Who would leave this little dog? We were also discussing how we needed to get it away from us before Stacey came outside. Well, she came outside. After no arguing, that dog was in the car with us 10 minutes later.

PE: Punk dog!(laughter)

S: We had 2 shows left, where we walked up with a little dog on tour in a punk vest.

Em: Yes! We found a pet store on our journey and had to stop and get her a vest. During a long drive, we sewed a patch onto it. It looked very badass.

PE: Are you all Minneapolis natives?

Ash: Wisconsssinnnnn!

S: Me too….

Em: St. Cloud.

Ang: Suburbs! Nameless suburbs.

PE: So what drew you to Minneapolis?

S: I came here for school more than anything else. At the time, it was the furthest away from Appleton, Wisconsin that I could afford to go to without paying out-of-state tuition. That’s what got me here, though it’s the punks that kept me here. It’s funny because I have so much love for Appleton now. Up the Wisco punks!

Ash: I came for the graffiti scene. And the punks here are just as brutal.

PE: Can you describe what it’s like to be a part of the Twin Cities punk community?

Em: It’s really sick. It’s a very vast community and most shows we play are quite varied. It’s awesome not having strict genre dividers.

Ang: Most people here are very supportive of each other and DIY music. It’s very cool to see. Another thing about starting this band is that I’ve just been getting into more and more stripped-down music and been wanting to hear things that are just punk. I didn’t feel there was as much of that going on here as there might be in other places. There’s tons of DIY music and really good bands for sure, but it was cool starting up something I thought was lacking. I wasn’t sure if people would be into it, but everyone’s been really supportive.

PE: Do you feel like the scene is divided between Minneapolis and St. Paul? Or is there a greater scene because the cities are so close together?

Ash: I feel like it was really divided until recently. There was a Twin Cities United show and it seemed like people were making more of an effort unify the scenes.

S: I think it’s still definitely divided in a sense, but it’s been slowly evolving and changing, people are letting go of the issues that divided the two in the past. Some of the most energetic reactions we’ve had at shows have been from the St. Paul kids.

Ash: Yeah, St. Paul, off the wall!

PE:Do you guys go to shows in St. Paul at all?

S: There isn’t much over there in the way of DIY spaces lately, so I don’t get over there unless it’s a bigger show at a bar or something.

PE: Do you guys get shit or feel like you get special attention for being an “all girl band?”

All: Ugh…. yes.

Ang: How much time ya got?

S: Where do we begin?

PE: I remember specifically whenever I’d book you guys, you all being like “Do not write on fliers that we are all womyn!”

S: We used to be like FUCK YOU if someone would call us a “girl band” and are still a little uneasy about it, at least if using that as our description on a flier or something. That’s not who we are as a band. That said, we have embraced it a bit as we’ve seen that it is something people support and value. It sounds so cheesy but when people-ladies specifically-come up to us after shows or on tour and say they were inspired that we were women making music.  It’s something you want to embrace.

Ang: It’s really fucking cool to see girls get involved when we’re playing. In Houston while we were playing it was all of us, then a huge circle pit of girls, which was fucking awesome. Almost everyone is pretty cool about it, and really all we want is to have a band, not a gender issue. But it does become an issue more often than it should, and even if it’s only one or two people out of an entire show that act fucked up about it, that’s more than I want to deal with it. I never really want to spend time fighting or explaining why sexism is bad to someone who’s not really listening to me anyways. But no matter where on the range from latent, i.e. “You know who you guys remind me of? SMASHING PUMPKINS! They had a girl, didn’t they?”, to blatant “seriously, I just want to fuck you,” just letting that shit go never feels right to me either…

S: Like hearing after the fact that while we were playing the SUBHUMANS show in Minneapolis someone was shouting, “Oh yeah, I’d totally fuck every one of them.”  It’s sad to think people are that dense that they’d say that. We’re up here to play fucking music, that doesn’t mean we’ve signed up to be some object to degrade. It’s bullshit. I can’t even count how many times someone’s come up and been like, “Oh you play pretty well for a girl”.

Em: I feel people are also subconsciously offensive, and things are exposed when they talk to me. For example they say something such as, “Oh, I wasn’t expecting you to be very good…..but damn, you guys rule!” My response being, “Fuck you! What do you mean you weren’t expecting us to be good? Why would you even say that? Fuck you for coming to that conclusion.”

Ang: I really hate this pressure to represent women and women musicians. It is very satisfying to play well and our band is good and fuck yeah if we had something to prove, we proved it. But there is this added pressure being women, and I hate that, and I hate that if I fuck up it’s not just that I fucked up, I feel like it’s this bigger gender thing where women can’t really play music. And I hate that pressure! I just wanna do my shit and play in a band just like everybody else and have fun with it.

S: I think we’re lucky in the punk community of Minneapolis being that there is definitely more support and more active women here than I’ve seen in a lot of other communities. It’s really cool to see at shows where the whole front is women rocking out. Last time CHOOSE YOUR POISON played here I remember looking over and being stoked seeing the entire front of the show was ladies. Maybe I’m just more aware of this now that I play in a band. Or maybe it’s always been there, or it’s something that’s changed in the last few years. I’m not sure, but I like it.

Ang: It’s definitely true that there are a ton of really rad ladies in this city. I find it strange that even here when we play there’s at least someone that says something vaguely offensive about being a female musician. I feel like it would be easier here than other places, but it’s still an issue.

PE: How do you handle the fucked-up remarks? Do you let it slide or make an effort to call them out on it immediately?

Ang: If you say calmly to them, “This is not appropriate, I’m just trying to hang out,” or “No, you just need to be more respectful,” they just don’t hear it. But then if you get pissed, it’s like, “Oh, they won because now I’m angry.” It’s hard to win these situations. Especially when someone walks up to you and takes power over you, it’s a hard fucking thing. We wrote that song “Puke”about that. How nice it’d be if you could just vomit on somebody and win. This doesn’t turn out to be very practical in the actual applying sense, so lately we’ve found it satisfying to just point and laugh.

Em: I just don’t have enough vomit to regurgitate, unfortunately, and I don’t want to have to train myself to use bodily functions to prove a point. (laughter)

Ash: So, we tend to just point and laugh….. And get our homies to point

and laugh, too.

PE: So do you feel like being in this band has made you stronger as individuals?

Ang: Yeah

Ash: I hate to say, it but most definitely.

Gain confidence?

Ang: Yeah. We’re ridiculously supportive of each other. It’s sort of silly at a point. Like if someone is having trouble picking out trail mix, we probably don’t need to be like “No, I got your back.” But really it’s pretty nice knowing I have this support base.

PE: So what are you involved in outside of punk? Interests? Passions? In school?

Em: I’m going to the University of Minnesota right now, pretty indecisive, not knowing what the fuck I want to do, but I’m really into art. I like to do that. I play bass. I love to cook, been stealing many gallons of vegetable oil from my work and deep frying everything. We made vegan donuts! And various fried things…. (laughter). If anyone has any deep fried ideas, please contact VARIX and we may make them, and maybe send you something we made in the mail-just one…. a very greasy package… with the nutrition facts by Ashley.

Ang: I’m in my first year of law school in New York. So right now my life is law school and punk. And there is no time for anything else. I eat food, and I put clothes on my body, and I take a shower like twice a week, and that’s all for now.

S: I graduated from the U of M a while back. I cook a lot, vegan/vegetarian cooking, I love animals & sort of live for my dogs and little cat. Uhm…. booking shows, natural healing, running, working out, trying to push myself physically and feel good, but then I also drink a lot…. (laughter)

Ash:I stay really busy. I go to school for nutrition science and study food, so I’m really passionate about food. I play guitar, do graffiti, (PTS!) do yoga, and run a lot. Those are my priorities in list of importance.

PE: Any issues personally, locally, worldly you’d like to address? Anything you’re particularly pissed off about right now?

Ash:I listen to Democracy Now and have been involved in much activism. I totally support the Occupy movements all over the world. There is a ton of crazy shit going on constantly. If you pay attention it’s so engaging, but can be really frustrating and deflating. You really do have to focus inward and focus on your community. If you have the time pay attention- there’s so much going on!

Ang: It is overwhelming. It’s hard to focus on just how fucked up everything is, because it does just make you want to drink, and just not do anything, and even give up.

Ash: But you can’t quit…

Ang: Just trying to do something, anything, to make a positive difference.

PE: Plans for VARIX?

Em: Varix forever.

Ash: No one knows what exactly is going on. We’re doing the best we can here.

Em: It’s a secret.(laughter)

Ang: We have tentative plans to do an East Coast long weekend tour this winter. We’re still writing riffs and trying to write new songs. I get back here when I can. We all want to continue to be a band, but if it stops being fun, we’re not going to force it.

S: I think we’re far too ambitious to stop taking on new projects. We had our “last show” a couple months ago, and yet we brought Angie back to play this fest in Minneapolis, and we find ourselves writing new songs and sending riffs back and forth through cell phones….

Ang: Or walking down the street singing a riff to Emily’s voice mail.

S: I have a feeling we’re going to just keep finding things to do as a band

Em: We have no choice.

PE: What are you listening to right now?

Em: TED NUGENT… the Nuge…(laughter)

S: Outside of shows, I kind of live off  hip hop and soul.

Em: BO DIDDLEY, ROBERT JOHNSON.

Ash: Anything that I can run to, which is super high energy. Lately SLAYER, IRON MAIDEN, GAUZE, APPENDIX. Shit that makes you want to kick some fucking ass. I find myself playing air guitar when I run sometimes.

Ang: PROTES BENGT, KAAOS, THE CLASH.

Em: I’ve been watching a lot of ‘90s music videos lately.

PE: Any new bands you’ve seen lately and have been blown away by?

Em: KONRASEKT is the shit!

Ash: Yes, and WILD CHILD.

Favorite drink?

Em: I have this espresso machine…. I lure people to my house by making delicious coffee beverages.

(laughter)

Em: Otherwise I just really like whiskey. and coffee. Those two things. Water’s good. Chasing whiskey with water to balance things out.

Ang: The coffee beverages. Coffee with a shot of espresso with vanilla and some soy milk.

S: I drink my coffee black. Any kind of beer.

Ash: Coconut water! It’s the king supreme for sure. It’s the closest thing to your plasma, so if you’re on a desert island and your friend is bleeding to death, you can hook them up with some coconuts, and it will be good for them.

Any last words?

Ang: Punx rule.

Ash: Punx win.

S: Up the punx!

Em: Fry them!(laughter). Not the punx.. just various fryables.

Contact Varix at badlybrained@yahoo.com

Profane Existence is proud to present a special video presentation of Warcollapse captured live in Minneapolis on December 18, 2010. The was the finale of Profane Existence 21st anniversary party also featuring RESIST, APPALACHIAN TERROR UNIT, WAR//PLAGUE, PYROKLAST, DRESDEN and IN DEFENCE .  The entire gig was recorded with multiple cameras and sound board audio and portions will be edited and released on this web site as time permits.

Cheers to Leffer for stitching this together from the raw footage!

Seeds are technically biologically alive, slowly consuming their energy reserves waiting for the right conditions to sprout. Many seeds will still germinate for many years if stored properly. Recently, scientists successfully sprouted a record breaking 2000 year old date palm seed found in Israel.

Sprouting is the practice of germinating seeds (usually herbs, grains, legumes, oil seeds, and nuts) to be eaten raw or cooked. In the right conditions of air, temperature, and moisture, most seeds will grow a little tail that pushes out of the seed shell or hull and burns up the energy stored in the seed to break through whatever is in its way to reach sunlight. Once it reaches sunlight, it can begin to photosynthesize the energy it needs to grow into a mature plant.

As a dietary practice and survival strategy, I believe sprouting is the most important thing we could all be doing. It’s cheap and easy. It allows you to cultivate crops with a 3 day harvest time that increase vitamin and mineral content availability 300-500 times that of unsprouted cooked grains, seeds, and legumes. Also, relative to the parts of the mature plant, there’s often more nutrient density in a sprout as it’s filled with all of the material and vital energy needed to burst forth into life as a plant.

Some of the benefits I’ve experienced consistently when I have a high percentage of sprouts in my diet include:

Full rest at exactly six hours of sleep, vivid dreams, enhanced memory, enhanced motor skill speed and accuracy, enhanced vision, enhanced concentration/focus, enhanced verbal ability, super-charged physical energy, higher pain/stress tolerance,  increased experience of/connection to intuition, more patience and inner peace, more mystical/transcendent meditation, increased sexual energy and sensitivity.

Beyond the personal benefits, sprouting rather than cooking reduces the need for fuel energy (though some legume sprouts should be lightly cooked in my experience and opinion to break down mildly toxic and malodorous compounds, 5 minutes of boiling or frying works for me).

I started sprouting about 6 years ago. At the Gaian Mind Institute (a non-profit co-op house/community center/research facility I co-founded and was living at in 2005) we agreed to be vegan with an emphasis on raw and living foods. We had a juicer, dehydrator, food processor, blender, coffee grinder, sprouter, and other miscellaneous culinary gadgets. We were collecting donated surplus produce from local farmers’ markets for our youth volunteer programs, weekly free vegan potluck, neighborhood free food pick-up program, and community garden composting. We had a lot of food material to work with so we all got to experiment with a wide range of methods, recipes, and dishes.

For a time we were using the sprouter to make a daily alfalfa breakfast meal base. Aside from the mucilaginous properties of the alfalfa, it was great. The problem was the electric powered water recycling sprout machine was a little flawed, either that or we didn’t use it properly. The sprouts kept molding. Like many consumer contraptions that are too clever for their own good, they end up collecting dust on shelves as they either don’t work like they’re supposed to, or are user-unfriendly.

The sprouting stopped for a while with the decommissioning of that sprouting device. Months later when we lost the community center space, the last of us migrated to the South Central Farm which at that time was an occupied direct action encampment, resisting the bulldozing of 14 acres of community garden plots. We set up our side-walk camp with a tarp teepee and joined what I affectionately called “activist skid row”. They had just opened a community center space across the street from the occupation. We brought some of our kitchen gear over there for use by the campaign.

We had recently got a simpler, lower tech sprouting device and I tried putting it to use there. It was a set of mason jar lids made out of plastic. The top of the lid was like a strainer with a grid of square holes. I knew the jar sprouting formula was to put a about a half an inch to an inch of seed stock in a wide-mouthed mason jar, soak for about 8 hours (or overnight to make it easy), then store at room temperature, rinsing at least twice a day, harvest when the sprouts are at desired length (usually after 3-5 days), then refrigerate. I didn’t know the key however, which is that during the rinsing period the jars must be kept at approximately a 45 degree angle to insure that the metabolic wastes of the new-born sprouts are gravity flushed out of the jar, and to insure that all the sprouts can breathe. A friend of mine at the encampment taught me this critical part of the process. Since then I’ve been religiously jar sprouting and it’s comprised anywhere from 25-75% of my diet on average.

My favorite sprout crops so far have been brown rice, quinoa, amaranth, flax, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, corns, peanuts, chickpeas, lentils, mung beans, and almonds (note: tiny seeds don’t do well in jars, I’ve found cloth to work better)

After using the plastic sprout jar lids, and later using a specialty plastic tilting device I realized that the jar sprouting meme is limited by the necessity to have some designer contraption to keep the jar tilted. As I’ve become more of a survivalist and primitivist, I’m always looking for the simplest, least manufactured, lowest-energy, least component devices/methods to support basic survival needs. The easiest way to d.i.y.ify or “MacGyver” my sprout jar system was by assembling tilting contraptions and waste water collectors out of Tupperware, cups, lids, etc. I got it working for myself but whenever I’d help get others to start sprouting, it was always hit or miss based on what random junk was available in a given household’s cupboard.  At one point I finally decided to make a “trans-apocalyptic” sprout jar angler out of materials that will be ubiquitously available in a post-industrial world: 2x4s, fly-screens, nails, staples, and bike inner tubes. I made my own high-heel shoe for the jar, it kind of looks like a Birkentstock sandal with two nails giving it the boost at the heel.

For a couple years I used this model in a “lab” with no windows and no sunlight. I noted that with air, water, seed stock, and a jar sprouting system you could survive under ground.

Sprouting as a survival strategy is essential as it can help prevent/delay the onset of scurvy and other diseases of malnutrition. So whether you’re in a cave, bunker, desert, mountain, raft, etc. you can stretch your survivability and get by for longer without a supply of perishable fresh food, you just need a sprouting kit. I can’t make any claims about how long you could last solely on sprouts. There are so-called “sproutarians” out there, but I don’t know how strict they are, and I don’t know of any scientific/medical experiments that have been done to determine the safe duration an average human could survive on sprouts alone.

Beyond the nutritive aspect, there’s also the volume. By sprouting you increase the biomass of your food sometimes over 1000%. Visualize this: after putting a half-inch of dry lentils in the bottom of a jar, in 3-5 days the jar is full and over-grown.

After living in the simulated cave/bunker environment, when I moved my lab to an outdoor urban garden/survival camp type environment (at two urban garden projects I started after the demise of the South Central Farm) I discovered that the jars would get overrun by fly larva and flies would reproduce inside the jars by the thousands. My response was to find larger plastic jars to enclose the sprout jars in. I inverted the outer jar, drove a nail in the side to keep the inner jar upright as it leaned over the edge of the larger jar’s lid which acted as a collector for the waste water. There was enough air in the outer jar for the sprouts to breathe, and they ended up requiring less rinsing because the moisture didn’t evaporate out of the system. After a rinse, the water evaporated and condensed into a dew within the two jar system.

There are other methods of sprouting such as trays, colanders, and bags. My experience with those in both indoor and outdoor environments is that they attract flies. Theoretically if you create an outer enclosure that’s fly proof, you could sprout using trays and bags at a much larger scale then jars. For personal/household crop yields, I think jars are the way to go. They’re easy to clean, easy to manage, and easy to assemble into kits.

For true shit-hit-the-fan survival situations, especially if you’re forced to be mobile, I imagine a cloth method would be better than carrying breakable glass jars. You could soak the seed stock for 8 hours in a bowl, canteen, water bottle, etc. then for the rinsing cycle, use a piece of t-shirt material, a bandana, etc. twist a handful of the seed stock into the center, tie the corners together, hang off a tree branch at night and off your back-pack while hiking, and just dip in clean (filtered/purified) water twice a day.

For home food storage I recommend the standard 5 gallon bucket food storage system. This requires a 5 gallon bucket, a mylar bag, oxygen absorber packets, and dry bulk food. Rather than storing white rice and pasta, by storing sproutables, you’re able to have a food source that can be cooked, sprouted, and in many cases planted as a garden crop. Many times there will be more sprouts growing out of my jars than I can eat and when they start to get a little gnarly, I’ll toss them in the worm bin and they’ll continue to grow so I can prick them out, pot them up, and plant them later.

Some of the most commons sprouts include: alfalfa, fenugreek, mung bean, lentil, pea, chickpea, oat, wheat, corn, rice, barley, rye, kamut, quinoa, amaranth, buckwheat, sesame, sunflower, almond, hazelnut, peanut, broccoli, carrot, spinach, cabbage, celery, fennel, onion, parsley, radish, turnip, leek, watercress, mustard, arugula, lemon grass, lettuce, clover, mizuna, milk thistle, tatsoi, etc.

Happy sprouting!

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