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Category: toxins & pollutants

Nepali gifts – subsistence-resilience, cows and cricket, and an Annapurna Ranges happy ending

Aug 17, 2024 | agriculture, belonging economies, books we are reading, children's learning, civil violence, colonialism, community sufficiency, food sovereignty, home economies, Indigenous knowledges, Industrial culture, interspecies relating, Mother Country, raising boys, regenerative farming, social warming, storytelling, subsistence economy, toxins & pollutants, walked-for food | 47 comments

 

We left the sleepy, mahjong town of Lujing, outside Chengdu city in China early in the morning.


We had a plane to catch.

We could not find another way of getting to India overland from China due to border disputes, politics and bureaucracy, so we spent a little time among the clouds,

got forcibly fumigated by the air hostesses before landing, and arrived in Kathmandu three hours later. After going through immigration and customs, changing currencies and setting up a Nepali sim card, we hired a Tootle.

A friendly Nepali man took us to the lodge where we were to stay on our first night.

We walked some of the intense streets of Kathmandu,

and some of the gentle ones,

witnessed people gathered at the butchers,

and at the stupas and pagodas.

We came across personal struggles,

transportive skills,

and bigger challenges affecting people day to day,

Kathmandu is the first city we’ve visited on this journey, since we left Darwin, where drugs and alcohol are causing misery in peoples’ lives. Woody was grabbed by a man in the street. The man was inebriated, by substance and grief. He tried to cuddle Woody, forcibly, which set we parents off. We are all learning how our vulnerabilities as travellers conjure up fear, and reactivity, especially when just arriving in a new country. In reading J Krishnamurti again,

he reminds us how fear is often a precursor to violence, to a lack of freedom.

We parents were upset by the inebriated man. He required our compassion, our witnessing of his grief, our openness. Woody required protection and surety. Krishnamurti makes much sense to us, especially his thoughts about religion, however inside books, sense can be very clear-eyed, while on the streets such papery clarity can soon dissipate.

On another occasion on the edges of the tourist district of Thamel in Kathmandu,

Meg was pushed aggressively by a street vendor because we’d stopped in front of his stall to talk with another man who wanted to know about our travel plans. The push had the desired effect as we quickly left that unhappy place, after Meg offered back her views about his behaviour. We must have been an unwitting block for his livelihood.

The man who wanted to know of our plans, like many older street businessmen in this tourist district, wanted to yarn with us so as he could better weave our needs as travellers to his financial needs. Initially we were irritated and put off by this in Kathmandu, but later after speaking with Nepalis and understanding how business works here, we realised this perceived pushiness comes from an indigenous trait of connection through gossip and story sharing mixed with colonisation’s imported scarcity anxiety and lust for material riches. Nepal is currently in conversion from an indigenous culture into an imperialist one, guided by the west, China and India. This is the process from human-ecology interactive violence (eating, farming, hunting, gathering) to what Deborah Bird Rose calls, ‘man-made mass death’.

It’s easy for us to refuse what’s on offer in Kathmandu, in most cases. We are on a shoestring budget. But we also enjoy speaking with people and sharing story, even if we know there is financial intention behind the interest. It is part of the local/foreigner dance, here.

On our first night in this city, we went looking for and bought a khukuri from Ramesh, a former Gurkha soldier.

Gurkhas are a Nepali fighting unit who have a reputation for fearless military prowess. The word itself derives from Go-Raksha – protector of cows. This again reveals the conversion – cowherds become militia, famously employed by the British empire to their dirty work. No, we didn’t buy the big knife or khukuri, Patrick was given that by Ramesh to bring drama to our shared photo. Rather, we bought the little one that now travels on Patrick’s belt. It cost AU$30.

Happily, we’re back in the business of sliced mangoes for breakfast. Yes, this local green variety is ripe!

Wearing a knife again brings things up for us. We’re not going to pretend it is only for mangoes. While we are big fans of Krishnamurti’s ‘freedom from fear’ invitation, and for wisdom like this,

we also think there is a right time and place for what we call appropriate, conscious, or ecological violence, such as hunting, subsistence farming and slaughtering, and self defence. We say this without fear in Nepal. It is wild and unruly here, but quite safe in most places.

The work that Krishnamurti perennially invites us to partake in is understanding our inner violence – impatience, irritation, superiority, lack of curiosity, absence of compassion, preciousness, and so forth – and he offers meditation (post-thought peace), breath work (being in a state of wholeness with the world), and a daily mental practice of recognising early when we enter states of fear or anger, which when not faced, can lead to wounding. More common is psychological wounding than knife or physical wounding. This goes a little way to understanding the high suicide rates of men in Australia. While there is much necessary media about physical violence to women, few want to see more subtle and more common forms of psychological violence in our communities, especially perpetrated against men. The societal acceptance of Clementine Ford’s extremist misandry, especially in the so-called liberal media, is testament to this.

Before we left the city we scoured the streets of Kathmandu for somewhere to buy a cricket bat for Woody, and after much searching we eventually succeeded, here.

We found Kathmandu boys are mostly into football (soccer), though cricket is more of a thing here than in any other country we’ve visited since leaving Australia. We didn’t see Nepali girls playing either sports until Pokhara. Woody has been longing for a game, and we didn’t have an opportunity until we reached Bhaktapur, about an hour east of the city by car, through thick traffic.

We arrived and were instructed to pay AU$60 to enter historic Durbar Square, where we were to stay. It was too much dosh for we neopeasants, so we declined, cancelled our booking at a cheap hotel inside the square, and booked into this little sweat box with stellar views, just outside it.

A kind Nepali fella back at the gates told as that after 7.30pm the guards go home and people can freely walk into Durbar Square.

It was beautiful inside,

and fragile. In 2015 an earthquake ruptured many of the buildings.

We enjoyed this place for its dedication to the sacred, pissing street dogs, absence of motor vehicles and night time quietude and cool, though we also felt a sadness here – an old Nepal walled off from the rest of the country, which has been superseded by global imperialism and national political corruption.

We are seeing in the culture how technological ascent and the global machine conglomerate disturbs everything immensely, everyday. In Krishnamurti (1973) we read this:

“…we see that education, science, organised religion, propaganda, politics, have failed. They have not brought about peace, though technologically man has advanced incredibly.”

Five decades later we are observing that technological advances have led to the psychological derangement of people, making life faster, more furious, more interrupted, more anxious, polluted and permanently unsettled. It is perpetually draining to behold the continuous propaganda and promises of US-style empire capitalism, while living the actual realities of it.

The following day, to oxygenate our rather sedated bodies in play, Woody and Patrick started a game of cricket on the brick pavement that framed a water feature and temple outside our hotel.

They soon noticed a young boy watching and they invited him to play. He was shy and declined, at first. But after a while he started helping to retrieve the ball from the water. Woody got carried away with the bat on one occasion, which found him stripping down to his undies and swimming out to retrieve the ball. Sushil, the young Bhaktapur boy, who joined our game while school kids and teachers looked on from above in their classrooms, soon lost his shyness, and we all took turns to bowl and bat, often fielding the ball out of the pond. Sushil is a natural sportsman and he loves both batting and bowling.

Once the shade disappeared from the pitch, we all got mightily hot and so we invited Sushil to join us for a drink. Patrick and Woody found out, with limited language, his family business is peddling fruit, or should we say, pedalling fruit?

We offered him a banana lassi but he wanted a Coke,

that slow release poison in a bottle, killing the microbiomes of Nepali everywhere courtesy of the psychological warfare conducted by US empire admen and women.

We observed again in Bhaktapur that Mother Country has a way of slowly eating up that which is not required,

and like all hubristic civilisations over the last 5000 years, the US empire will be eaten up too.

The following day, when we came back into the traffic jams of Kathmandu city, we glimpsed a goatherd and his animals travelling by foot.

What are we doing in this city? We want to behold subsistence-resilience, not traffic! We stayed one more night in this little cosy, mozzie-filled room,

laughed at the phenomena of us only tripping in the streets in China’s cities, which are flat, expensive and new, yet never in the countries that keep our street senses switched on,

once again marvelled at the mind-fuck that is the electrical experience in southeast and subcontinent Asia,

and headed out to find a Nepali restaurant mostly catering to locals.

We all loved the food at the Himalayan Yak, especially Woody,

and the family who ran this modest restaurant were a big part of the love we consumed in their fare. We also liked and noted the lack of advertising outside the restaurant, just a lovely gold and red drape that suggested some form of business.

The next morning we left Kathmandu, we walked to the bus stop in the rain.

We had just received a message from our friend, Trace, who asked us to look out for cyclists carrying all manner of things in Nepal. Trace is an inspiring children’s book writer and illustrator, and she told us she is considering doing a children’s book on the subject, after years of noting and documenting the beauty of such low-tech transportation and the everyday miracles of what can be sometimes carried on a bike.

We only published one bike of this husband and wife gleaning duo, in our previous Laos-China post. So, for Trace, and anyone else who is into appropriate technology, here are the wonderful cycling twosome we spoke with in Chengdu. The husband is carrying cardboard recycling; the wife is carrying plastic.

Our bus left Kathmandu at 7am, and there was talk on the bus about the potential of landslides because of the heavy rain overnight. We travelled with great alertness,

witnessing at one point a local bus on the other side of the road marooned in road-edge mud, seriously close to tipping over.

We followed the powerful Trishuli River for some time, and when the driver pulled over for punters to buy food and use the public toilets, we soaked up the energy of the river.

On and off over this several hour bus passage, the rain belted down,

and we saw locals or government employees out in it, trying to elevate the force of the water causing the land to slide.

There were innumerable examples of the concrete walls, attempting to arrest the pressure, failing.

At Dumre we got off the bus and hopped in a taxi for a ten minute drive up to the high country of Bandipur. Oh, how our senses relaxed as we moved towards this misty,

sane,

magical,

place.

We booked into this room for AU$20 per night,

looked out onto the town from the hotel,

went for a walk,

beheld sweetness and beauty everywhere,

and felt our nervous systems calm. In the main street of the town, no motors were permitted, and we witnessed first hand what a pre-industrial village would have felt like, and the greater peace that would have resulted. We asked if this man would be happy for us to photograph him and his craft.

Instead of delivery trucks, people carried things along the street with traditional baskets.

What we witnessed here is an easy work ethic, a green gym epistemology – a time for yarning and gossip, and a time to carry and labour.

No one seemed overly consumed by their work here, although the man sewing (above) did seem to be the exception. Every time we passed his doors he was working, and we felt a sadness in him that perhaps his continual labouring helps ease. We saw in Bandipur a beautiful village, only accessible from the rest of the country by motor transport since 1998, and that despite being part-supported by tourism, is still in tact socially, spiritually and ecologically.

Quite by chance we arrived in the low tourist season. Now is the coolest and quietest time of year. We booked one night, as we do with any new place, but immediately knew we were going to stay awhile. We just didn’t want to leave, and the goats were a big part of this.

Back home in Djaara Country, our flerd ran out of food while we’ve been away, and as a result kept getting out, causing generous neighbours and friends a lot of stress. Back in Thailand we made the painful decision to give our animals away. Being in Bandipur we witnessed peasant-sized small goats browsing on common land, as ours did, and the huge breeding-programme goats at the National Goat Research Centre, where we were welcomed in and shown the bucks, young and old,

and the does.

We tried hitchhiking back up the hill, the three kilometre hike from the research centre,

but there was little traffic. As as we walked we talked about saving our pennies when we get home to invest in some bigger animals.

Goats here in Nepal are a big part of daily life, and so too is play. Each day in the afternoon we went to Thulihill, the village park, to play cricket with anyone who wanted to join in. We fashioned stumps out of fallen sticks.

Playing both cricket and football here has helped dismantle the local/tourist, us/them barrier. When we come across others in Nepal we like to acknowledge them in the customary, local way, Nameste, which so elegantly translates as ‘the light in me sees the light in you.’ The more we stayed, played games and met people in Bandipur, the deeper our relations grew with the people of the village. Having worked in hospitality in our own tourist town of Daylesford for a number of years, we have a sensitivity to being ‘the locals’ too, and how tourists are often in extraction rather than connection mode.

We love the casual drying of corn between rain showers in the streets,

the Sishnu (nettle) and Bandipur (fermented vegetable) soups, served with local Tumba (millet) wine, which is clear in colour and tastes more like a spirit,

and we love Nepali money, which celebrates six indigenous Nepalese animals. The largest note, 1000 npr, is worth just over AU$10.

In the evenings we played cricket until the light faded,


and the local boys said to us, you need to get home because the tiger might be out. We were thrilled more than fearful, however, we took their advice and didn’t dawdle in the dark, more forested parts of the village.

On our third day, after writing a bunch of postcards,

we jumped on the cable car from the top of Bandipur,

and descended through the clouds to Dumre to send them. The Dumre post office, which we found online, didn’t actually exist in physical reality, despite the internet stating it did – the map is not the territory, just as data modelling is not our complex immune biomes. So, instead of sending slow mail to love ones we stopped in at the Dumre markets, brought some bananas and mangoes,

the latter of which we couldn’t get in Bandipur, and headed back up the hill, praising the craft of Baya Weavers (or, Tope Chara, in Nepali),

yellow-breasted sparrows Indigenous to Nepal and other parts of Asia.

Bandipur is just over a 1000m above sea level. On our fourth day the clouds revealed to us the Himalayas. While difficult to see in this photo, this first sighting of the majesty of these mountains enchanted us. Hint: Not all the white above the tree line is cloud.

There is an undeniable power in this country, and beautiful people. Dilap, who pointed out the mountains to us when we descended the staircase at his family hotel on that morning, is one of them.

We moved hotels to his, after the black mould became too overwhelming in our room in the first.

On the journey down from Bandipur to Dumre to catch the bus, we asked Dilap how his family survived Covid without tourism: “We didn’t have much money then, but Nepali all know how to grow food. We are an agricultural country. We help our friends when they struggle, and the food we grow at home is fresh and is healthier than from the store.”

In Bandipur we witnessed widespread home-grown food production and herbal medicine plants we use at home,

We helped heal Woody’s knee injury with our own peoples’ medicine kit – soaking this typical boyhood scuff of the knee injury in eucalyptus oil and warm water to clean it,

and later applying narrow-leaf plantain salve. He limped around for a day or two,

but soon forgot about it when it was cricket time. Woody’s immune system, of course, did most of the healing particularly with good food in his belly. We ate healthy Nepali food in this lovely town, much of it grown close by, (rice, lentil dahl, buffalo curd, veg curry and a weed saag),

and we sat and yarned in the clouds.

Bandipur bore many gifts, including the community of village cricket and a dreamy peaceful respite from the intensity of travel. We left with tremendous gratitude.

We caught another bus on to Pokhara, which was slow going (can you see the goat on the van’s roof?),

mostly because of the monsoonal rains causing landslides that narrowed the road,

but also other challenges.

It took five hours to travel 80 kms. It is currently wet in this region, and the next season’s rice crops have been planted.

We saw from the bus endless examples of subsistence agriculture. We love the fenceless nature of farming here, where cows and goats graze right up to rice paddies, and where the ‘fences’ are the human herders who stay with the animals to prevent them from eating the crops.

This being with the herd, being with the land, instead of constructing fences suits a less manic, less alienated culture. For the cow- or goatherd to observe their animal’s intelligent senses in what they graze and when and where, gives the farmer knowledges about deep and diverse nutrition. These knowledges slowly accrue in the being with, and often cannot be measured. In Nepal, we’ve witnessed how animals are often stabled for part of the day with rice straw or freshly cut weed fodder, after bouts of free-ranging.

This allows people to do other things throughout the day.

When we arrived in Pokhara, and went down to the lake, we found cows free-ranging among the tourists and locals.

The Pokhara farmer whose cows they were was on always on hand.

The very first image (thanks to Jordan and Happen Films) we published in the very first blog post of this journey, was of us moving our animals across town.

We miss our flerd and find comfort in the ways people are with their animals here, and also the way they are with each other. Like in the two-cows-by-the-lake image above, we witness daily the unashamed public affection Nepali friends have for each other here.

On the way to Pokhara we passed gravel mines on the fertile flood plains. This gravel is being used to make concrete to build roads,

and modern Nepali buildings.

We stayed in one of these buildings in Pokhara.

It was an oven inside because of the concrete acting as a heat bank.

Due to the monsoonal rains there are great numbers of mozzies so we needed the fan in the room all night to both repel the mozzies and try to distribute the radiating heat from the room so we could sleep. Here is the rooftop room we spent the first two nights in in Pokhara. When thermal mass is not a good thing, and not just because of the ruined fertile flood plains…

We spent the afternoon walking the streets of Pokhara to seek out various things. We looked for a shoe repairer to fix the holes in the soles of Patrick’s shoes. A skilled man in his street workshop stopped them from leaking,

and also brushed the mud off and polished them, all for the equivalent of AU$10. Locals told us he over charged us, but it’s all relative.

We also sought out more postcards, and a secondhand bookshop. There are several in Pokhara, with books in many languages. Patrick found Bikas-Binas (Development-Destruction): The change in life and environment of the Himalaya, a radical text from the mid 1980s featuring both Nepali and foreigner contributions, discussing through a development-critical lens what was happening to this beautiful region at that time. When Patrick opened this book it fell to this page,

In one of the book’s essays, Deadly Development, the author, Claude Alvares, reads the development of this region as a con-game:

“…for it seems now that the idea of economic development has been used by the ruling classes to induce people to accept not only enormous sacrifices, but the destruction or mutilation of older cultural patterns and physical and moral environments, and debilitating forms of dependence.”

There is a romantic, pre-development painting of a Pokhara village scene hung in the office of the hot hotel we were staying in. It depicts traditional stone, slate, clay brick and thatch buildings, which are only one or two storeys high and presumably cooler and ventilated. Villagers are engaged in ecologically-embedded labours,

That was a scene of Pokhara, according to the artist. This is a scene of Pokhara now, according to Artist as Family.

The irony of being dependent on some of the patterns of colonialism is not lost on us, though we baulk at most things on offer here.

Radical texts like Bikas-Binas don’t appear to exist anymore, or they are labelled conspiracy texts, and disappeared from view in the search engines. When you do a Google search for something today, it is always filtered according to the empire’s narrative. This is why

On our first evening in Pokhara we stopped to ask a man where we might eat where the locals go. John, a jovial Irishman, led us to such a place and joined us for dinner.

John, who is currently living in Pokhara, is a great source of local knowledge. We told him of our plans to bus from Pokhara to Sonauli on the Indian-Nepali border and go through immigration there. He told us that with our Indian e-visas – the most over-complicated and annoying piece of bureaucracy we’ve ever had to endure, and which Meg spent several hours filling in back in Kathmandu – we won’t be able to cross at Sonauli, and worse, John told us, “you’ll need to return to Kathmandu and fly to Delhi; there is no other way.”

We were gutted.

What we are witnessing on this journey is the more a country ‘develops’ the more ridiculous the rules become, and the less freedoms people hold. Development isn’t only about eliminating old cultural patterns and customs and transforming ecologies into construction sites,

it is also about controlling people, and herding them into sad little, hard spaces as workers or consumers, and both.

And this control stems from a desperate economic system based on a the fabrication of scarcity. Capitalists and Marxists alike perpetuate this system, which is always city-centric and debasing to people and life forces.

We are on this journey, having not gone overseas for twenty years for social, economic and ecological reasons, to give Blackwood a glimpse of other cultures and lifeways before health-fascism – biometrics linked to Digital IDs passports – become the norm, and people like us won’t be able to travel at all.

As those of you who have been following this journey from the beginning know, Woody’s love of cricket and our meeting ‘cultural others’ through a shared love of the game, combined with our more adult focus on subsistence-resilience are the main intentions for this travel. We know we need to be ever mindful of the restrictives, negatives and our expectations, acknowledge them and let them go through to the keeper.

The feralty of street dog life in Pokhara helps with this. The way they dance through the streets with their souls in tact gives us courage and guidance.

We walked for a while with these two,

up to the park, where cows graze on soccer fields and players kick around them and cricketers play until dark.

That magnificent steer (in the photo above) certainly had his eyes on the ball. How genius for a large park that enables festivals,

track running, football, volleyball, badminton, cricket and many other social gatherings, for the cows and buffalos to be the ecological lawn mowers of it,

eating down the grass while returning manure to feed the park, and being part of the social life of this beautiful commons.

Having cow pats scattered around the park certainly adds another level of coordination and awareness as a player, when chasing down the ball.

On our fourth and final afternoon of cricket in Pokhara, a two meter long, grey-brownish snake revealed itself, just near where this fella fielded a ball.

A few stones were thrown to encourage it away from the game. It was very respectful. We are impressed with so much in Nepal, especially the interspecies connections and reverence for life.

Last cricket season in Hepburn, we watched a Muckleford player bash to death a two metre long tiger snake with a cricket bat. It just wanted to cross the field to get to the creek. We players could have waited five minutes for the snake to pass. Almost everyone on the field cheered when it was dead and hurled across the boundary fence. There is deep trauma in a culture that thinks this is OK.

We moved from the top floor of the hot box hotel after two nights to another multi-levelled hotel closer to the park. The trees in the garden of the Trekkers Lodge significantly help keep the building cooler, despite it too using much concrete.

It also helped we were on the first floor. Outside our window to the south was another hot-box-for-empire building going up, but much more interestingly, corn and millet were planted together where in Australia people plant lawn seed. This backyard also housed stooked rice straw for the buffalo stabled nearby, with taro and bitter gourd on the edges of the patch for human consumption.

The sweet family who ran the lodge had other family members growing this food, and collecting fodder in the park across the road for the buffalo.

The owner of the hotel told us the buffalo lives in this shed, near were we are sleeping,

and sometimes free-ranges in the park. All of this is done in small suburban, often shared areas, and it is giving us so many ideas about the scale of a farm, especially if daily human ‘green gym’ practices of foraging fodder are incorporated. Buffalo, at least on menus in Nepal, is called buff. Instead of beef, buff sits beside chicken, pork and goat dishes. While we spent three nights at this lodge we kept checking from where we could, waiting for the buff to come out of her shed to get a goodly photo. But she liked her little cow cave, and all we got is a glimpse of her lovely rump.

Coming to Nepal is like doing a RetroSuburban masterclass. Not just in the growing of food, but in the way people transport things,

wrap things,

and feed themselves in a way that doesn’t require many resources and is accessible to most. We loved eating masala omelettes and drinking mint tea for lunch. The cost was around AU$2, not just because we are in Nepal, but because such a meal can be hobbled together without a middleman, without a supermarket.

Cafe owners share, borrow or buy ingredients from one another, so no food is wasted. Often, when we’ve ordered something we’ll see the cook go across the road to another cafe get an ingredient or two. This is another example of working together – another indigenous trait that hasn’t been destroyed here.

On our first day in Pokhara we spotted these lovely boats on Lake Fewa.

On our fourth day in Nepal’s second largest city, we hired one.

and rowed across to the other side of the lake to trek up to the stupa. On the way we beheld more rural food production and preparations, such as future crop patches mulched and left to go fallow,

and in other patches, manure brought from the stables and animal sheds to return to the soil, akin to any organic food production that doesn’t require the mining of phosphate rock.

More intelligent indigenous-peasant lifeways we witnessed on our walk, and which we have seen all over Nepal, are the ecological air conditioning systems that invite rest, yarning and cooling. They are often about 3 degrees C cooler underneath them.

Here, the technics required to build this air conditioning/recuperation/social system incorporates local materials. Large mossy benches made from brick or stone are built around (often pre-existing) giant ficus trees, and they operate as temples of relief and shrines to the long history of people and ecologies being in union here. We walked on, up the many steps,

past the ‘tree elbow’ love tree,

leaving lying dogs to sleep,

passing fading proverbs adorned with wild flower,

until we reached the stupa.

We looked out across the lake to Pokhara, at a city of 600,000,

and rested and meditated on the shady side of Shanti Stupa,

which was built by Japanese buddhists belonging to the Nipponzan-Myōhōji order, and local Nepali devotees and artisans.

Our response to Pokhara at first was a repulsion for the tourism and imperialism that’s so clearly fucking over the culture here. But having meet with the locals on boats, such as Santos who grew up on the streets,

and over breakfast with Surentra who worked in Australia for five years as a chef,

and each evening playing cricket with a bunch of generous young men,

who generously included us in their afternoon games, we felt ourselves shift from sadness into relationship.

We witnessed sophisticated subsistence-resilience here, showing the way forward for the rich countries that are speedily coming down the affluence bell curve,

and we beheld the growth and learnings within ourselves.

so, after two weeks, we leave this spirited country full of possibility and with much post-hope positivity.

On our last morning in Pokhara, we woke to unseasonably clear skies, and thus to the majestic Annapurna Ranges of the Himalayas.

This rare glimpse (at this time of year) of the power and magic of this Mother Country somehow changed us. Perhaps it changed us in how we relate as humans, now knowing this grand scale of range is possible. Or is it that Annapurna is a mythological site, and we were briefly drawn into her mythos as we silently stared. We held no expectations to behold her because this is ‘off’ season and the Himalayas are usually covered by clouds, but behold her we did.

Crossing the equator – the Jakarta to Batam moment

Jul 9, 2024 | adventure, children's learning, colonisation, community gardens, energy descent, human rights, Hypertechnocivility, politics, post-industrial thought, state violence, story, street food, toxins & pollutants, travel, Unschool | 55 comments

While the electrical experience in Jakarta was fascinating and relatively complex,

the hybrid smog from motor exhaust and cigarettes was heavy going.

We were very much part of the traffic; part of the problem; part of the toxicity. Since arriving in Dili and travelling west by land and sea to Jakarta, we’ve found that hitch hiking is impossible. There are taxi drivers on every street eager to pick up as soon as there’s the smallest intimation that a lift is required. It took about two hours in a cab from the railway station to drive about 20kms, grinding through one continuous traffic jam to where we’d booked a room for a few nights in an apartment building called the Casablanca East Tower.

A $30 a night room with this view.

Since we left Vincent in Surabaya, he being the final thread of relationship woven for us by Yanti way back in Dili, we are socially anchorless in Jakarta. We went in search of connection.

We explored back streets,

and street food warungs,

and were thankful for the delicious gastronomic arts of this city.

We loved the simplicity,

and flavours, and it was here Patrick fell in love with gado gado – an Indonesian salad served with a peanut sauce dressing.

We beheld richness in the poorer suburbs,

and a green emptiness in the bourgeoise ones.

Afternoon storms became a pattern while we were in Jakarta, and we got caught out in one.

Coming across a truck selling sweet potato, our cold climate farming bodies dreamt up crop trials for this coming summer. If tuber vegetables can replace cereals at home, we are another step closer to unshackling from monocultures. While this may sound eco-ideological, it was actually our love of sweet potato for breakfast at Ego and Yanti’s where this desire grew.

We came across a man repairing shoes on the street. Patrick handed his over, and we walked on for a while,

exploring streets inhabited by the transported abundance of Java’s rural productivity,

and stopping here and there to savour the goodly fare.

Between deluges the cobbler had glued, re-stiched and polished Patrick’s shoes. His handiwork cost a mere $3.50.

We were happy to spend a few nights in Jakarta getting high,

and getting down low,

and discovering communities growing food together,

such as Green Farm.

We were happiest in this city either playing music as a family, trying new foods or exploring productive gardens.

However, try as we did with the locals,

we really just consumed food, returned it to leaky, decrepit plumbing systems, and absorbed volumes of pollution. We also got fairly pissed off, at one point.

We booked a boat to the island of Batam, just south of Singapore, and had to stay another night in Jakarta before it set off late the following night. So we took another room in an apartment building. At 9am, dressed and ready to explore the neighbourhood, we caught a lift to the ground floor, only to find we couldn’t get out. We went back up the elevator to a number of floors to try to get help and understand what was going on. One man we met told us people are locked in the building until 10am. WTF! Incredulous, we descended to the basement, budged open a door, and after stumbling around in the dark entered an apocalyptic passageway,

which led to an underground carpark that had no lighting. After a little orientation we came across a bolt of natural sunlight descending into this creepy underworld, indicating a road out. As we entered daylight and approached the security guards lingering at the laneway behind the building – thinking they were going to chastise us for leaving before 10am – Patrick started penning this message on the translation app:

It read: “You cannot incarcerate people in a building against their will, it is an abuse of human rights.” But the guards looked unfazed as we drew up next to them, so we walked on, away from that strange moment into the mayhem of street life, where we practiced the art of crossing busy roads,

by doing what the locals do – walk out in front of the traffic, gesturing to motorists to slow down or stop. We crossed many roads during the morning looking for an op-shop to buy Woody a t-shirt. He’s a fast growing boy, especially in the tropics.

The roads are anarchical here; they hold their own flow and logic,

and while there are few footpaths and everyone seems to drive anywhere they can, including against the traffic, it is not entirely impossible to be a pedestrian.

On our last afternoon in Indonesia’s capital we reflected on the city and its future in an energy descent reality.

There’s a makeshift spirit here and an absence of safetyism that will likely aid residents, and while the examples of retrosuburban farming we saw in the wealthier parts of Jakarta may well keep producer knowledges alive, the infrastructure collapse that is already advanced in this metropolis, could undermine any such resilience.

In our final hours in Jakarta we played music, and slept and swam,

before joining the traffic, again, to the port, to board this boat, the KM Kelud.

We’d wanted economy tickets for both the affordability and sociability but they’d sold out, so we paid for lodgings in bunk rooms.

$70 per bunk for a 40 hour voyage, and all meals included.

We found we were again the only caucasian travellers on the boat sans one young couple, perhaps Dutch, who had no thirst to converse and held a permanent look of worry in their faces. Without any phone signal, our translation app was rendered useless so we defaulted to body language with fellow passengers, were invited many times to make selfie, and practiced what little Indonesian we’ve gathered.

After several weeks of travelling west, we are now heading north again.

On the way to the port the taxi driver warned us about our belongings both at the port and on the boat. We have heeded such advice along the way, and used the lockers provided on the boat, however, neither in Jakarta nor on this boat have we felt unsafe.

We spent July 6 at sea on Indonesian waters, crossing the equator. July 6 is an important day for both Indonesians and West Papuans, as it marks the anniversary of the Biak massacre of possibly hundreds of West Papuans by the Indonesian army, 26 years ago (as Alison Bevege reports). A US mining giant, Freeport, and the Indonesian government make considerable wealth from their joint colonial project in West Papua.

There is no getting away from it, colonisation is insidious. It is in this boat. It is in the food on this boat. It is the fuel powering this boat. Industrial civilisation is nothing more than extravagant displays of colonialism rebranded as global development. While the machine of Empire sets out to conquer and destroy, perhaps all we have as a meaningful antidote is connection, even at 3am when this photo was taken. (From left Jernih, Meg, Shanty and Wenti).

Around 2.30am as we approached Batam our fellow bunk bedders’ phones came to life. It had been an enjoyable 36 hours without signal, but all that changed in the early hours. Phone addiction is next level in Indonesia. It was a media frenzy and we just went along for the ride.

The blurriness of us compared to Jernih and her husband speaks not only of device foreshortening but also of how tired our lil family felt in this moment.

Both nights on the boat our sleep was disturbed with multiple comings and goings of people, as well as their pre-downloaded media, which was played at full volume throughout the night.

We had perhaps vague, even romantic notions of an island oasis before arriving in Batam,

only to find a fully industrial port city,

where the empire had long since come, and dumped its shit.

There were remnants of ecological culture on the street. The indigenous mob here has been reduced to just 5 remaining Orang Darat people.

A culture replaced by a civilisation that has little regard for life.

These practical baskets made us laugh thinking about the local council back home, neatly ticking their sustainability boxes, rolling out ever more coloured plastic bins to the streets to organise (and hide) the various wastes of we residents.

Once again, the pollution was overwhelming in this city, whether it be cigarette smoke, burning plastic waste,

or motor fumes, which sat as an unpleasant smog above this produce market.

Motor bikes and scooters bellowed fumes across all the lovely food tables. The antioxidant medicine of chilli almost negated by the immune wrecking smog.

We bought salak, banana and longans,

and we booked another $30 room for two nights. Patrick slept for two days as he is struggling most with the pollution, while Meg went on little exploratory journeys into the city with Woody, and researched the next leg.

A big part of this trip is to put ourselves in situations where we are out of our comfort zones, to have our Magpie and Blue Wren feathers ruffled, and our Blackwood branches shaken. We are here to learn, to be jimmied open. There are things we keep learning over and over about ourselves. That we are creatures of place, creatures of a sacred Mother Country. This trip is not open ended, and although we are travelling slowly in industrial terms, we are moving quite swiftly towards India. Where we can, we are trying to stay put in one place so we have time and spaciousness to explore where we are, from the inside out. We love markets, hot food warungs, and produce stores, and understanding how other people do food.

The lesson we keep learning over and over is that we are not city people. The hustle and bustle overwhelms us and again and again we gravitate to the backstreets. The side alleys, the quieter moments. Gardens and green spaces, where our lungs and souls can breathe. We are grateful to the cities for enabling our transit, but we don’t understand what they are for and why people choose to live in such places. But that’s of course a long civilisational story, which is different for each of us.

So, here we are. Open and willing to learn, feeling the estrangement while trying to see the beauty of every moment.

For the fruiting, ferrying, vomiting, gifting and train travelling love of Indonesia

Jul 3, 2024 | adventure, agriculture, children's learning, creative frugality, culture, economics, government, locavorism, parenting, praise, raising boys, story, subsistence economy, toxins & pollutants, uncapitalised food, Unschool | 49 comments

We left Amá Mar and Apá Yan’s home for the Indonesian border with a pod of family members and local villagers who were going to spend the day at the beach. On the last night in this warm and loving home, Yanti, Thaddeus and Bella came to stay. Yanti has been such a big help in the organisation of our travels since we left Dili, for which we are so appreciative. Thank you Yanti and all your family and adopted kin for making us feel so at home in Timor-Leste.

Our farewell was emotional. We’ve made so many connections over the past week or so, and we extended warm invitations to many to visit us in Australia.

Then, when all the hugs and waves and bondias (good mornings) and obrigadu/as (thank yous) and nadas (not at all) ran out, we were off in a little black pickup,

driving on roads that were in various stages of construction and deconstruction, the latter due to the common floodings in the wet season. Buildings too along our path were at various stages of their lifespan.

It was good to be travelling under a tarp with natural air conditioning because Patrick was heavy with cold symptoms for the second time this trip. Before we left we wondered whether we could find a place to rest for several days, as he was fairly run down. We are all still adjusting to the relentless heat, which is exhausting for we cold climate loving folk. Siestas, when we can take them, have been a godsend.

As it’s the dry season, everywhere cows free range on the soured stubble of the last rice harvest.

After about an hour or so in the pickup we arrived in Balibo, a town where five Australian journalists were killed in 1975 by pro-Indonesian militia.

Amá Mar came with us to check out this little museum dedicated to that grief story, which still touches our home town as one of the five, Tony Stewart, has family there. Tony was just twenty years old when he died.

The people of Timor, before European settlement, were not divided between east or west. They were, and, to a large extent still are, people of land, and therefore of ritual and ceremony, whose remnant traditional buildings still hold the traces of an earth-honouring and aesthetically astute culture.

While thankfully invading armies have stopped assaulting Timorese people, environmental pollutants brought in by colonising industries are killing the country in more insidious ways. While subsistence to local market economies remain strong, and are probably the reason why there is little obesity and type-2 diabetes here,


we have seen the many tendrils of the global greed machine at work in this beautiful country, and we hope the Timorese people will continue to fight for their independence from all forms of colonisation. Before lunch we arrived at the border,

said goodbye to our fellow travellers,

and were escorted to the start of our visa transfer process. Farewell Amá Mar and granddaughter Domin!

and farewell dear Timor-Leste!

On the other side of the line we were met by Yanti’s brother, Agus, who led us into Indonesia,

where we went through another visa process, which, as in Timor-Leste, was relaxed, and a stunning constrast to the increasingly paranoid corporatised nanny-state some call Australia. We’re happy to attest we didn’t bring to Indonesia paranoia or fear, but instead we walked through the metal detecting threshold with our knives on our hips, (after being told it was fine), dwindling stores of kangaroo and rabbit jerky, openness in our hearts, and

our trust for what comes next.

Agus took us into the town centre of Atapupu to change currency,

before backtracking us to his family home in Silawan. Seated here with us is Agus’ wife Anita (far left) and neighbourhood friends.

After school Alfan, Anita and Agus’ eldest child (13), and Woody (11) met, much to the hilarity of the younger kids.

It was a sweet moment of connection. We have come across no fellow caucasian visitors or residents in this part of the world. We met a few westerners in Dili, but have seen no others on our trip outside Australia, so far.

We are a bit of a novelty in these parts and everywhere we go what we find to be novel and interesting is often amusing for the locals. Meg and Patrick haven’t travelled overseas in the mobile phone age, and our snaps back then weren’t as instantly interactive and shareable as they are now.

In the afternoon, Agus took us for a walk around his village, where we met a man and his monkey,

and where we beheld this beautiful doe goat, who we’d love to cross with our buck, Hawthorn,

and we spoke with neighbours growing, tending and drying all manners of food, including cassava.

We returned home to this exquisite dinner made by Anita. Rice, fish, chicken, vegetables and always, always fermented chilli and lime. Sooo good!

The continual grace and generosity people offer us only grows our gratitude the deeper we go into this journey.

The myth that humans are selfish and narrow self-interested is promulgated by the ruling classes and their quasi-intellectual stooges, who are blind to other values and lifeways due to the social circles they keep. Think Noah Harari and Steven Pinker, for example. While some folk buy into the myth of the selfish gene, most don’t and their souls are very much intact as a result.

Agus lost his employment as a driver due to the Covid measures of his government. He had to sell his car, and economically things have been very hard since. One villager, Torie, who was keen to hang out and practice her English, told us “People didn’t suffer from Covid here, they suffered from the health measures.”

But rather than see themselves as victims, Agus and Anita’s home life speaks of a loving resilience inseparably connected to people and place,

a home life without running water, where they forego their own bedroom for strangers passing through.

After bean cakes and Timor-Leste coffee for breakfast, Agus loaded up his friend’s car with backpacks and people and all six of us headed off to Kupang at 7am.

The roads are on the whole smoother in Indonesia, but nonetheless the average speed we travelled was only around 40kms/hr. We were happy for this slowness. It’s not only conducive to animals, cyclists, tourists and the longevity of vehicles, but friendlier for pedestrians too.

On more internal matters, our microbiomes have been in radical transformation since we left home. Constant changes in our diets and body temperatures have rearranged our guts and not necessarily for the worse. Patrick and Meg have been eating much chilli and seeking out tuber vegetables such as sweet potato varieties, taro and cassava. There are always a bounty of bananas to collect, and we’ve all been trying to steer clear of fried foods because, as we reported in a previous post, cooking with vegetable oils longterm is a fairly reliable path to cancer. The confluence of nutritious foods and industrial contaminants mix in our bodies, and the toxins are either getting sweated out in the intense heat of the afternoons, or end up in one of these, which we’re getting more adept at using.

As we travelled we saw many examples of subsistence garden agriculture, as well as much uncultivated land, and therefore much potential for radical economies of place to grow from.

We stopped for a delicious lunch with Agus and fellow remaining passenger, Vincent, who was, like us, heading to Kupang to catch the ferry to Surabaya. We absolutely love Indonesian food.

Despite the fried parts (which would be fine if they were cooked in ghee or animal fats), such simple and delicious road food is very affordable costing just AU$14 for five hearty meals and tea. Imagine if we could get this quality of food with no plastic at a truck stop in Australia!

We drove on for another few hours passing many examples of local food and energy productions,

until we arrived at Yanti’s sister’s home. Tilde and her husband, Ady, welcomed us into their beautiful home and replenished us with dried bananas and hot tea.

From left in the above image is daughter of the house, Ningsih, mother Tilde, then to the right of Artist as Family, neighbour Ardy and father Ady. Using a translation app has been a godsend since arriving in Indonesia. For many of the people we are meeting, a foreigner is a very rare thing and an app has allowed us to speak across languages and share stories. Our hosts were informed that we are travelling with instruments and we were invited to play. After we shared a song, Ady and Tilde replied with a favourite of theirs, accompanied by their son, Lodri, on guitar. As a family who plays music together, this was super lovely to behold.

At Ady and Tilde’s home we continued to receive generous hospitality and delicious food.

We adults are particularly loving the vegetable dishes, and Woody could practically live off rice, chicken and fresh cucumber, which came out from the kitchen a moment after this photo was taken.

Woody has become quite the hit with the young women we are meeting, who shyly ask whether they can take a pic or two with him for their Instagram pages. He reluctantly and awkwardly agrees.

In just one sweet hour together our families had bonded.

Trust, grace, generosity and openness are infectious qualities, and Tilde and Ady’s home flowed with them.

We got back into Agus’ borrowed car-for-hire, and followed a banana truck further west,

until we landed at a fruit shop, where fruit bat Woody really brought out his amorous side.

The boy takes his fruit pretty seriously.

Night came in fast, as it does here, and we finally descended on the port at Kupang, where we farewelled dear Agus,

while we settled in for a four hour wait to board the ferry to Surabaya.

At 10pm, after ingesting volumes of exhaust fumes outside the ferry terminal, hundreds of we tired folk piled through two small doors eager to get onboard. It was chaotic. We’re not sure what was the culprit – something he ate, tiredness, the all day car ride, or perhaps just the petroleum and cigarette fumes none of us could escape – but Woody vomited several times on a tree at the dock as we waited to get through the next threshold. “You’re supposed to vomit on the boat, Woody,” said Patrick. We adults were fairly cooked as well, and somewhat delirious with fatigue.

Then, about thirty minutes later the call was announced, the wide gates opened and we were rushed onboard, a collective slug of people starting to fill the hull. We knew we shouldn’t dilly, though at this moment we didn’t know why.

It turned out that our tickets, like many others, were for ‘no seats’ for a 78 hour voyage, and fellow no-seats-folk (several hundred of us) were eagerly taking up little patches of carpet to make home for the journey. This photo was taken just moments after Woody vomited into a rubbish bin. The boat was still docked in the port.

He then promptly passed out, and eventually so did his parents. This tripodded image (taken early the next morning) is effectively how we spent the night, sans Patrick’s shoes and any available floor room.

Woody woke very pale and,

gingerly, he entered the noisy, busy fray of the morning, as Patrick made tea.

But the boy had slept, and this is our best medicine on the road, as indeed it is at home. He quickly came back into himself after a breakfast of fruit and the last of our oats, before Vincent came around and offered to give Woody a tour of the boat.

while Meg and Patrick connected with those sweet souls we slept beside and near. Instead of fighting over scarce real estate, people made room and connections.

On the middle day of our three night journey, an anniversary poem flowed out of Patrick, which we shared. There is something conducive to creativity when everything is stripped back to a vast ocean,

and all one has to do is sleep, converse with fellow travellers,

try their traditional foods, such as this Shabu rice preserved with the sugar taken from the Lontar palm and wrapped in a banana leaf,

catch up with correspondence (when there is signal), or stare mindlessly at the innumerable screens playing B-grade films in languages both spoken and subtitled that we don’t understand. We are so impressed how Indonesian people can sleep anywhere, and we’re learning to do this too, sleeping under bright lights and a cacophony of chatter, laughter, hacking coughs, loud phone media and crying babies.

The plastic pileups on this voyage, and indeed since leaving Australia, have been the most depressing aspect of our journey so far. So many banana leaves and rich fermentation and preserving traditions here, though sadly people have been steered down a path of convenience by the plastic industrial complex.

To combat our participation in this tragedy of Grandmother Gaia and her oceans, we’ve kept topping up our bulk food stores as we travel and we bought as much fruit with us as we could carry onto the boat, including watermelon, bananas, papaya, longons and salak. Salak is also called snake fruit due to the scale-like skin, and also memory fruit. As Indonesian traditional (or peoples’) medicine reports, it improves memory and brain function, no doubt due to its high levels of beta-carotene, potassium and pectin, which can improve blood flow to the brain.

Over the month we’ve been away, Woody has been taking his own photos on his little camera and writing regular journal entries. He has also been a keen editor of this blog, reminding us of things we’ve left out.

This three day passage began with vomiting and trepidation, but fairly soon we were thankful for all the connections we made, and the new foods we tried because of those connections, such as this traditional homemade food from Sumba incorporating nuts and banana. Yum!

We were also grateful we bought the cheapest tickets, as we found out the more expensive ones would have put us in these sardine cans.

Give us that floor of interweaving bodies any day! We came into Surabaya on the island of Java at around lunch time on the third day, took a final journey to the upper deck with Vincent,

passed by, with wide open eyes, the mountain of anthropogenic waste amassed in just 24 hours since the last port stop, (similar, no doubt, to an afternoon spectacle at the MCG back in Australia),

and alighted the ferry into the heat and haze of the afternoon.

We booked a AU$42 room 40 minutes by car from the ferry terminal. With cyclist guilt, caught a taxi there for AU$20, which we found out was about twice the going rate. The pedal-powered and heat-intense mobility we saw from the domesticity and AC of the cab reminded us of our previous adventures. There are different challenges with this journey.

Indonesia, gratefully, is much cheaper than Timor-Leste, whose currency is in US dollars. For an Australian family who lives well below the poverty line (that is, in money terms), we are both grateful for and mindful that this frugal adventure can occasionally bring a little more comfort.

We hadn’t washed for days, our clothes were putrid, and we longed for cold water. The apartment building provided.

On the street outside our apartment, a laundry business washed, dried and folded our clothes for around AU$4, and a five minute walk brought us to a little nasi goreng warung (fried rice roadside stall), where we bought dinner for AU$6. The meal was delicious. We’ll spare you another family selfie or food porn pic. We passed out early, woke early, and as we had to get across town before 8am, hailed another cab.

Taking selfies for social media isn’t ordinarily a cultural practice for our family, but since arriving in Timor and now Indonesia, it has become an everyday thing. Sunsr (sunset), our driver, wanted to “make selfie” with us. How could we refuse such a happy fella??

Patrick regrets he didn’t get the number of Sunsr’s dentist. At the conversion rate here, we might just be able to afford an implant or two. Not for the missing front tooth – Patrick loves his well-earned pirate face – more on the sides where numerous missing teeth make it difficult to chew. In Australia, for our overseas readers, we have universal healthcare called Medicare, though something our family doesn’t use, and thus doesn’t draw public money from, because of the way we live and because we don’t trust the medical industrial complex. Dentistry, however, something we would ues, isn’t covered by Medicare, at least in real terms. Meaning low income folk can get only rudimentary dental work done if they wait a year or so, but they cannot seek out a dentist they trust or who comes recommended. For decades, a lobby of dentists has pressured the government to make sure dentistry isn’t covered by Medicare, and so proper teeth doctoring remains a luxury treatment. Pulling out teeth when a problem arises has been the only affordable treatment for us, and more recently we’ve developed practices of self-applied dental work, which we’ll share in a future post at some stage. It’s not a big thing, we are happy neopeasants who make-do to keep ourselves free from economic slavery, but we are keeping open the possibility of dental work while on this journey, so if you have any hot tips for goodly dentists in Asia, please let us know.

~

Cities are not really the point of this journey. We are not the sort of tourists who seek out cities and their sights. Instead, we’re much more curious about farming practices, socio-ecological relationships, food and cultural habits, rituals and ceremony, stories and songs, and technologies that keep both bodies and Mother Country well.

At 7.15am we arrived at the railway station, found a stall that served black coffee,

and boarded a train to Jakarta.

This all-day train journey brought us into contact with the extent of small farming practices in Java. Field after field grew rice, taro, cassava, banana, cabbage, corn, sweet potato, bok choy, various alliums and a plethora of other crops we couldn’t identify from the train.

Unsurprisingly, rice is the dominant crop. Even in the dry season there is abundant water here, to flood field after field of this staple monoculture. We witnessed the use of herbicides in the rice fields, but unlike the broad-acre, boom spraying regimes of conventional agriculture back in Australia, small-scale farmers here frugally spot spray weeds by foot and with backpacks. Not ideal, especially for we neopeasants who avoid growing and eating sprayed monocultural crops back home, but a far more superior farming method in comparison to US agribusiness colonialism, so reliant on dumping endless tonnes of pesticides into the world.

As we approach Jakarta, we are reminded of the warnings about this city people have shared with us along the way. Yanti told us to keep a careful watch on Woody as child trafficking exists in this mega city of 10.5 million people. Others told us theft is big and we’ll need to be careful of our belongings. This is all curious to us because we have felt so safe on this journey so far, despite the hitch-hiking in Australia and despite being virtually the only folk of our ethnicity we’ve seen since leaving Darwin.

As we have moved west from Timor-Leste, where the dominant religion is Catholicism, to the island of Java, where the dominant religion is Islam, we have felt the social functionality formal religions bring to people’s lives. Yes, we understand the colonial threads of these newer religions, but have observed such a deep cherishing of them here. For us, we feel much more aligned to the older animist practices we have witnessed on our travels, because of the centrality of earth story rather than sky god honouring .

For society to function, for there to be peace and respect, people need a story. We have not been judged for ours, which is neither Christian nor Muslim, rather we’ve been embraced and cared for. Where our stories overlap with people, there is always humility, intrigue and gratitude. Our family’s big universal story, the story we serve so as we don’t require the use of a formal religion or unconsciously default to the cult of materialism, centres on the sacredness, abundance and teachings of Grandmother Gaia and Mother Country. So our big story goes a little like this: If we serve the communities of life that make more life possible, if we are the humus-informed participants of the materiality and physics of life source, and we honour, give to and receive from the living and dying of the worlds of the world, then so much more than ourselves can leap forward into more divine life, and our spirits and souls can dance with abundance and sing more fruit into being.

Sitting on a diesel powered train, using a rare-earthed mined laptop, and eating food we don’t know the origin story of, might seem a trillion miles from such an earth-honouring cosmology, and it truly is. However, unless we have a story that we love, a story we can cherish for its possibility, how can we move to where our souls want to lead us?

Hot chips & cigarettes (or, how government regulators fail us, again and again)

Feb 6, 2024 | biology, corporatism, Hypertechnocivility, Industry science, junk food science, toxins & pollutants | 16 comments

A post by Dr Patrick Jones, audio version (approx. 5mins)

 

There’s a common argument in polite Australia that goes something like this, ‘Governments regulate industry and all is well in the world. We don’t need to watch corporate activity, our regulators have that all covered.’ But is this assumption naive and hazardous to our health?

I accompanied Blackwood and some friends to watch the cricket at the MCG last week. The advertising at the ground that bombarded us throughout the day included fast food, alcohol, gambling, and microbe extermination products. You can see this for yourself if you watch the highlights.

During the day, Blackwood, now a confirmed cricket tragic like his dad, was kindly offered a bucket of hot chips, and I agreed to let him have it. Although cigarette companies are banned from sports advertising (which took decades of activism including Australia’s own unique chapter, BUGAUP), this week I discovered that this small bucket of chips that Blackwood consumed may have had the same level of toxins as him smoking a bunch of cigarettes.

I’ve been invited to write a paper on environmental poisons for an Italian academic journal, which is providing an opportunity to update my research regarding environmental pollutants and toxins in both bodies and biomes. So, I thought I’d use this period (over the next several months) to share snippets of my research and publish interesting morsels here for readers.

This week I’m taking a look at the humble potato chip (or French fry, if you’re from the US), from the vantage point of a 2018 study on fried food toxins.

Our taste receptors are excited by salty and fatty foods. The fast food industry exploits our weak spot for such nutrients or chemical compounds, which were not so prevalent as we evolved into a species with unique human taste abilities.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I’m probably not telling you anything new. However, if you’ve been looking for research to back up your hunch that fried hot chips are likely very toxic in the body, then please read on.

Our family has been avoiding hot chips bought at a store for many years now, preferring to grow our own spuds and animal fats organically and cooking them at home. But, every now and then (like at the cricket) we soften our stance and indulge. Is this such a stupid thing to do?

A study entitled, Chronic non-communicable disease risks presented by lipid oxidation products in fried foods (2018), although limited in its frame of reference – i.e. it would have been more useful to switch butter for ghee, and add animal fats as part of the trial – it is nonetheless a good indicator of what we have suspected, intuitively for some time, that is – if you are buying hot chips from fast food outlets, perhaps don’t.

The study finds that in a “154g potato chip serving [the] aldehyde contents are not dissimilar to those arising from the smoking of a (daily) allocation of 25 tobacco cigarettes…”

That there exists cell-damaging, carcinogenic aldehyde toxins in supposedly benign foods like fried potato chips is yet another example of government regulation not serving people, but rather serving the profit interests of industry foremost, while simultaneously eroding human health.

Of course anyone paying attention knows governments and industry now sleep in the same bed, and as we saw so outstandingly with the Covid response, there is no longer even a covering up of their flagrant lovemaking.

To have fried foods duly regulated by government oversight is never going to occur within a political system that has been captured by every large industry across the globe. Such oversight can only come from individuals, households and communities getting informed from sources they can trust, and acting on what they find out.

But if we cannot trust, or haven’t got the time to research the things we consume, then living by a simple precautionary principle, like ‘if it’s fast it’s probably toxic,’ is going to serve us well, and keep us from the ever grubby hands of the pharmaceutical or illness industry.

Your comments, research and experiences with environmental toxins that have been enabled by falsely regulated industries and corporatised journalism, are most welcome here.

And lastly if you’d like to listen to a couple of sweet evolutionary biologists discussing the scientific paper mentioned in this piece, head here.

(The citation for the paper referenced is: Grootveld M, Percival BC, Grootveld KL. Chronic non-communicable disease risks presented by lipid oxidation products in fried foods. HepatoBiliary Surg Nutr 2018;7(4):305-312. doi: 10.21037/hbsn.2018.04.01)C

I’m closing out this post with a peg of Blackwood harvesting spuds in our home garden last year. Growing our own food is always the best medicine, and it means that low-income households like ours can afford organically grown food that is non-reliant upon the vulgar boudoir of the state-corporate nexus.