The day of all activities.

Full moon aoooowww

The day starts by a bread and cheese mission for Timothee who has his Tai chi workshop in the morning. I engage Christa to come along on the mission whch unfortunately fails... the farmers have nothing left to sell :) good business it seems. At todays very rich first food circle where few people are present and we all get second time food, a lot of activities are proposed. Not only there are heaps of things to do in the afternoon but they are all very interesting. A men speaks about his experience in amazonia, there is a chacra meditation, a medicinal plant introduction, massage workshop and a plum mission to make jam...
With Timothee we join the plant workshop. We are with a bunch of about 20 eople, following a guy around who tells us much about the different properties of plants. Antibiotic, photoactive for less depression in the winter, against head aches, for reinforcing the immune system etc.. However, writing this 3 weeks later, it is hard to remember everything.
I remember much more about the last part where an other brother started telling about nutrition. The fact that our stomach is not appropriate to eat meet. Not any meet i should precise since soft parts like brain liver, fat etc are very well digested. This is no big surprise to me, i notice very well that big meals of roasted meat are not always well digested. The meat has to stay at the butcher for a while and is broken down by some bacteria to make the job easier for our stomach. The job is even easier when it is white meet or when it has been marinated for a while with fruits. The acids in fruits break down the meet a bit more. More surprising however is the little story from the Berlin zoo who's lions could not give birth to living offspring and that the zoos vet solved the problem when he saw lions in the savanna go for the soft parts of their pray first, intestines, liver, hart, brains... As they fed thees parts to the captive animals, they rapidly had a happy living bunch of kids...
All this seems very reasonable and the men seems to know what he is taking about but still could be checked. He will tel us much more about eating, That you find more vitamin C in onions than in oranges, that there is a lot of vitamin b12 in everything that tastes like marcepan, namely in the seed of peaches. That the blackberries give you fruit sugar but at the same time lower your blood sugar, that you can eat the rhizomes from reeds (roseaux in French), the sprouts from fern (fougere in French), that there are some bacteria in soils (clean soils) that our digestive system can need... and much more.

We leave this workshop full of new knowledge. After last nights serious history class we now got a nutrition introduction. All this made us a little hungry and we decide to go looking for mushrooms. It has not rained in awhile and hope is low but we almost immediately find some Plerote, growing on a tree. Timothee is an edible plant expert and also knows a lot about mushrooms. i fully trust him when i taste this little acid mushroom growing on the bark of trees. We then finish our walk around with a huge plum picking session. We find a plum tree with ripe fruit and get good 10 kilos of it. This will be shared at tonights food circle where we make one round of plums for everyone.

Tonight there is a workshop on cannabis :) i know this story which is actually more about the amalgam between hemp growing for industrial purpose and cannabis consumption. Introducing the illegality of the later is very linked with US cotton production and was sponsored by Dupont corp who just invented nylon... for those who are intrested there is a documentary explaining this very well. just google video it! i will report on thing doctor Otman said however. when a farmer now buys hemp seeds with less than point something percent of thc in the plant (to comply with international law), well he has to do so every year because the thc level naturally increases over the years :)
Because we know this story already, we prefer to sit around the fire, talk with our French, Israeli and German brothers and sisters. And when we get tired of standing around the great fire, lite our own small fire where we grill mushrooms with olive oil, salt and cheese :) mmm delicious!