the Waste-Not Blog

In case you haven't noticed, I am very phytic acid aware. If I'm going to be feeding a whole grain or a legume to my family, you can bet it's going to be soaked for a minimum of eight hours before I start cooking or baking. This is because I want my family to receive the full benefit of the good food I'm cooking, and phytic acid is an antinutrient that latches onto minerals in your diet and carries them right out the back door. It doesn't matter how much magnesium you eat if it all ends up in the toilet, and that's exactly what happens when you consume whole seeds, grains or legumes that haven't been soaked. So when I look at the bags of pelleted grain or ground, dry "mash" that people feed to their animals, I have to wonder: why would I feed uncooked, unsoaked, unaltered grain to my animals when I wouldn't feed them to my family? Beyond my desire to take good care of my animals, I'm paying for their feed, and if they aren't absorbing...

For us, the Waste-Not Plan is a blueprint to arrive at our ultimate goal of total independence in terms of food (for us and our animals), energy (at least in terms of heat and cooking, and using the grid only for luxuries that can easily be dispensed with) and money (we want to be able to have both me and Ben at home or at least working very minimally, so what land we have needs to at least pay for its own taxes and hopefully a bit extra). For others it might just be a matter of becoming progressively more self reliant: having enough food to know that a couple weeks without buying groceries won't reduce you to eating expired spaghetti-Os from the back of the cupboard, being able to pay down debt and add to a nest egg, reducing your carbon footprint and plugging your particular holes in the waste stream. That's why I call these "levels" instead of "steps," because even if you never get past "level one" or "level two," you're here. You...