kylewon-kenobi

Happy spooky season Tumblr.

This scam made the California University study 124 imported oils and found that over 70% of samples failed the tests.

These failed:

Mezzetta

Carapelli

Pompeian

Primadonna

Mazola

Sasso

Colavita

Star

Antica Badia

Whole Foods

Safeway

Felippo Berio

Coricelli

Bertolli

These brands passed:

Corto olive

Lucero

McEvoy Ranch Organic

Omaggio

California Olive Branch

Bariani Olive oil

Lucini

Ottavio

Olea Estates

Cobram Estate

Kirkland Organic

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/13/slippery-business   This is a cool article on how they do it now and what they tend to substitute it with.

In 1997 and 1998, olive oil was the most adulterated agricultural product in the European Union, prompting the E.U.’s anti-fraud office to establish an olive-oil task force. (“Profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks,” one investigator told me.) The E.U. also began phasing out subsidies for olive-oil producers and bottlers, in an effort to reduce crime, and after a few years it disbanded the task force. Yet fraud remains a major international problem: olive oil is far more valuable than most other vegetable oils, but it is costly and time-consuming to produce—and surprisingly easy to doctor. Adulteration is especially common in Italy, the world’s leading importer, consumer, and exporter of olive oil. (For the past ten years, Spain has produced more oil than Italy, but much of it is shipped to Italy for packaging and is sold, legally, as Italian oil.) “The vast majority of frauds uncovered in the food-and-beverage sector involve this product,” Colonel Leopoldo Maria De Filippi, the commander for the northern half of Italy of the N.A.S. Carabinieri, an anti-adulteration group run under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, told me.

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"By learning how to craft from the materials of nature" I think to myself, "there would be no need for buying plastic objects and knickknacks which doubtless were shipped from overseas and are responsible for much pollution...and the ecosystem rejoices when its gifts are accepted."

I made a little basket. I'm getting much better at it! It's made of Eastern Redcedar bark, collected from standing deadwood.

Not everyone can be into crafts, but everyone can use the crafts! So they can be a gift!

At our allotments (like a community garden only the plots of British allotments tend to be a bit bigger than your average American community garden plot) there's a lot of swapping of skills, supplies, seeds, and actual food.

One of our neighbours is too old to get up a ladder and prune his plum tree, so we do it for him and have permission to pick some of the plums in return.

If one person ends up with too many seedlings of one type of plant then they'll give some of them to others and often get something else in return. If one person ends up with more beans or courgettes or kale or whatever than they can use then they offer the excess to friends.

I make a lot of jam and have several 'jam deals' with people where I have permission to pick their berries etc and return some in the form of jams or jellies. A different neighbour has a crab apple tree that he can't be bothered to do anything with but also won't cut down because it shelters his bee hives. I pick the entire crop of crab apples and give him crab apple jelly and butter in return. We also keep an eye on his bees when he's away and then we get some of the honey.

The same applies to skills and communities. You don't need to have everyone knowing how to make baskets from barks and grasses. You only need a few that can do that, while others are good at canning or sewing or growing pretty flowers or raising chickens or identifying tasty and non-lethal mushrooms. Then you swap skills and end products and so everyone has supplies and everyone gets fed.

@meganemaryam Luckily, there are a ton of wild plants that work great for spinning thread and yarn. I don't know where you live, but some of the best ones are Apocyonum cannabinum (dogbane; it has a lovely copper-to-peach color and is incredibly strong and tough, doesn't require retting you just beat it and scrape it a bunch) any of the types of nettle, Kudzu (Pueraria spp, haven't personally tried it yet but it was literally one of the fundamental textile fibers of ancient China and farmed for use as textile), Milkweed (Asclepias spp, you can use the bast fibers or the seed fluffs, the latter are very delicate and best to blend with something stronger, but I made a fantastic yarn out of 50/50 Dogbane bast fiber and Milkweed floss) and the new/green less-than-a-year-old sprouts off of grapevine (Vitis spp).

With the exception of the milkweed floss, all of these fibers are bast fibers, meaning they come from the inner bark, you have to peel the bark off the woody inner part and then beat, soak, crush, and/or ferment the bark in some combination to extract the fine threads. It is surprisingly easy to get cool results this way

BEHOLD!