WHY EATING SEASONALLY IS IMPORTANT

•save money - food is at it’s highest supply

•food is better - it is grown closer to home so less likely to rot

•support local, sustainable farmers

• Cacti are some of the only plants to photosynthesize from their stems. Their needles are really just modified leaves.

• Avocados are only around because people pollinate and disperse them by hand. The large seed is indigestible to small mammals now. It was originally eaten by giant sloths who would poop them out far away from the parent tree so they can grow. This is called an evolutionary anachronism.

• Banana candy does not taste like bananas because it was designed to taste like the Gros Michel banana which was eaten in the pre-1950s. It was wiped out by a fungus called panama disease. Since bananas are asexual all of them are genetically identical making it easy to wipe them all out at once. However fungus is sexual so it evolves more quickly. This means eventually we may lose the modern banana, the Cavendish, to it as well.

• There are actually three different types of photosynthesis: C3, C4, and CAM. Which type is used depends on the aridness of the environment, and are increasingly more efficient as listed.

• Moss is amazing. The fuzzy part of the moss is called the gametophyte stage and it is haploid meaning it has one set of chromosomes like a sperm or an egg cell in humans. If you look closely, sometimes you will what look like little tiny seeds on stems coming out of the main body. This is the sporophyte stage and it’s diploid, or has two sets of chromosomes, like our body cells. Moss is the oldest type of plant.

• You can usually tell what animal pollinates a plant by the color and shape of its flowers. Red flowers are hardly ever pollinated by bees because bees cannot see red well. Butterfly flowers have long deep centers. Bird pollinated plants can bear weight and are wide and open. Bat pollinated plants usually smell strongly and are darkly colored.

• Almost all American native elms and chestnut trees are extinct because of fungi. Asian chestnut and elm have replaced them, because they are resistant to the strains.

• There is a type of fern that has over 1200 chromosomes. For reference, humans have 46.

• If you shine consistent low level red light on a plant it will grow extremely tall, because red light tells the plant it is being shaded by and competing with other plants. If you shine consistent green light on a plant it will not sprout or die (if already sprouted) because plants absorb red and blue light to use. This is also why plants are green, because the unused green light is reflected back out.

It exists purely as a status symbol that says, “I have land but I don’t have to use it for anything productive. I can invest time, money and resources in maintaining an entirely useless crop on land I’m not farming just because it looks pretty.”

When the pipleline was re-routed, it was set up to go through land that belongs to the Standing Rock Sioux. For those who don’t know what I mean by “belongs to” because “Oh me oh my, this is American land,” no, it isn’t. Not all of it. There is land that belongs to different Native tribes. Including part of the land that the pipeline will be going through. This was not done with permission. How was this done? This was done by bulldozing up the graves of ancestors. (If that doesn’t bother you, read it as the graves of our veterans; the graves of our presidents’ families; the graves of your family.)

Outside of the media finally watching us for the last six months, the camps have been there before that. I know someone who was there on April 1, 2016. That’s well before the media started paying attention in August. Well before. The camps have been self-sustaining. Yes, there have been donations. Yes, donations were made in physical items, money for items, and money for legal funds. That money and those items went to keeping something beautiful alive.

People who were arrested had numbers written on their arms, they were kept in dog cages. Protectors who were peacefully in prayer had untrained dogs set on them to attack. There are photos floating around of one trainer who couldn’t keep her dog, who had blood in its mouth, under control. In sub-zero conditions in the early morning protectors were hosed down with freezing water - this includes the elderly and children. (Yes, there were children. Guess what, they were getting schooled there. Self sustaining.) Police shot bean bags, rubber bullets, and flash-bang bombs into the crowds. A woman had her arm blown to pieces because of this. 

At every point since the beginning, there has only been peace on our end. No rioting, no fire, no weapons, no alcohol, no drugs; nothing but peace. And from the end of law enforcement has been violence. Even residents had been violent, and police did nothing to them. But they sure as hell arrested people from camp for praying - a nonviolent act.