Boise Food & Health Weekend May 3 and 4 2014!

Last year, blogger and friend Raine Saunders hosted a Food & Health Weekend at her home in Boise, ID. We had a fantastic time--I led a fermenting workshop, and there were also presentations on liver and pâté, and on "sun, sleep and supplements". In between, we visited farmers markets, spent time at the local hot springs, and had a real food potluck!

Good news: We are doing it again! It will be the weekend of May 3 and 4, 2014.

Details follow. Please sign up and pay in advance, so that we can make travel arrangements and get the right amounts of materials.

Full info, schedule, and sign up are here. Or:

BUY NOW Alex's fermentation workshop, $40 --> http://bit.ly/1m3UAk6
BUY NOW Raine's yogurt workshop, $15 --> http://bit.ly/1gwT56y
BUY NOW Cheryl's GAPS & Leaky Gut presentation, $10 -->http://bit.ly/1qD3CVW
BUY NOW Mary's kombucha/kefir workshop, $12 -- > http://bit.ly/PAH4Y6
BUY NOW All event workshops and receive $7 discount -->http://bit.ly/1cFEpq5
BUY NOW Alex's book --> http://amzn.to/1gwiYXQ

If you have questions, please comment on this post and I'll answer them ASAP.

EVENT LOCATION: 406 W. Iowa Street, Boise, Idaho 83706
Phone contact: 208-869-8860

SCHEDULE: SATURDAY, May 3rd

12:15 PM GAPS and Leaky Gut Syndrome with Cheryl Carruth 

1:30 PM Homemade yogurt with Raine Saunders

2:30 PM Demo on soaking nuts and oatmeal with Alex Lewin & Raine Saunders

2:45 - 4:45 PM Fermented vegetables - sauerkraut, kimchi, and beet kvass with Alex Lewin, author of Real Food Fermentation and the blog Feed Me Like You Mean It

8:00 PM Join us in Idaho City at The Springs for a hot mineral soak to end the day!

CLICK HERE to reserve your spot at The Springs on Saturday, May 3rd -->http://bit.ly/1gqyOmS

SUNDAY, May 4th 

1:30 PM Demo on soaking nuts and oatmeal continued with Alex Lewin & Raine Saunders

2:00 PM Kombucha & Kefir with Mary Korte

3: 30 PM - ?? Everyone is welcome to attend! Bring a dish to share and come meet the members of your local food community, with a real food potluck at our workshop location (see address above).

Doctors Are Not Always Right

George Washington died in 1799 at the age of 67. When he fell sick with what sounds like a cold or infection of some sort, he received care from eminent and respectable physicians. Nevertheless, within a few days, he was dead.

His medical treatments ranged from possibly helpful ("a medicinal mixture of molasses, vinegar, and butter") to very unhelpful (extensive bloodletting) to toxic (orally administered mercurous chloride, also known as calomel, generally given to patients until they salivated uncontrollably, a symptom of acute mercury poisoning).

We can look back at this story, shaking our heads sadly at the barbarity of the medicine of 1799. While doing this, we may note that mercurous chloride was an ingredient in infant teething powders in Britain until 1954, and shake our heads sadly some more. Or that mercurious chloride was a legal ingredient in skin whitening creams in the US until 1990.

Science Doesn't Prove Things

Science provides hypotheses and models of how things work. The value of a model is measured by its ability to explain past observations and predict future ones.

A new scientific theory is accepted into the mainstream canon when there is consensus that it provides better, simpler, more accurate, or more detailed explanations than existing theories. New theories often meet with great resistance unrelated to their merit or utility, for a variety of reasons outlined in my previous post.

Today’s breakthrough theories will become tomorrow’s mainstream theories. And sooner or later, many of today's best and brightest theories will be displaced by newer theories.

Mainstream Science Advances Slowly, Even In The Face Of New Evidence

Per the Oxford English Dictionary, scientific method is “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”

It wasn’t the case that we all woke up one morning and agreed on scientific method; its adoption, like the adoption of most philosophical and, indeed, scientific paradigms, was a process rather than an event, and its adoption process stretched into the 1800s. And it has not been adopted by folks whose personal beliefs preclude or supersede it.

So what is the scientific method?

I'm Teaching A Fermentation Class At Stanford

I'm teaching a fermentation class at Stanford, in partnership with Dr. Tia Rich and Dr. Angela Marcobal. It will be on four consecutive Fridays—Feb 28, Mar 7, Mar 14, and Mar 21—from 12:30-1:30pm.

Details are here (at the bottom of page 7). To register, click here, search for "ferment", and proceed. (If someone finds a reasonable way to link directly to the class page, please post a comment.) Enrollment is limited to 25, and as I write this, 14 spots have been taken already.