Pagan Coffee Talk
We will discuss topics related to the Pagan community. All views are from a traditionalist's point of view. The conversations are unscripted (no preparations have been made ahead of time). A special thanks to Darkest Era for the use of their songs: Intro- The Morrigan, Exit - Poem to the Gael. Check them out at http://darkestera.net/.
Pagan Coffee Talk
Cultivating Skills for a Healthier Tomorrow
What if we could reclaim the lost arts of food production and self-sufficiency to break free from today's throwaway culture? Join us as we explore how reconnecting with the earth—whether by planting a modest urban garden or nurturing a larger plot of land—can empower us to reduce our dependence on corporations. We discuss the urgent need to preserve essential skills like cooking, repairing, and building for future generations, and learn how these practices can lead to a richer connection with nature, especially for those in the pagan community.
We provide practical advice on starting a home garden, offer tips for expanding your culinary skills like making delicious homemade tomato sauce. Through personal anecdotes and hands-on experiences, we illustrate how these practices can foster a deeper appreciation for the food we consume.
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Welcome to Pagan Coffee Talk. If you enjoy our content, please consider donating and following our socials. Now here are your hosts, lady Abba and Lord Knight.
Speaker 2:Okay, Lord Knight, I was looking over your notes for podcast topics. And one of them was witches. Don't know how to farm anymore.
Speaker 3:No, witches don't.
Speaker 2:Okay, go ahead, go ahead, Give it to us.
Speaker 3:All right, I'm going to go on my little soapbox here, please do. We need a better connection to our food. You need to be able to see your food. We do not need green loans anymore. We need gardens in your front yard. It drives me up the wall. The most basic necessity we need to live, live. We leave up to freaking corporations and all this other stuff.
Speaker 2:that just drives me up the wall okay, so take it a step further, you. So farming and gardening are different are different. Yes, most people think farm. They think farm land acreage huge right right, massive responsibility. No, okay, so you're seeing just the act of gardening right, right, interchangeably right.
Speaker 3:Okay, all right, because again there's a lot you can do on a quarter of an acre of land.
Speaker 2:There's a lot you can do in an apartment building on a balcony.
Speaker 3:So again, at what size?
Speaker 2:do you become a farmer, versus just gardening and knowing and understanding what it means to connect with the soil to grow your own food to reduce waste cost expense.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know, have something reliable. I mean, I'm not sitting here saying you need to feed your whole, entire family, but can you at least get one meal a year out of your yard?
Speaker 2:I'm going to take it a step further. I'm going to say it's not just gardening, farming. I think we have a slew of potentially lost or endangered arts.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:Growing your own food cooking your own food, storing your own food, sewing mending, repairing building fixing yep all of the manual trades, if you will, are in danger right now. We are in a time where most people's answer to it's broken is throw it away. Right, it has a hole in it. Throw it away.
Speaker 2:Uh, it's missing a button, throw it away. I can hear my grandmother in my. I can hear the audible whatever you want to call it yelp. That would have come out of her mouth If I were to take a shirt and missing a button and head to the trash. Can, right, right? She would come flying out of nowhere, shuffling in her slippers with the needle already in hand you know, because that's not a reason we have forgotten how to do.
Speaker 2:we look at packaging, we look at the insanity of what's going on with waste, with landfills. Right to me, this drives me crazy, right? So you go to the grocery store, I go to buy a bell pepper, okay, why does my bell pepper have to be wrapped in plastic? Ah, I don't understand. Why do?
Speaker 3:I have to take my grocery bags to the grocery store, but yet everything I buy is wrapped in plastic.
Speaker 2:Is wrapped in plastic, I yeah. But meanwhile I can go to the farmer's market and nothing, nothing is packaged, none, you just put it in a grocery bag and you go about your business. But did you not see?
Speaker 3:the story that was going around. There was a girl and she had this lemon tree out in her yard. She lived in like Florida.
Speaker 3:And somebody came over to her house one day. It's just like why do you have lemons from the store? Because I use them to cook, and all that, but why are you buying lemons? You have a lemon tree. I don't know how to get them off the tree. Oh my god, she honestly thought there was that there was a process that farmers have to do to make this suitable for eating after it comes off the tree? Oh boy she didn't understand. You can walk up to a lemon tree, pull the lemon off and use it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as long as it's ripe. One of my favorite stories.
Speaker 2:when I was a baby, my grandparents came from Sicily to come visit my mom Actually, I don't even think I was born yet they stayed for a while. I think they stayed for like the month of her, the last month of her pregnancy, into, right, like my first couple of months. So I think they spent like a summer ish, or well, that's not true. It wasn't a summer. I was born in November, so you get my point, that fall, whatever.
Speaker 2:And two things happened that to my grandmother were devastating. The first was she showed up at the airport with a basket of figs to bring to her pregnant daughter, who just really wanted figs, right, right, and for a Sicilian you know, farming, agriculture, family, that's not a weird request. No, you go to the fig tree in the backyard, you pull the figs, you bring a basket of figs, needless to say, yeah, the airport security just took them and threw them away. Right, because you can't transport Fruit, fruit, yeah, no, you can't. So she was just in tears, couldn't understand, right, why they took the figs away. And then and this one's really funny my dad, because he told this story through my entire childhood.
Speaker 2:My dad was very proud of his lawn. Okay, he was also very proud of his garden. He had, he had, an acre garden, but but he was also very proud of his lawn and the entire time that my grandparents were there he couldn't put weed killer on the lawn because my grandmother would go out into the grass and pull the dandelions, yeah, and pluck to make salad for the dandelion greens, yeah, because they're edible. And my dad was like, god damn it, my grandmother's out there and the first like week, my mom is having to explain to her you can't eat those. There's, there's pesticide, right, there's poison on those. You can't, you can't eat that. And she was like what do you mean? I can't eat this. It's food, yes, I can, yeah, so, uh, so my dad had to stop treating the lawn while they were there, yeah, because grandma was foraging in in the grass, um, but that is so indicative of the difference of the mindset yes um, these people never worked, your, your grandma, they never worried about not going hungry no, it's weird.
Speaker 2:And they were very poor. Yes, they were extremely poor. And yet you're right, because you could always raise a chicken, right, you could always bake a loaf of bread, you could always grow something to eat, you could always go fishing, you know that's what you did.
Speaker 3:You go catch a rabbit, whatever they, they eat snails.
Speaker 2:I mean, sicily has a lot of volcanic rock, uh, around the shoreline and you get little mollusks and little snails and it's a whole thing to go and you catch them and you bring them home and you cook them.
Speaker 3:Well, let's talk another reason about all of this, all right, which I might get in trouble for later. Yeah, it's fine, all right, but.
Speaker 2:I'll protect you.
Speaker 3:But what? Past six months, months or so, I have changed my diet to go to more. I do more things from scratch yes all right, instead of prepackaged food. Yes, since I have done this, I have not went out to set out to lose weight but, yet I have right a considerable amount too, all right, so why don't we trust in our food?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to make two comments to that All right. So the first is I'm also going to give you shit for a minute, all right, I'm just saying I'm not saying this is perfect. Because, you know, like any good priestess, my mind is a seal's trap and I remember everything. I distinctly remember a time, many, many, many moons ago yes, remember a time, many, many, many moons ago, yes, where we had someone in temple who was having a discussion about making marshmallows from scratch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember, and you went off on the funniest tangent I have ever heard you. I believe you actually said okay, martha goodwitch, you can go to the grocery store right now and buy a two dollar bag of jumbo marshmallows and you're gonna waste an entire day making marshmallows from scratch because the bad part the bad part is about doing everything from scratch is I spend a lot of time? Yes, in the kitchen yes, so okay, let's, let's break.
Speaker 3:I'm not saying that, that doesn't that that problem still doesn't exist no, and that's the the thing I think it is.
Speaker 2:it is proportionate to the amount of time that you have available. At that time, you were working a very demanding full-time job and you were running the church full-time. The idea of making marshmallows from scratch was enough to make you want to beat your head into a wall because there was no way you had time for it.
Speaker 3:No, yeah, things have changed.
Speaker 2:Yes, so that is an important distinction we have to make, right, we understand that. But on the other side of that coin, people have yes, they look, cooking is probably the the at an all-time worst right younger generations do not cook.
Speaker 2:I know almost no one in their 20s who cooks and only a handful of people in their 30s who do. And I'm not talking about like cooks once in a while or can make a meal. I mean cooks for their family, like that's it. They prepare food right, not? I cook one meal a week and the rest is takeout, and that's the problem. There's so much we don't know what's in our food anymore, because I feel like people don't want to know. The fda just banned red dye number three. It causes cancer. Oh, okay, just like red dye number six.
Speaker 3:And red dye, number nine, that cause migraines.
Speaker 2:Nine and number three, and let's keep going on down the list. Let's just go ahead and say red dye bad. Right, unless it comes from beets, red dye bad. Red dye bad red dye bad like I mean, because it's pretty straightforward. If it's not a naturally derived dye, why the fuck are you putting it in your body?
Speaker 3:why are we putting dyes and preservatives that come from petroleum products?
Speaker 2:which we know causes cancer. I have always said, and I I've been like this most of my life, I mean even as well, probably not as a little kid, but you know if it can dye my tongue or my skin, but it didn't come from something natural that I can see.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Like the plant or the fruit. Why the fuck would I ingest that? What is that doing to the inside of me?
Speaker 3:Well, I mean just the fact that they've done this Mm-hmm. I mean, regardless of what, the red dye of three Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:The study was 30 freaking years ago and now we're banning it and now we're doing the damage is already done. Yeah, so I'm back to and we're giving them two years to phase it out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the damage is done and I and I'm sorry I do I see obese stuff, I see what happens to me, and if that's all that is, then how many people are out there who are overweight and all this other stuff can't lose weight? But they don't seem to understand what it's.
Speaker 2:Well, but but again there's, there's multiple barriers in place here. So probably one of the biggest and one of the hardest is the fact that processed foods are cheap and plentiful. Yes, and because they are cheap and plentiful, people who are stuck in a poverty cycle, they have a really hard time getting out of it when they can just continue to eat this filling garbage. It's not, it's not fun and it's not fair. It has been said many, many times now it is tragic that it is cheaper to buy literal garbage food, food that is terrible for you, than it is to buy a basket of fruits and vegetables. That's tragic and in no way, shape or form, should that be taking place.
Speaker 3:No, I mean that's just like in the school system.
Speaker 2:If you hear the lunch, ladies.
Speaker 3:everything comes in a box, everything. They don't make nothing.
Speaker 2:They just warm everything back up. Yeah, everything is packaged and prepared. Reading labels, you know, has become a big deal, but I think okay.
Speaker 2:So if we look at the pagan community, it's awareness, well, I think, I think the pagan community is a little bit more concerned about this subject because, of our closeness to nature yeah, I would agree with that, but at the same time, the system makes it so easy it does To just ignore it and not take action. So it's small change, right. So the gardening thing we talk about that, that was where we started with us, right? It is not a big endeavor to take a pot, put it at the front or the back of your house and grow tomatoes no it is an incredibly easy summer crop that is relatively low maintenance.
Speaker 2:As crops go, I mean, you just have to water it. They're usually pretty easy. Aside from that, steak it um. I mean cucumbers are relatively easy peppers are relatively easy.
Speaker 3:Most of the herbs are easy. Matter of fact, herbs are the most laziest gardening you can do oh, herbs are fantastic.
Speaker 2:I have at least four herbs in my garden right now that I haven't planted in multiple years and they're still growing. They're not supposed to be. They should have been dead long ago. They're still kicking.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, you know most herbs. If you ignore them, they'll grow because they're technically weeds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but herbs can be intimidating to people because, again, it's kind of like you have to know how to cook or how to use the herb, right? So I'm like, look, start with one or two vegetables and then start using them. And then start using them Now when your crop is finished. You're going to realize real quickly how painful it is to then go to the grocery store and buy that item. Yeah, because you're going to be appalled by what you're spending for it. Yeah, mm-hmm. So start small and then add on.
Speaker 3:Learn one recipe Right.
Speaker 2:Learn one thing and make it something if you can. That is a staple that you can freeze quantities of, because I also think that's a great way to see like why would I spend money on that? Why would I buy that? Now, you know me, I haven't. I don't know that I've ever bought jarred tomato sauce, but I I thought that was a sin in your house.
Speaker 3:Yeah right, it is, it is.
Speaker 2:It was recently brought to my attention that jarred pasta sauces eight $9 a jar and I'm like what? That's insane to me.
Speaker 3:I, when I can go over to the can aisles, pick up a can of tomatoes I can get.
Speaker 2:I can get a can of crushed and a can of whole. Give me 45 minutes. You got sauce and I mean and, and for you, you know, four dollars if it's on sale. I mean, but even still, I go. Sauce comes from my freezer, I just open it up and pull out a container from the last batch. Yeah, that, and also starting to buy in bulk and learn the basics of dispatching.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I am amazed by how many of our young pagans are disgusted by connecting with their food source. They don't want to touch it. They don't write raw chicken meats, seafood, they don't want to get their hands dirty. And I'm like, listen, yeah, I mean, if I could, and it all depends on, like, who we have in temple at any given time.
Speaker 2:But make no mistake, one of these days you're going to walk in in the kitchen and find me butchering a whole raw something and you're going to be like like, what the hell are you doing? Oh, I'm teaching how to fillet right now. Okay, because, yeah, because those kinds of things are why we are struggling with a food crisis. People want to buy, you know, their chicken breasts, perfectly packaged and ready to go, and I'm like why I can buy split breast chickens with the, with the ribs and the meat and the bone and for like a quarter of the price, yeah, I just have to do a little bit of work when I get it home and then I have the bones to make stock to make stock, which I do regularly also.
Speaker 2:So, yes, it's funny to me, because things like chicken breast, chicken breast cracks me up. Ask anybody our age the chicken that they ate most growing up, and the answer is always the same drumsticks, drumsticks, legs. Why they're cheap? They're cheap, they're dark meat, which means it tastes better yeah, and, and all kids like the.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all kids love a drumstick and they're just easy. They're easy, yeah, I mean they cook quickly, like they're versatile as hell. There's so many different ways to prepare them and now everything is white meat chicken. White meat chicken. White meat chicken. White meat chicken. White meat chicken is A the most expensive part of the chicken, it's the most wasteful part of the freaking chicken and it's the one that's most shot up with hormones and BS to make it bigger and plumper.
Speaker 3:Yep when. I can go out and buy two pounds of chicken thighs.
Speaker 2:Oh God I love chicken thighs For like half the house, and here's the other one that gets people every time Chicken breasts is dry and tasteless.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but there is a lot of that. We had a power outage not that many months ago from a storm. It was minor, but my brother's neighborhood lost power minor, um, but my brother's neighborhood lost power and him and his uh partner went out to just kind of drive around see what was going on and they said that everything in the neighborhood was dead until they got just outside of town and it turns out that chick-fil-a had power and they said that the line was wrapped twice around the building and spilling out into the street. Okay, and Kenny said what's going on? He goes why are all these people at Chick-fil-A? And Brandon stopped and went because none of them know what to do when the power's out to cook a meal.
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 2:He's like nobody knows what to do. So they're panicking and they're buying dinner at Chick-fil-A because it's open and it has power. They cooked dinner that night on the barbecue. Yeah, I just Uh-huh, I know.
Speaker 3:That's what I would have done.
Speaker 2:I know I've cooked dinner in my hearth, in my fireplace.
Speaker 3:I have seen my mother cook breakfast on a wood stove because we didn't have power.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, I'm not saying it was easy, but it did it.
Speaker 3:There was a fire running upstairs fire downstairs, a foot of snow outside and all the doors opened because it was freaking hot in the house.
Speaker 2:Cooking is like anything else it's a little bit of know-how. It's a little bit of knowledge that you can then apply, and it goes such a long way. But so is fixing, so is repairing, so are any of these things. So what's the point?
Speaker 3:We got work to do. We need to be more self-reliant.
Speaker 2:Well, no, you can't learn it all or anything but there aren't as many skills as you can.
Speaker 2:We need this connection, yeah and I will say you know what, if you want to get creative and go off the rails in some way, that's unique, knock yourself out, go for it, but do it. My daughter surprised the hell out of me when she showed me a big tub of dirt and she pulled a giant beetle grub out of the dirt in her hand and I went what in God's name? Because these things are huge. They were the size of her palm. Uh-huh, her property is littered with these giant beetle grubs. They're very destructive, obviously, because they're so big, but they make those giant horned beetles that are really big and that people sometimes keep as pets or they mount, she started incubating them.
Speaker 2:Now, in a way, it's bug farming right yeah, yeah, she started incubating the beetles so that she could. Then because they don't live very long, you know she would allow them to live out their life cycle and then when they die, she's got the carcass that she can mount or she can sell, or you know any number of things with.
Speaker 3:Let me make it. Let me make it worse. I've been looking up chickens and how to raise chickens and in this process, I keep on hearing people talk about bug farms.
Speaker 2:Yes, to feed the chickens. To feed the chickens, crickets or whatever Black flies and stuff.
Speaker 3:And I'm like, okay, so I don't even have to buy the food to feed my chickens anymore, and I still can get eggs. Yep, you know, because I'm still back in the day. At one point little house on the prairie was real. These people lived on this farm, did not leave, only left the land on sundays to go to church.
Speaker 2:They only bought shoes they didn't go to the grocery store there was a time where you couldn't buy honey because your neighbors were giving it away. Yes, because there was so much of it. There's an interesting kind of phenomenon of with the decline of honeybees. Yes, we know pesticides and all of that have a lot to do with it, but part of that decline is also the fact that people are not beehiving anymore. No, it used to be a lot.
Speaker 2:Now we're starting to see a comeback, but for a large period of time people stopped doing it, yeah you know, you know, we, we have a weird, I don't want to say obligation, but cultivating something is one of the most things you can do, yeah, and to be able to see how your cultivation effort can benefit yourself, your family and then your community starts to also, I think, trigger other people to start cultivating something, and then we see that collective working together more smoothly.
Speaker 3:I mean cause.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be honest with you I mean my goal really right now is to at least get one sabbath meal out of the garden one year I um to be quite honest with you oh, I know I was sad I took last year off from my gardening because my gardens are all containers and raised beds right, and periodically you have to rest the soil because otherwise you deplete it. So I did. I did a complete rest, so I had nothing last year. And it pained me because every time I went to the farmer's market I was begrudging because I'm like why am I praying for this?
Speaker 2:yeah, but anyway it is. It's a lost art and we've we've got to get these things back. We are in danger of losing some very basic knowledge. I mean, come on, I mean just witchcraft alone. How can we be witches who aren't connected to a harvest?
Speaker 3:right, how can? That's my point is how can we be pagan Every?
Speaker 2:single holiday, every single event on our calendar is connected to the harvest, and we actually have witches who have never experienced a harvest. Nope, that's madness.
Speaker 3:What it's like to have to go out there because you've got to take all the tomatoes off you because it's going to freeze tonight and you ain't got.
Speaker 2:Well, and I'll tell you something that's really funny and I learned this through my step kids it didn't, it didn't dawn on me because I mean, like you, I grew up with it, right we? Always had a garden.
Speaker 2:We always had somebody farming or doing. One of the fastest ways to get kids, a to eat vegetables, b to connect to the garden and see, to look forward to it, is to get them involved in the growing. Yeah, my step kids would not eat a vegetable. I'm being like nothing, like you know. If you could get them eat a piece of lettuce, consider yourself lucky. Yet when they came to my house and the garden was they can we help pick, can we go out? Yeah, yeah, and then it was get, taking that what they picked and going. Okay, now do you want to make something with it? Yeah, yeah. Okay, great, now that we made something with her, are you gonna eat it? Yeah, yeah, because to them it was just, and there it was. There was the whole cycle right in just a moment with these children and I was like they actually like this, yeah, yeah I mean, and again, farming, if it's a skill that you can have you never go hungry, that's true.
Speaker 3:So speaking of farming, if we could just farm some coffee beans.
Speaker 2:Oh, that would be amazing.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. Join us next week for another episode. Pagan Coffee Talk is brought to you by Life Temple and Seminary. Please visit us at lifetempleseminaryorg for more information, as well as links to our social media.
Speaker 4:Facebook, Discord, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit, and so it is the end of our day, so walk with me till morning breaks.
