Hello everyone.
This is Katherine Elmer with a lecture on the connections
between community herbalism and the ways that it can
contribute to and enhance sustainable food systems
and really be a reciprocal relationship
to sustain and enhance each other.
And before I get into that,
I wanna provide a definition
that I'm using for sustainable food systems.
And the definition that I like to use in my class
because it's really simple and comprehensive,
is based on the SEED model,
which is something that was proposed by UVM,
I think it was a continuing education department
that put out a video about sustainable food systems.
And I'm gonna share that video in a moment.
But what I like about this model is
it really emphasizes the ways that the food system,
particularly globally and certainly in the United States,
has overemphasized economic benefit at the expense
of impacts on social structures, environmental health,
as well as human health and a healthy diet.
So I did some more homework.
Lo and behold, it is not as simple as you'd think.
Turns out that people often confuse the term food system
with what is just a profit driven system
of production and consumption.
That's the way that food is grown, processed,
distributed, marketed, consumed, and disposed of.
But this production model falls woefully short
when considering the multitude of factors
that go into sustaining
a healthy person and a healthy planet.
It's really more layered and complex than that.
Several additional factors need to be considered
to understand the full impact of the food system,
including the social and cultural aspects,
the environmental impacts, the economic aspects,
and the diet and health implications.
Now that I've planted the seed,
let's look at a few examples in each of these areas.
To give you a better idea of what I mean.
In social, we have food traditions,
treatment of farm workers, and taste and flavor.
In environmental, there are farming practices,
land use, topsoil loss and climate change.
The economics looks at the consumers' food costs,
trade policies, and crop subsidies.
And the diet and health category includes
diet related diseases, hunger and food safety.
And that, of course is just to name a few.
The SEED way of looking at our food system allowed me
to make some sense of this complex web.
All of a sudden I could look at a can of soda
and see that it was much more than a drink.
It actually involves relationships between government,
food policy, what is grown, what is produced,
and the health and cultural consequences
of what is consumed.
Once I started looking at the food system this way,
I started wondering how our food system
got this complicated in the first place.
Lucky for me, there are a lot of smart people out there
who have already asked this question.
What I found out is that we've arrived at the current
industrial system of food production
because of several factors driving the industry,
including government policies
and increasing corporate consolidation.
But what does that all mean?
In the industrial food system,
consolidation is not just happening within individual
sectors along the supply chain,
but a few large multinational corporations
are controlling more and more of the entire process.
They own or control the seeds, the farms, the trucks,
the processing plants, the brands and the grocery stores.
It's called vertical integration.
Yikes, this is why the food you find
at the grocery store is relatively cheap.
But before you get too excited about cheap food,
because that would be looking at only
the economic aspect and not the whole SEED picture,
remember all those other areas we talked about,
my guess is that once you start looking at it that way,
it will get complicated pretty quickly.
Even if we just look deeper into the economic aspects,
you'll see that there are other costs such as,
pollution cleanup, treating illness,
maintaining infrastructure,
and different kinds of taxes that you
and your community pay for indirectly.
Ah, what else don't I know about our food system?
In my search for the story behind my salad,
remember that salad?
I looked at tons of resources and found some amazing
statistics on our food system
and I thought you'd like to know.
50% of all groceries in this country are purchased
at four supermarket chains
among children ages two to 19 in the US.
About one in three are overweight and obese.
Around the world,
soil is being eroded way faster than is being replenished,
destroying over 36,000 square miles of cropland each year.
That is the size of Indiana.
Your average carrot in the US travels 1,835 miles
to reach the dinner table on a truck
that consumes fossil fuels and emits CO2 all along the way.
There are over 800,000 farm workers in the US,
many of whom work in dangerous conditions
that get paid significantly less than minimum wage.
In the US our system of food production
and distribution results in 40% of food grown
being lost through spoilage.
So the industrial food system is controlled
by a handful of corporations, makes our children sick.
Erodes are soils, pollutes our air and water,
mistreats farm workers,
and wastes almost half the food it produces.
Ick, I think I just lost my appetite.
This salad may be cheap to buy,
but it's not the salad I was hoping for.
And as I learned,
it's not the only salad I can eat.
Like I mentioned before,
there is an alternative food system
that is alive and thriving across the country.
So all this question asking made me realize that one,
there is a complicated and important story
behind every plate of food.
And two, it is my responsibility
as a consumer in the food system
to think about the SEED framework
when choosing which food to buy.
And that involves asking a lot of questions.
It turns out that here in Vermont
I'm surrounded by savvy and smart food systems experts.
Vermont has become a leader
in the area of local and regional food systems,
largely because its mountainous terrain
has limited large scale production,
but it is also Vermont's legislative initiatives coupled
with a university and colleges committed to research
and innovation in the food system,
an abundance of entrepreneurial farmers
and a plethora of informed consumers
already thinking the SEED way
that have turned Vermont
into a hotbed of innovation in the fields.
This expertise is also being shared around the world,
and it's not just for monitors who are working towards
a more sustainable food system,
it's a bonafide national and international movement,
and there's a true sense of urgency and momentum behind it.
From our dwindling supply of oil to resource depletion,
to chronic disease, the reasons for change are endless.
The most effective way to make that positive change
in our food system is to work
from both ends of the spectrum.
On one side,
we need more transparency and accountability
from corporations to include some of the externalized costs.
And on the other side,
we need regional food systems
and local diversified farms distributing fresh food.
Informed consumers are in the middle, driving the change,
and also putting pressure on the government to protect
the planet and create healthier food and communities.
To accelerate the move to a healthier food system,
we need to cultivate innovative leaders who can chart
a course for a more sustainable future
where food is abundant and healthy and accessible to all.
It sounds like we have our work cut out for us,
but while we are busy working on this food revolution,
let's be sure to slow down and take time
to cook and eat together.
Now that I've done my homework,
my January salads look a lot different than last year's.
I replaced the lettuce and tomato with kale, beets,
apples and local cheese.
It is delicious and has a story I love to tell,
but that's me, what's on your plate.
(light music)
So what can you do to help move us towards
a more sustainable food system?
Here are a few ideas.
Be curious about where your food comes from.
Learn about the different companies that produce food
and what their practices are
so you can make informed choices.
You can learn or surmise a lot just from reading labels.
Advocate for transparency and labeling.
You have the right to know where your food
is coming from and how it was grown and processed.
If it was irradiated or grown with GMO seeds,
you should know that.
Try to shorten the distance between where most of your food
is grown and you, it will be fresher and taste better
and we'll have used less fuel to get to you.
Eat and cook with an emphasis on fresh whole foods.
And don't forget, ask lots of questions.
There's always more to learn about what's on your plate.
So hopefully all of you have had some exposure
to sustainable food systems models
and the ideas of how these systems have developed
and the way that the scale of the food system can really,
the scale and the emphasis on economics over other impacts
can really cause issues in terms of environmental
degradation and social impacts and health impacts.
I think what's interesting to consider in a class
about plant-based healing medicine
is how can the food system and a local medicine system
that includes access to local plants,
merge to support social, environmental,
economic and improve diet and health.
So that's what I wanna explore and this conversation today.
I also think it's really important to emphasize,
since we are coming through this COVID-19 pandemic,
that there's a lot of evidence to suggest
that the roots of the coronavirus
and the roots of this pandemic are related
to a food system and an over-emphasis
on large scale production, particularly of poultry.
And a lot of the links back to the virus in China are
related to industrial production of poultry,
high intensity production of poultry,
and a really clear and acute example
of how the food system really needs to change
to support social, environmental,
economic diet and health
and have a more balanced approach to that.
And I also wanna emphasize,
I spoke a little bit about this
in the community herbalism lecture,
but one of the ways that I've approached my role
as an activist in the community herbalism
and sustainable food system here in Vermont
and the work that I've done over the last decade
in that area is it can be helpful to use
the supply chain as a framework for looking
at areas where there might need to be more infrastructure.
For example, there may be lots of growing
of medicinal plants on the landscape,
especially those that are growing wild,
but there may be limited processing and distribution,
which means that if there is a gap in those two areas,
then even if there is a market for those medicinal plants,
they aren't getting local access to the plants
that are growing in the surrounding area.
I also agree with the SEED video in discussing
the importance of informed consumers
in the medicine system and in consumers
that feel like they have agency
to add information in order to advocate for their needs.
And also the importance of innovative leadership.
And I feel really fortunate to be here in Vermont surrounded
by food systems and wellness leaders
that are doing a lot of the work in that area.
And I see my role as an educator of all of you
to look at ways to support you
to be more informed consumers
and also to develop your skills in innovation
and critical thinking and leadership.
So hopefully you'll get some
of those tools out of this class.
And again, when I define community herbalism,
it's really based on the idea
that sustainable and healthy communities,
these communities that are relying on sustainable food
systems also really depend on access
to sustainable and ideally local plant-based medicine.
And there's a huge enhancement that comes
from developing robust medicine system alongside
a sustainable food system.
And this is a photograph of volunteers
harvesting linden blossoms on campus.
And this is something that blooms all over Burlington
in particularly June,
and is a really important remedy
for the nervous system as well
as the cardiovascular system and specifically
for anxiety-related high blood pressure.
So I wanted to get your thinking going.
So if you have a moment to pause this recording,
get out a piece of paper and jot down some notes.
I want you to consider
these two different bottles of supplements.
First, consider the dandelion root as a supplement
and what might be wrong with getting
your dandelion root from a bottle.
And my understanding is that Solgar is based in Oregon
and that they source their dandelion globally.
And once you've jotted down a few notes
about what might be wrong or just not ideal
about sourcing your dandelion root in this way,
shift to the calcium carbonate supplement
and consider what might be suboptimal
about getting your calcium supplementation in this form.
And then I'm going to get into these
in a little bit more depth.
So let's take the calcium carbonate example first.
First of all,
I'm a big proponent of whole foods over supplements.
Calcium carbonate is the cheapest
and most common form
of calcium supplementation in the market.
However, calcium carbonate is essentially
blackboard chalk and it's not bioavailable.
It takes a lot of stomach acid to be able
to break it down in the majority
of the American population actually
has too little stomach acid.
And that's a whole other conversation.
And I think one of the reasons is that stress affects the
level of stomach acid and the therefore
the bioavailability of minerals.
But also a lot of the older population is medicating
with Tums and proton pump inhibitors
like Prilosec or omeprazole,
which also lowers the ability to absorb calcium.
One of the most bioavailable forms of calcium is not milk.
Milk is promoted as a form of calcium
because of needing to subsidize
and market the dairy industry.
But kale and other brassicas is actually
the most bioavailable form of calcium.
And I'll discuss that soon
and how to make it more bioavailable.
You can also get a supplement of calcium in the form of
calcium citrate if you're not able to access fresh food.
And calcium citrate is slightly more expensive,
but definitely worth the money because of its
enhanced bioavailability as a calcium supplement.
It's also generally a better idea to take a calcium
magnesium combination supplement because too much calcium
can actually contribute to problems in the body
if it's not balanced with magnesium.
And that's another reason why I promote consuming foods
that are high in the minerals
and vitamins that we need rather
than trying to get the the right dosage
and the right source of the vitamins
and minerals in the body.
And if you recall,
when I shared about the survey that the program
and integrative health did of physicians
at the UVM Medical Center,
only 12% of the 700 physicians that responded
to the survey had taken a nutrition class.
Most of them had only taken one nutrition class
and nutrition classes in medical schools
in this time primarily focused on supplements
and don't actually talk about food as a nutritional support.
UVM Medical Center is developing a very innovative culinary
medicine program that I urge you to check out.
And so I think that they're on
the cutting edge and my colleague Diane Emery,
who's the director of nutrition at the UVM Medical Center,
is really leading that effort.
But there's a lot of work to be done in the medical system
to provide patients with accurate information
about how to support their bodies with nutrition.
And I'm a huge proponent
of whole foods nutrition to provide that.
So a little bit about how best to prepare these brassicas.
Brassicas are a class of plants that include broccoli,
cauliflower, arugula, even horse radish,
kale, brussel sprouts.
And they are pretty hard to digest when they are raw.
Takes a lot of stomach acid
to break down a bunch of raw kale.
And if you've ever tried to eat raw cabbage or kale,
you probably got a stomach ache afterwards.
Much easier to do in the summer months when our digestion
tends to be stronger and it's just warmer in general.
But I recommend massaging with salts
the brassicas in the summer or steaming them
and different from the dark berries where heating
them actually makes them more bioavailable.
The primary, especially the anti-inflammatory
constituents in Nebraska's are really fragile.
So cooking them gently or fermenting them is actually
the best way to preserve the nutrients,
but also to cook them enough so
that they're more digestible and bioavailable to our bodies.
And the interesting thing about fermentation
is that it actually enhances your digestion
and the ability to absorb many of these minerals
when you're consuming the cabbage
and brassicas with probiotic bacteria.
So I'm highlighting Flack Family Farm,
which is a local farm in Vermont,
but I also encourage you all to try your hand
at home fermentation.
It's a very, very simple process
and a great way to get these important
vitamins and minerals.
If you are steaming or having massaged salads of brassicas,
you can boost the assimilation,
particularly of the calcium and magnesium
and the vitamin K with oil and vinegar.
Vitamin K is an important vitamin
for healthy blood coagulation,
and consuming it with oil helps with absorption
because it's a fat soluble vitamin.
And then vinegar or lemon juice as an acid helps
to chelate or bind magnesium
and calcium so that the body can absorb it more readily.
So knowing how to prepare superfood
can greatly help with assimilation,
help you get the most out of that food.
So one of the arguments for a sustainable food system
that will help to support not only
the farmers producing the whole food,
but also diet and human health,
improved diet for human health is emphasizing whole food,
consuming this rainbow of colorful, pigmented fruits
and vegetables instead of an emphasis on supplements.
I also wanna speak to the dandelion root example
and see how my comments might resonate
with some of your lists of why getting
your dandelion root in this way might be suboptimal.
And you know, as you might guess,
dandelion root is a widely available weed.
It's available in most green spaces.
There are some concerns about harvesting dandelion
in polluted areas.
And it is commonly,
often there are herbicides applied to dandelion on lawns
and so there can be concern about toxicity
from any herbicides might be applied.
But generally speaking,
if you can find a clean space to harvest
your dandelion root, it's really silly, it's expensive,
it contributes to a higher carbon footprint to be purchasing
dandelion root in this packaging in something
that is coming from across the country
and you don't know about the source.
So dandelion root is a great example of many wild
and weedy medicinal plants that you really shouldn't need
to be buying from the shelves.
But I understand that in some urban environments,
the human systems may have limited access to these herbs.
And so it might be more complicated to change
the land use practices to make it more possible
to harvest the medicines.
So I wanna share a little bit of examples of how the farm
and the agricultural landscape can be enhanced
by using cultivated wild and weedy plant medicines.
And this comes out of a workshop that I've taught
at the Northeast Organic Farming Association
of Vermont Conference every winter
and really looking at the opportunities
for taking medicinal plants from farm landscapes
at the homestead and farm scale
and boosting the the bottom line of those farms
through value added products such as medicinal plants,
but also boosting the health of the farm family,
whether or not they choose to offer it commercially.
And then of course, as we're discussing in this lecture,
there are huge food system implications to increasing
the number of nutrient dense superfood
that are available in a food system,
as well as supporting other aspects of human health
such as remedies that might be supportive
to not just diet nutrition,
but other health needs in the community.
And really looking at the synergy
between the local food movement
and the local plant-based medicine movement.
And here's an example of the,
here are some slides from the presentation
that I've taught with my colleague Kara Buchanan
for several years at the NOFA Vermont Conference.
We taught it in 2020 to a fully packed
standing room only room,
really trying to share this opportunity for farmers
to tap into what's often an untapped resource
because the plants are already there,
they just might not know
how to identify and how to use them.
So this is one of our programs through Spoonful Herbals
is working with farmers and home setters
to help them access and use these remedies
for their families, but also to support
their economic vitality through value added products.
So some plant medicine that's common in the Vermont
farm landscape includes not only
what's available in the cultivated fields,
there are also many cover crops
that provide the ecosystem service of cover crops,
which includes helping to manage moisture in the fields,
helping to provide nutrition in the soil,
but also have medicinal benefits.
So I'll share a couple of examples of those.
They're also weedy plants that tend to grow
in the cultivated fields as well
as certain crops such as annuals
and some perennials that are very easy to grow
and have a high yield in terms of economic benefits.
We also might find medicinal plants growing in flower
gardens or other landscape areas on farms
because they're popular landscaping plants
that also have medicinal benefits.
And then in pastures and green spaces.
And there are also some slides about forest medicine.
Many of Vermont farms have a mixed land use,
including a fair amount of open fields either for livestock
or just because they haven't been cultivated in forests.
And there's many medicinal plants that grow wild
in those areas that are available for wildcrafting.
So one of the roles that Spoonful Herbals has played
in terms of the distribution gap is for farmers
who are interested in using those weedy
and additional plants on their own.
We organize medicinal plant gleaning events on those farms
and some of our primary partners in the Burlington area
for that are Shelbourne Farms, Bread and Butter Farm.
Shelbourne Farms is probably our most prominent partner.
We end up going there five or six times a summer
and this is an opportunity to close
that distribution gap of abundant plants
in the landscape and a local market
of consumers that are looking for these plants.
But farmers don't yet know or don't have
the infrastructure or the desire to harvest them themselves.
So trying to bring groups of essentially organized labor
to get these plants off the landscape
but also to process them through drying or other means.
We also work with farmers
to identify what's on their plant.
This is a quote from Tim Wall,
who's the owner of Three Chimney Farm,
and I, a few years ago,
went out to his farm and spent an hour with him,
essentially doing a plant walk and teaching him
about what plants were already available in his landscape.
He was really excited about the St. John's wort
and he had just hired a new worker
who had some skills in herbal processing.
So as a result of this herb walk,
they added a section of their CSA
where their members were
getting value added herbal products as well.
So this is a relatively new program
that we've been offering not only
to homeowners but also to farmers who might want
to get to know how to use their land more fully
in terms of the plant medicine that's available.
So here's some examples of common medicinal plants
that might be found on the landscape.
First of all, I'm a big fan of using invasive plants.
So here's garlic mustard, purple loosestrife.
I have tried to use Japanese knotweed
I've had some success,
but Japanese knotweed is very hard to process.
It requires hatchet and lots of muscle to harvest
the medicine and I don't quite have
the staff and infrastructure to do that.
But garlic mustard is a really wonderful addition
to pesto and other sort of flavored remedies,
especially if you harvest it early enough in the spring.
And there are a lot of crews that are involved in basically
pulling up and eradicating these invasive plants.
And I think that there's a huge opportunity for connecting
with area herbalists to use the plants
and not just put them in landfills.
Purple loosestrife is another
common invasive plant in Vermont
where there are programs trying to eradicate
and control the population.
And purple loosestrife is a traditional mucus membrane,
emollient or demulcent.
It's very soothing and moistening to mucus membranes
it's also slightly antimicrobial.
So mucus membranes such as the nose and the throat.
We at Spoonful Herbals for our CSA,
we make a throat spray every
year including purple loosestrife.
And for me it's not just providing
really good medicine using local remedies,
but it's an opportunity to broaden the public's thinking
about these invasive plants and not just seeing them
as a scourge to be eradicated,
but as a resource that might be used
to support their health and wellbeing.
Other common plants.
Here's dandelion again,
and I'm not gonna share as much about this plant
because we've talked about it often,
but a really wonderful plant to include
in many different forms.
Spoonful Herbals makes a backyard bitters formula
every year that varies depending on what's abundant,
but always includes dandelion, burdock and yellow dock,
which are all really common
and often misunderstood weeds in our environment.
Plantain, sorry that name got cut off there.
But plantain is another abundant plant remedy
and some of the products that we've made
with plantain include wound
and other sort of healing salves or skincare products.
We also made a dash your rash wash
and dash your rash powder,
which emphasized plantain as a soothing antihistamine.
And this was given out in the summer share to try
and support people with Poison ivy and bug bites.
And we also have often made
an anti-itch salve featuring plantain,
which has been really popular and I've had some people say
it's the only thing that works for them.
But again, the mission at Spoonful Herbals
is not really to make product.
The goal is to show people what's possible off the landscape
and share recipes and build that sense of wellness.
So sovereignty and the skills for them to support
their own households from their own backyard.
And also perhaps teaching commercial farmers to produce
these products as well and share it with their community.
Lamb's quarters is another common weed,
often in cultivated spaces,
it's not as common in a yard
'cause it doesn't compete well with the grass.
But lambs quarters is a really nutritious spinach like herb.
It's very high in calcium magnesium,
it often tends to come up sooner than the greens
in the garden beds and is really delicious raw.
You can see some on this wood-fired pizza
that we cooked at Rock Point
as part of our educational and community events,
but it also can be steamed or incorporated into pesto
and this would be a great plant for you
to get to know if you can find it in your local environment.
Yarrow is another medicinal plant
that I shared in the UVM Gardens,
but it also grows weedy in pastures
and often if it is mowed,
all you'll see is the short little frilly leaves.
Again, this is the finely divided Achillea millefolium,
but if you allow it to bloom,
it makes these spikes of white flowers sometimes
a little bit pink that can be used in many different ways.
Most popularly in skincare products
for healing wounds and stopping bleeding.
But it also makes a really wonderful flower essence
for helping to support energetic boundaries.
St John's wort is one of my favorite weedy plant medicines.
I think because it is more well known in sort
of the modern commercial environment for medicinal plants.
Many citizens know it as a plant
to support depression and reduced depression symptoms.
And it does work pharmacologically very much
like a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
It works as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor
or an SSRI,
which is a very popular class
of pharmaceutical antidepressants.
And so it can be really useful for people who are wanting
to wean off of antidepressants or lower the amount
of pharmaceuticals that they're taking
to basically use St. John's wort as a way
to lower the dose if their physician is on board with that.
But one of my favorite uses of St. John's wort
is to make an infused oil,
which is what you see on the right here.
So this is a solar infused oil and we'll be talking
about infused oils next week.
And the infused oil is an amazing remedy
for any kind of nerve pain, has really quick results.
And the main thing to know about St. John's wort
is that it is a potent liver activator.
So if anyone is taking daily medications
such as statins or birth control pills,
they should not use St. John's wort internally
because it can disrupt how that
medication is metabolized in the body.
But it is safe to use St. John's wort topically.
So I've used that for sciatic pain,
I've used that for fibromyalgia,
I've used it for nerve damage from a burn,
but also nerve damage that can occur
as a side effect of chemotherapy.
And this is one that is often in pastures and green spaces
and blooms this beautiful yellow flower
in mid-summer around the solstice.
Another popular plant is goldenrod
and one of my missions in life
is to dispel the myth that goldenrod causes fall allergies.
It's actually ragweed that blooms
at the same time that causes fall allergies.
And I can explain more about
that if you need more convincing,
but goldenrod is actually
a really amazing remedy for allergies.
It has antihistamine properties,
also potent antiinflammatory properties.
I love to use it in nasal irrigation or neti pot rinse
for helping to remove pollen
from the nose during allergy season
and have great results with that with my clients.
Goldenrod is also really amazing as a urinary tonic
and helping to prevent urinary tract infections.
But one of those plants that is widely available in Vermont,
this is an August and September plant
and very easy to make teas and other medicines with it.
I wanna share a couple of my favorite medicinal cover crops
because I see this as a huge opportunity not only
to support human health,
but also to improve farming practices and contribute
to more agroecological or sustainable farming practices.
So cover crops is a great way to support soil quality,
not just in terms of providing nutrients,
red clover is a legume,
so it's a nitrogen fixer in our soils,
but also to stabilize the soil,
reduce erosion and help with moisture control
and particularly in the wetter colder seasons.
And one of my previous roles was working
with Ernesto Mendez to start
the Vermont Agricultural Resilience
in a Changing Climate Project,
which was looking at ways to support farmers
to adapt to climate change
and the increased extreme weather events
that were coming our way.
And of course, you know, as most researchers,
at least most of my experience with research,
once we started talking with the farmers,
we found that they actually knew
a lot more than the researchers about what to do.
So it became more about validating and amplifying
the voices of farmers to policy makers
so that we could have more incentive programs
at the policy level to support smart
and sustainable farming practices.
But cover crops can be a great way to heal the landscape
and enhance the effectiveness of farming practices.
And then an additional ecosystem service
that it might provide is medicine.
So red clover is a highly nutritious herb,
it's an excellent source of calcium magnesium,
so I often use it for female bodied folks,
post-menopausally to support bone density
and prevent osteoporosis.
It also has a role to play,
particularly in younger adolescents as a way to help
regulate hormones and prevent toxicity
from estrogens in the environment.
So there's a fair amount of hormone pollution
that comes in the form of plasticizers
in certain pesticides and in our food
and particularly the commercial meat,
I guess this is more feedlot meat environment.
And those synthetic estrogens
in the environment can be really harmful to our health.
And legumes such as clover, black beans, chickpeas,
any of the bean family plants can help to buffer
and protect the body from the impact of synthetic estrogens,
which is particularly important
for young people in the puberty years.
One of my favorite cover crops is milky oats and oat seed.
This is the same as breakfast cereal oats,
but it's harvested when it's
the slightly immature seed at the milky phase.
And I grow a lot of milky oats as a cover crop in my garden
because it's such an excellent green manure for the fields.
But also these seeds when they're at the milky sage can be,
they can be dried and put into tea and I would make
a super infusion of this to get the minerals out of it.
But the most effective way to prepare milky oats
is to make a fresh tincture,
which is what's shown here on the right.
You can see it almost looks like guacamole.
The the creaminess of the milky oats
and the green makes it look like avocado.
And milky oat tincture is an extremely nutritious herb,
particularly for the nerves.
And there's a component called called calmodulin,
which is actually a precursor
for the regeneration of neurons.
And this is a really helpful remedy
after traumatic brain injury or concussion
to help to speed healing.
And I've seen really dramatic results
and I teach at the Brain Injury
of Vermont Association Conference every year
about many different remedies,
but particularly milky oats.
And this can also be useful for certain types of anxiety,
especially if there's a feeling
of just sort of like frayed nerves,
just like very anxious,
and it can be helpful for cognitive decline related
to aging or other situations.
So a really amazing nerve tonic as both a tea
and a super infusion or a fresh tincture.
And it's also very easy to grow as a cover crop
and can be rotated in sort of
the fallow fields every season
as part of a sustainable
or agroecological farming process.
There are also a number of cash crops
that have been targeted,
particularly by the Center for Sustainable Agriculture
and Heather Darby's group,
the Vermont Crops and Soils Program,
really trying to support farmers
to grow certain crops that tend to be medicinal,
but also because there's a huge market for them in Vermont.
So hops, some of you may may not be aware,
but I think it was about a decade ago
there was a huge hops shortage
and trying to keep up with all the wonderful micro brewers,
particularly here in Vermont,
that weren't able to get the hops they needed,
which prompted innovative farmers
and farm support organizations to support hop production.
And hops are not just good for beer,
they're also a really important medicinal plant
used as a sedative and for certain types of pain.
So this is something that can be grown on the farm
as a commercial crop and there's
lots of support through UVM in other places to do that.
Shiitake mushroom is also
one of our really important mushroom tonics.
Helpful for prevention of allergies
and treatment of autoimmune conditions,
but also prevention and treatment of cancer.
And there's a resource through the UVM Center
for Sustainable Agriculture
about shiitake cultivation on logs,
which is a great way to diversify the commercial offerings
on the farm as well as just growing small amounts
at a homestead or family scale
to support the family's health and wellbeing.
Elderberries is another crop that has been promoted
by the Vermont Center for Sustainable Agriculture.
This Growing Elderberry guide was something
that I was involved in producing
and this is not just a chance to offer
a really important medicine to our community.
It is a really helpful antiviral cold and flu remedy,
but also because it has the dark berry pigment in the skin.
Also really helpful for prevention
of cardiovascular disease and cancer.
So huge benefits in terms of the human health side
of the sustainable food and medicine system.
But elderberries also provide
a really important ecosystem service on the farm.
It's tends to grow on stream banks
and wetter areas and can be a really helpful,
productive riparian buffer crop and riparian buffers
or stream bank plantings to stabilize
the stream banks in the soil is a really important practice,
particularly in a farm environment where flooding
and extreme rainfall events can be really common.
So this was a grant that we received from the Working Lands.
The Working Lands Initiative in the state of Vermont,
which was not just about producing medicine
and producing cash crops for farmers,
but also about adapting to climate change
and heavy rainfall events.
And then echinacea tends to grow
in landscape areas as a flower garden.
It's a wonderful pollinator plant as you can see.
It's really beautiful
and then it has lots of medicinal value and in fact,
one of my favorite remedies is to make
an elderberry syrup with echinacea tincture in it.
The echinacea tincture helps to preserve it,
but also provides additional immune boosting remedies.
And Urban Moonshine,
which is the company that started in Vermont
that Guido Mase is the chief herbalist and formulator for,
they make a product called Immune Zoom,
which includes elderberry and echinacea in it.
And here's the Working Lands report,
which is available on the Center for Sustainable Ag website,
if you wanna check it out.
And elderflower is also a medicinal plant used
as a flu remedy and in tea form.
So there are a few crops
that farmers might choose to cultivate.
So these are a couple of annuals, tulsi or holy basil,
which you all are hopefully starting
to see sprout in the next week or so in your homes,
is a very easy crop,
it's an amazing pollinator crop,
but very easy to grow and there's a huge market for tulsi.
It's a really popular plant through
sold through our apothecary.
And it's a traditional plant,
it's called holy basil because it's a traditional sacred
plant of India and particularly the Hindi religious groups.
So this is one that's very easy to grow
and could be a way for farmers
to turn one of their cultivated fields
into a cash crop of medicinal plants.
Calendula is also another one that that's very easy
to grow and just sort of keeps giving.
So calendula, it's the flower that's used as medicine,
whereas tulsi on the previous slide,
it's the flowering aerial parts that we use as medicine.
So for flower medicine,
basically it's a practice of going out every other day
and removing the flower heads when they're,
you know, open and fresh look like a ray of basically
a fully open sun and harvesting
the calendula blossoms every other day.
And basically this process of removing
the flower heads in the calendula encourages
the plant to keep producing more flower
rather than going to seed.
If you allow a calendula plant to go to seed,
it will stop producing flowers.
And I've had calendula plants giving
from June all the way into November.
This amazing skin supportive remedy
and also great to include in small amounts in tea
because of its color and also its gut
and digestive system healing properties.
And then lastly,
many Vermont farms include forested landscape.
So don't wanna discount the medicine
that's available in our forests.
And the other benefits of forest medicine
is that they tend to be available year round.
So many of the evergreens, cedar, hemlock, white pine,
are amazing antimicrobial plants
which can be used as a respiratory remedy and steams,
they also are wonderful if they're dried
and burned to sort of smudge or clear a space.
And then the resin, this is pine resin,
is also a traditional remedy for wounds and can be really
helpful as a wilderness first aid if you get a cut
to put pine pitch or pine resin into the wound
to seal it and prevent bleeding.
But also it's full of antimicrobial essential oils
that help to protect the skin from infection.
Another really popular forest medicine is from poplar buds.
So this is the Populus balsamifera, the balsam poplar.
And you can see the spring buds have this sort of,
it's a very sort of sticky resin that can be infused
in olive oil or other carrier oil
and included in salves and body rubs.
And it has that classic sort
of wintergreen methyl salicylate constituent,
which is really helpful not just as an antimicrobial
but also an anti-spasmatic or helping
to reduce muscle pain and tension.
And then black cherry is a classic remedy for
as a antitussive or helps to stop coughing,
so often included in winter cough syrups.
And the important thing
about black cherry is it's more of a,
I would call a green allopathic remedy.
So it helps to stop the coughing,
which can help improve sleep and help someone rest,
but it doesn't actually treat the cough
or get at the underlying infection.
So you'd always wanna combine black cherry syrup
with some sort of antimicrobial.
It could be garlic or horse radish and fire cider
or a lung steam or both echinacea would be good
in that situation as well.
And then, not to mention this
is not necessarily a plant medicine,
but the medicinal mushrooms,
chaga, turkey tail on the right,
and reishi on the left are available in our Vermont woods.
And I always encourage people,
because chaga tends to be over harvested
and you're not harvesting the fruiting body,
you're actually harvesting the whole,
the whole mushroom chaga when you're harvesting chaga.
So it doesn't regenerate very quickly.
I encourage people to leave that in the woods for folks
who really need it, which are often folks with cancer,
whereas turkey tail and reishi can be useful
for cancer prevention and treatment,
but also as a tonic, an immune tonic,
and prevention for allergies and autoimmune conditions.
So another piece that I mentioned
in the community herbalism lecture,
but I wanna emphasize is that sometimes additional support
is needed not only to help farmers learn
how to cultivate crops at the commercial scale,
but also because Vermont's landscape
is not conducive to large industrialized farms,
it often tends to be much more smaller,
decentralized diversified farms that can be an issue
for getting into larger markets such as selling
to large companies like Urban Moonshine
or Traditional Medicinal's Tea.
So Jeff and Melanie Carpenter are owners of a really
successful organic herb farm up in Hyde Park, Vermont.
And a few years ago they received national
and state funding to create a Vermont herb growers co-op.
And I was on the steering committee
to develop that initiative and they also published
a really helpful book.
So if you or someone you know is interested
in cultivating medic medicinal plants,
I highly recommend Jeff and Mel's book.
But the Vermont Herb Growers co-op
was a solution to allow Vermont producers
of medicinal plants to compete on the national market.
So that basically as a way that
they could ensure quality and aggregate the supply.
So producing large amounts of calendula
from multiple farms but selling it as
one order to companies such as Urban Moonshine
or traditional medicinals.
So Jeff and Mel are definitely leaders
in this initiative and that's been
a great support for Vermont farmers
who are interested in getting
into the herb growing commercial business.
So here's a slide for farmers
and part of what we offer to farmers was not just,
these are the herbs that are,
that might be available on your farm,
but what are some basic techniques
for processing your herbs?
And I'm sure some of you would be interested
in just a review of some of those medicinal crops.
So I'll share some examples there.
So first of all,
drying the herbs is great
for not only producing herbal teas but also can be useful,
we have made some super green smoothie powder
which includes things like lambs quarters
and nettles and really just trying to get
Vermonters to use local super greens in their smoothies.
And this can also be a great way
to have those local greens throughout the winter.
And spice blends can be another way
that you can use dried herbs.
Also making value added food products,
such as wild weeds pesto or elderberry syrup is a great way
to incorporate nutrient dense backyard plants
and berries as condiments.
We also made an infused vinegar, vinegar verde,
which was a way to incorporate some of these nutrient dense
herbs into an infused apple cider vinegar,
which could be used in salad dressing recipes.
Vinegar infusion.
Here's another slide specifically
about the vinegar infusion.
So they can be used in salad dressings and marinades.
You can also use fruit and vinegar
to make something like a shrub,
which is a really popular beverage flavoring.
And on the picture on the left is making fire cider,
which we make every year is a really popular remedy,
really wonderful for respiratory complaints
and not just preventing colds
and symptoms related to that
but also helping to reduce mucus congestion.
So a great easy to make remedy
that's also strangely delicious.
Alcohol infusions is something
that is great for preserving medicinal plants.
There can be some legal issues if you are interested
in the commercial sale of alcohol-based tinctures
and products, but certainly for the household scale,
making digestive bitters
from alcohol extracts of bitter roots
or we also make a sleep remedy called Snooze Full Spoonful,
which features things such as skull cap,
which is a mint that's very easy to grow.
And the valerian root, which is also readily abundant,
not only in gardens but also growing wild in in ditches.
And we also try to encourage farmers to find their local
herbalist to share weeds with
'cause they could be the medicine maker
and they could be transforming their weeds into medicine.
Here's the solar infused oil
which can be incorporated into salves,
which is what you're gonna be experiencing
next week in the lab number three.
And then just a reminder for farmers,
but also for all of you as a resource
that there's lots of research and support
for medicinal agriculture and that many
of the food systems support is also offering programs
for farmers to get involved in the production of medicinals.
So when we're thinking about
a sustainable food and medicine system,
I think it's really important to look
at all aspects of the food system.
And so part of the work that I do at the program
in integrative health and also you know,
teaching at the University of Vermont and the integrative
health certificate program is in the role of creating
more informed consumers and also informed practitioners.
So part of incorporating botanical medicine
into the integrative health program
is raising awareness
about the evidence-based effectiveness,
particularly for preventable diseases such as heart disease
and cancer and the important role that that can play.
And some of you who have taken food systems classes
may have read some of Eric Holt-Gimenez,
who's one of Ernesto Mendez',
another agriologist colleague.
But I wanna talk a little bit about food sovereignty
and its relationship to medicine or wellness sovereignty.
So a lot of the discourse around food sovereignty
compares it to different aspects
of the food system and initiatives in the food system.
And the neoliberal column
on the left is basically the status quo.
This is the economic driven capitalist food system
which focuses on a discourse of food enterprise,
making money from food and is the sort of
the dominant threat in the food system in this time,
which really emphasizes a corporate monopoly
and focuses on technology and marketing globally,
not so much looking at at local markets.
And there are a fair number of initiatives
that are looking at issues
such as that 40% of the food ends up being wasted
'cause we have a food distribution issue.
And reformer strategies are more related
to food security and anti-hunger.
So making sure that people are getting food even
if it may not be food that is culturally
appropriate or food that they want.
And the main critique of these reformist strategies
is they're not really addressing issues with the system.
There are some serious issues with the food enterprise
system that creates these disparities in access.
And a reformist strategy is basically just keeping
the same system and looking at places
where food might be pooling in certain areas
of the food system and redistributing it,
which isn't actually getting at the underlying structure
and sort of changing how the food system is structured
and how power is structured within a system.
The more progressive and radical
are moving into food security,
food justice and food justice and food sovereignty.
And the main difference between these areas is really
looking at underlying structural issues
and starting to get at the root cause,
looking at decentralized food systems,
emphasizing community empowerment,
emphasizing human rights and labor rights
within the food system and really
looking at disentangling our food system
from the corporate monopoly in ways that might be harmful
to human health and wellbeing
and environment health and wellbeing.
And the main difference between food security
and food justice and food sovereignty
is that food sovereignty is much more
about appropriate choice of food.
And in the case of wellness sovereignty,
medicine and wellness strategies and making sure
that the cultural values are incorporated
in what food is available, certain food security,
especially global food security programs,
might be providing the calories to a population
that is food insecure,
but may not be providing culturally
appropriate food and remedies.
And food justice and food sovereignty really acknowledges
the emotional and sort of soul components
of food in the community and making sure
that the food choices are culturally appropriate.
And food sovereignty is really looking at power
and particularly looking at many
of the food security and even
the food justice movements are still emphasizing leaders
that come from a white middle class,
highly educated background and really may not be able
to represent accurately the views
of the populations that are impacted,
which are often people of color, lower class,
not traditionally educated individuals.
So one of my favorite examples of food sovereignty
and food justice initiative
is Soul Fire Farm and Leah Penniman's work,
and you'll have a chance to read from her recent book
"Farming While Black", about some of their initiatives.
But if you're interested in learning more about their work,
we're also gonna see them in the film
that we watched in the last week of class.
But great examples of ways that food sovereignty movements
can be a way to uplift and redistribute power
to people of color for supporting their communities.
So wellness sovereignty is really an expansion of that
and really looking at not just making sure
that people are well and accessing healthcare,
which is already a huge issue in our culture.
And there are many reformist strategies
which are trying to make sure
that people have access to the medicine that they need.
But there there's a huge cultural and interpersonal
and spiritual lineage related to
how we care for our bodies
and what types of remedies feel good for us.
And many of my clinical clients don't feel supported
by their physicians recommending pharmaceutical medicine
and actually feel resistant
to using pharmaceutical medicine
and are looking for strategies
that are more nutritional or locally available
because they get their food locally
so they'd like to get their medicine locally.
So there's huge opportunities where community herbalism
can help contribute to food sovereignty
and wellness sovereignty because it is such
a grassroots and accessible,
it can be a grassroots and accessible form of medicine.
And that's something that I'm working toward
with my colleagues here in Burlington.
So the vision of healthcare that I wanna put forward,
and this is just mine and adapted
from the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism,
which is where I received my training,
is really a vision for a system of healthcare
where primary care is nature-based
and practiced in the home.
So people have the resources to access nature-based remedies
and the tools and confidence to prepare home remedies
for themselves and their families.
The tools of technological,
in this case, conventional medicine
is a secondary resource and the herbalist,
or it could be other, you know, naturopath,
someone else who knows about plant-based remedies,
acts as a bridge between the two.
This model ensures the individual central role,
utilizes the simplest and least invasive treatments,
emphasizes the co-evolutionary and interdependent
relationship between humans and our environment.
So this is a vision to put put forward,
which I think also promotes a sustainable medicine system
because it connects people back to the environment
and sustainable production of medicines.
If you've ever taken classes with Christine Vitovic
and the environment and human health,
she gets into a lot more of the carbon footprint
and the environmental impact of modern medicine.
And I think there's a huge opportunity
to converting our medicine system
to one where citizens feel confident
supporting their general health and wellbeing,
which is their primary care
from their surrounding environment.
So with that, I'll close with these pictures
of some of the elements of the food
and medicine system and particularly elements
that contribute to different aspects
of the supply chain.
And I would love to hear from all of you if there are
examples in your own community of components
of a sustainable food and medicine system
that you can share as an example.
Thanks for listening, and be well.