And welcome to We Want Organic Food!

What a kindred spirit you are! I, too, checked out the link to your recipes finding your welcome references to using lard, and I am grateful to find out what to do with all those pkgs. marked,\'shanks\' in my freezer.

Just last week our Adirondack Weston A. Price food group rendered quantities of pork fat from a locally-raised pastured pig, so I\'ve been inspired to be in the kitchen trying to recreate the taste of my grandma\'s doughnuts deep-fried in lard.

I have cooked for my diabetic husband for 30 yrs. so loved your low-glycemic creamed cauliflower replacement for the glucose blast of risotto. I happened to make my first ever risotto several days ago, and it is takes time and attention, that\'s for sure. I was happy with it; the flavor of the several ounces of marrow called for in the recipe and scooped from the center of the grass-fed beef bones in my stockpot was discernible and satisfying. I also used lard in that recipe instead of butter. Would both the marrow and the lard be traditional in risotto, Anna?

Today, I rediscovered my tattered, stained and coverless Moosewood Cookbook. Mollie Katzen\'s excellent soup recipes were among my first creations in an organic kitchen. Her pantry ingredients must have sub-conciously imprinted my food shopping habits these past decades because I discovered everything in my own pantry that I needed for many of her recipes. These days, I mostly I use cookbooks for inspiration and for ingredient ratios.

In the WWOF recipe section, I\'ll soon post how I made the soup we had for dinner tonight. I hope folks will not be disappointed if they find it interesting enough to try. And let us know how it came out, too.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that the bulk of modern society could be other than fairly stationary, and I'm not sure that (at least here in the U.S.) there's enough open land to support nomadic pastoralists … would you think that there is?

At any rate, I took a quick look at your site, and I must say that the Weekend Osso Buco sounds divine. :)

Agreed. Though I tend to think farmland priorities should be for pastured herbivorous animals and polycultural farm practices rather than less nutritious monoculture corn crops for humans, such as corn, soy, wheat. Commodity grains like corn, soy, and wheat are mostly inedible for humans without a lot of processing (one can\'t even eat fresh grain corn off the cob, for instance), and they only provide excessive amounts of low quality food, food that is unnatural to humans in large quantities (humans have essentially pre-agriculture, paleo physiologies and corn is a agricultural, neolithic food [consumed in quantity for only 5,00-12,000 years], for which we are still not well adapted). But herbivorous animals on primarily pasture (not grains) are efficient converters of sunlight energy into high quality foods.

Furthermore, the grass prairies of the world are perfect ecosystems, with renewal of the plains from the rotational grazing and replenishment of the soil by ranging herbivores. Digging up the soil for crops destroys the fertile soil that took eons to develop, scattering it to the wind and silting up waterways, removing the nutrients and soil structure, never to be fully replaced. Tilled soils are damaged, with far lower beneficial microbes; some soils are even chemicaly treated to make them \"dead\", with the thinking that humans can control all the variables. Ha!

Agricultural crops allowed for a false sense of security which promoted excessive human population growth, and created feast or famine conditions to humans, since agriculture demands a stationary population rather than nomadic pastoralists who follow the herds. Of course, current realities prevent a complete reversal of agriculture, but the tired and flawed arguments about using grain for fuel or human feed needs to be put to rest. We must find ways to feed people with higher quality foods than grain, that also respect and preserve the world\'s ecosystems. Biodynamic, polycultural farms that recreate a natural system are a better answer than the unnatural mono-cultural \"dead-zone\" farms that attempt to subvert nature that are proliferating today. Mother nature always has the last word; too many humans just don\'t seem to get that.