Newsletter - September 12, 2023

Dear brothers and sisters,

Why not exemplify a  aliveness by juicing a watermelon? Why not?! That's right-  not just the bright red flesh but the rind as well. A watermelon in its entirety! It makes a vital and alive juice-an utter delight.

On sale this week is our Macadamia Butter. We offer $3 off. It is made from organic Hawaiian macadamias and is richly fulfilling.

Then Ben Vanheems, our favorite gardener, guides us in tasks to do in September  in our Victory Garden. First, he  by shows how simple it is to propagate new plants from your existing strawberry bed. Then he encourages us to save our own seeds – this is particularly easy with beans, tomatoes peppers and lettuce. Then he clears growing beds of old crops and adds compost to get ready for a planting of Swiss chard that will yield greens throughout the winter and into early spring. He exhorts us to sew a cover crop or a green manure- this could be mustard greens, rye or field beans. Mung beans are outstanding in this regard.
Ben’s combination of expertise and enthusiasm is an inspiration for us all.

Our  Victory Garden Sale, this month, includes Zinc Cantata, Selenium Sonata. A combination of alive, organic nuts and seeds, high in zinc and selenium. Then there is Hazelnut Chocolate Almond Butter-starting with almonds grown by California family farmers, we’ve added Oregon grown hazelnuts and our organic dark chocolate. Our  Sliced Almonds lend themselves to so many uses. Imagine combining them with coconut chips, ground walnuts and chopped dates as a crust for an alive pie.

We offer these at 10% off.

Next we present Five Epic Earth Healing Projects. On a grand scale they deal with biodiversity loss, water shortages, land degradation and deforestation.Here are a series a projects in India, Zimbabwe and China that have utilized the principles of permaculture to transform vast areas to stabilize the climate, restore the water tables, restore the forest and bring about an abundance of food.This calls to mind the surmise of a mighty thinker that mankind never sets itself a problem it cannot solve.

Next, we are honored to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Alfred Russel Wallace. He was a profound student of the natural realm. Darwin credited him as the co-discoverer of evolution.But whereas Darwin’s concept of natural selection and “survival of the fittest” was in some ways a projection of commerce in the Victorian epoch, Wallace gave evolution a limited role in a larger scheme wherein life was the result of the intention and design of a universal intelligence.

Finally, Will Harlow, an Over-fifties, Specialist Physiotherapist demonstrates 7 exercises, adapted for seniors, for building stronger knees.

May we wish you and family an alive, organic  summer of good health, prosperity and success,

Jesse Schwartz PhD
President
Living Tree Community Foods

We hope you are enjoying your Labor Day weekend. While you are carefully putting away all your white clothing until next summer, take a moment to consider the impact of labor on the development of evolutionary theory.

That’s right, the two founders of evolutionary theory, Wallace and Darwin, came from very different backgrounds. Alfred Russel Wallace, whose thought receives an accessible treatment in the book Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism, would later become a premature proponent of what we now call intelligent design. Unlike Darwin, Wallace grew up among the middle class and had to work for a living. This dictated the contours of his life and research. Charles Darwin came from family money.

Assessing Wallace’s Impact

Watch the video below for a brief take on the impact of this difference from our friend and colleague, the historian Michael Flannery. Wallace did his collecting, leading to his own formulation of evolutionary thinking, because his livelihood urgently depended on it. Darwin felt no such pressure. So what? As we’ve explained before:

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