TV you enjoy

[Robson Valley]

I'm faintly surprised that there isn't a TV series to showcase paleo skills.
Not the excitement of seeing cretinous, stumbling idiots leaping about in the rain.
My parents taught me some of those paleo skills as a kid.
It only comes to light in books now.
I always enjoyed the fishing parts with spears and weirs.

Neolithic paleo civilization has not disappeared here.
Much of it fell away only 300 years ago with the sudden introduction of plentiful iron.
There never was a Chalcolithic (copper) age or a Bronze age at all.
I've forged copper knives. I had a copper adze blade made. Useless even when work hardened.

Show me how your ancestors discovered and refined bronze.
Show me how they got their forging fires hot enough.
On my bucket list.

direwulf: the bison, elk and venison meats are as close as the flint knives in my kitchen.
The live meats are within 5 miles of my house. I don't like bear or llama.
Potatoes and onions and corn/maize are native foods, too.
Yesterday, Sept.07, the campfire ban in my region was lifted.
We can cook everything beside an open fire again. Alder wood smoke is good.
What's TV for?

 

[Mr Wolf]

Potatoes

Peru and bolivia

 

[Mr Wolf]

corn

Mexico

 

[Mr Wolf]

So native to me is more localised...not 8500km away

 

[Robson Valley]

You have an enormous selection of the world's finest apples as a terminus of the Silk Road.
And the normal selection process that followed like any agriculture.
I'd like to visit one of your heritage orchards, so very different from ours.

What about your Rowan, sloes, plums. Grains like oats. Any other seed grasses?
Some sort of big rushes and seed flour? Beta vulgaris from the North Sea Coast.

Apple has the neatest DNA track (trail of apple cores!) to the UK and to China from the Kazakhstan origin.
Malus pacifica is a shrivelled little native crab apple, rare even in its west coast range.
DNA shows that the potatoes grown in Alaska and Haida Gwaii are direct clones of potatoes native to Chile.
I like those botanical tags of human trave

 

[crosslandkelly]

 

[Janne]

I have seen snippets of paleo stuff on TV over the decades, but nithing truly decent.
Not sure if the wider TV watching public is interested in stuff, I think they prefer smutty stuff or those neverending tv novelas.

Also, even the so called survival experts’ quite mundane nature skills are seen like something fantastic.

To show paleo, copper or bronge age stuff would be way outside the interest range.

Todays tv shows have to show a lot of cleavage, six packs and stuff like that.

We are a tiny minority interested in old skills.
Thank Gods for Youtube!

 

[Broch]

We are a tiny minority interested in old skills.

And thank our lucky stars we are or the countryside and wilderness that I/we enjoy would be overrun

 

[Robson Valley]

Well, when you feel that you are running out, it's too late.
Is it true that there's no place in the UK that is more than 5 miles from a road?

I can show you a whole bunch of really nice places to camp in seclusion
and mess about on the edge of a stoney mountain river.
Prefer a forested island? Easily arranged.

 

[santaman2000]

Hold my beer and watch this

.....
Potatoes and onions and corn/maize are native foods, too.......

Corn (maize) was domesticated over 9000 years ago and had spread over the entire North American continent by about 2100 years ago. I think it's safe to say it's "native." https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=Awr...n-171832/RK=2/RS=nfWGr4iTDPefpaBmvKSZF_mJwFo-

Potatoes are only slightly younger (or older. depending on who you listen too) having been first cultivated between 8ooo and 13,000 years ago. They were slower to spread to North America though (being introduced in Europe first) and didn't spread over the NA continent until just over a half millennium ago. Still, more than long enough to be considered "native." For that matter, we regard anything in the Western Hemisphere as more or less "local" anyway. http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrJ...ato.html/RK=2/RS=XO4QLIgQw.9cLsUDMninciz9CLY-

 

[Hodge]

Me and my missus have just discovered Alone, which everyone probably already knows about, but we were late to the party

GBBO and Masterchef are also awesome. These are pretty much the only things we watch today really. I can recommend a lot of good books though.

New series of Alone started last night on History Channel made up of competitors that featured in previous series. The venue is Mongolia. Also new season of Mountain Men starts next week, my personal favourite is in the show is Tom Oar.

 

[vestlenning]

Drama series made without the Hollywood formula = believable story, believable characters.

 

[Janne]

We tend to see North America and South America, with Central America inbetween, as one continent.
It is not.
But how many years should pass before we see a food or plant as ’native’?
Plus, as soon as a plant is transplanted into a new area, changes have been and are made to change the characteristics.


(Santaman, that article about potatoes from the history magazine containes quite a few errors.
Old mother is a food historian, I checked with her.

She said the largest error is about the supposed toxicity.
According to her it is well documented that people got ill from eating parts of the potatoes:
It was /is a dietary custom in Eurooean cuisine to also use the leaves as food. Brassicas are the most common. As Potato leaves are nice and juicy people ate them and got ill. Also they are the toxic berries.
Plus they did not know that you need to heap up soil around the growing plant, as a result some tubers were exposed and became higher in the toxin.
Solanin. People did not want to eat the potato plant because it made them sick.
In most traditionell Euroasian plants you can eat most of the plant.)

 

[Bishop]

Is it true that there's no place in the UK that is more than 5 miles from a road?

Alas true and suspect the average is more like 3.5 miles if you include farmhouses. On the flipside some of those roads are less well traveled and many of the busiest serve to isolate small islands of land from casual wanderers. Splendid isolation can still be found surprisingly close to civilsation is some places as demonstrated by Christopher Knight aka The North Pond Hermit.

 

[santaman2000]

We tend to see North America and South America, with Central America inbetween, as one continent.
It is not.
But how many years should pass before we see a food or plant as ’native’?
Plus, as soon as a plant is transplanted into a new area, changes have been and are made to change the characteristics.


(Santaman, that article about potatoes from the history magazine containes quite a few errors.
Old mother is a food historian, I checked with her.

She said the largest error is about the supposed toxicity.
According to her it is well documented that people got ill from eating parts of the potatoes:
It was /is a dietary custom in Eurooean cuisine to also use the leaves as food. Brassicas are the most common. As Potato leaves are nice and juicy people ate them and got ill. Also they are the toxic berries.
Plus they did not know that you need to heap up soil around the growing plant, as a result some tubers were exposed and became higher in the toxin.
Solanin. People did not want to eat the potato plant because it made them sick.
In most traditionell Euroasian plants you can eat most of the plant.)

We don't "heap up soil around the growing plants." Never have. We just cut the potatoes and plant them in the furrows. Wait for them to grow then turn the plants over with a turning plow so we can gather them. I'm not a food historian; just a country boy (farmer, rancher, logger, hunter, fisherman) with four years education in vocational agriculture (high school level) Potatoes are part of the nightshade family and we agree, eating parts of the plant can sicken people with sensitivities. We also agree the article, like almost all articles, has some errors; but by and large the history (timeline) is correct.

 

[santaman2000]

Alas true and suspect the average is more like 3.5 miles if you include farmhouses. On the flipside some of those roads are less well traveled and many of the busiest serve to isolate small islands of land from casual wanderers. Splendid isolation can still be found surprisingly close to civilsation is some places as demonstrated by Christopher Knight aka The North Pond Hermit.

While I don't remember seeing any true wilderness while I was there, I do remember loads of splendidly rural places.

 

[Janne]

Heaping soil around potato plants increases the yeald in Northern Europe.
And prevents the top tubers getting a greenish tint.
Many people think those tubers are poisonous. The Solanine level is slightly increased yes, but still very safe to eat.

Potatoes are the singly most important source of carbohydrates and Vit C in several European countries.
Delicious too!

Sweet potato is still a novelty for people my generation.

 

[Robson Valley]

Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) and yams (Dioscorea sp.) are not the same.
However, it's common for yams to be called sweet potatoes ( orange flesh).

Other than the amylose and amylopectin in potato starch,
it's advisable to eat the peel for a diversity of nutritional values.

Precolumbian maize cultivation was flint corn, flour corn, dent corn, sweet corn and pop corn with many variations.
They thrive under different climatic conditions. The other two parts of the "Trinity" are squash and beans.

Nearest wild relative to maize is teosinte which breeds in a very unpredictable fashion.

 

[Janne]

In most Europe now you can buy the spool formed tubers with sweet orange flesh. Called Sweet Potatoes.
Here we can buy lots of different ones. The spool formed orange ones are calked American Sweet Potatoes.
Other versions are longer tubers. Yellow, whitish, whitish grey. Different diameter, from maybe 3 inches to 5 inches.
Calked sweet potatoes by some, other names by the caribbean or central American people..

We never buy them, so I have not memorised those names.

I love sweet things just as anybody, but not in my starch. We love normal potatoes, of all versions. Here we find the Canadian potatoes tastiest. Maybe because it is colder there?


We like watching some tv chefs shows. Bourdain was/is fun. Despite him coming to Cayman at least several days a year, he never did an episode about us?

 

[Robson Valley]

I would watch a serious gardening TV series of shows which demonstrated growing FOOD.
Not some jack-bottom flouncing around to pot up exotica.
I can order (!) six different kinds and colors of carrots in the village.
There's more than 300 different varieties of tomatoes here.

The yams are the good stuff that many people call "sweet potatoes."
It's a genus of many species, like the situation with onions, leeks, shallots and so on.
I like the brown-skinned ones with deep orange flesh.
I like to halve them to cook in a microwave oven. Then score, melt butter, cinnamon & brown sugar.

There are more than 400 different varieties of potatoes for climatic conditions all around the world.
Might be 50+ grown in Canada alone. I can usually buy 4 or more of them, then local people grow others here.

I can see it all now: "It's The Cannabis Hour!" Watch Smokey The Bore roll a Fat Boy with the latest hemp cig paper on the market!
All the adverts with be for easy-open bags of junk foods when you get the munchies. October 17, stoners.