Here are some thoughts on the Year of the Horse. The horse is one of the Chinese’ favorite animals. A horse provides good and quick transportation, symbolically a sign of speedy success. Horses are social, alert, intuitive and incredibly sensitive. They like to be in the open where they can see and flee danger. Horses help humans win battles and riding a horse will take you places you could not get to otherwise. Horses love to be in motion, but if restricted, can appear lazy. The horse is above all, naturally beautiful, graceful and noble. Extrapolate what you will for a happy 2014!
Taking back our food supply year round. Each year more of our local NM farmers are investing in greenhouse equipment. That means even during our Santa Fe winters we can offer you locally grown greens! Joe’s too made a recent investment in growing food right here at the restaurant. More on that later. Now taking this all-season growing concept a step further, there is an exciting development from one of our cattle ranches. Charles Mallery and Rebecca Allina have invested in an all season barley grass-growing unit for their cattle. That means their cattle are nourished all year round with a green feed that is organic, fresh, harvested at peak nutrition (day 6) and has stood up to 50 years of documentation for its superior nutrient value – some say topping even wheat grass! We met Charles and Rebecca of El Morro Valley Ranch the other day for the first time. Can’t tell you how tickled pink we are that they have implemented this innovative, visionary, cutting edge approach to elevating the quality and independence of our local food supply. Roland and I have fed sprouted wheatgrass to our horses on a very small scale during winter when there is no live vegetation for them. I was ecstatic to see one of Joe’s beef suppliers applying the technique on a grand scale to feeding his cattle. Drought in the West has taken its toll on beef production. Water usage is a huge challenge. This method is water-wise, taking pressure off existing native grasses, wells and aquifers and reducing dependency on trucking in feed during winter (Huge carbon footprint that is!)
Charles and his barley grass
Our local radio gurus, Alan and Elizabeth Hutner interviewed Joel Salatin (we call him the rock star of sustainable farming) on TRM 98.1FM one recent Sunday. One thing Joel said stood out. “Much of the reason local food is more expensive has nothing to do with production costs, labor costs or inefficiency. It is the inherent prejudice from”… the 3 letter regulatory gubment agencies against scalable (as opposed to industrial) food production. “Food regulation is not science, it’s politics.” Wow, that’s a statement.
Memory Part 6 – Continuing this series on natural therapies for neurodegenerative conditions such as memory decline, dementia, unexplained depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS (see past newsletters, if you are interested.) If you’ve been doing your own research (and who doesn’t want a better brain!), you’ve undoubtedly come across Magic Bullet # 5 – phosphatidylserine (PS). And you may know the story of Bill and Nita Scoggin. Bill Scoggin after many long successful years in a Pentagon career, was losing his mind. He couldn’t dress himself, remember where his bath or bedroom was and was sliding into advanced Alzheimer’s. Nita, a woman of faith, prayed to find an answer. It came in the form of a fatty acid produced naturally by our bodies, but which diminishes with age – phosphatidylserine (PS). One can get ample PS from eggs and organ meats. Vegetarians are at particular risk. However you can run out right now and buy it as a supplement. Watch my dust!
Deficiencies of PS produce rigid membranes and faulty neuron communication – resulting in brain fogginess, memory holes and depression.
Back to Nita – encouraged by European studies on PS she started Bill on 300 mg per day. She saw only one event that encouraged her – he one day responded to her sentence about cereal and said “I’ll get the bowl.” She upped his dose slowly to 1000 mg per day. Long story short, the doctor was flabbergasted with Bill’s recovery. Soon she dropped Aricept and watched as he regained complete independence. www.nitascoggin.com.
More than 35 human studies demonstrate how crucial PS is to restoring memory, vocabulary, concentration and beyond that, to beat the blues. Remember, depression, may be a correctible failure of brain function rather than how you were mis-treated by your parents or teachers or bullied as a child. I’m way out on a limb here, but I have seen many “conditions” one would consider mental/emotional respond to a rebalance of nutrition and supplementation. Studies conducted at Stanford and Vanderbilt U’s by Dr. Thomas Crook (too many kudos to mention here) yielded the following results: “After 12 weeks PS had restored the ability to remember names by 14 years…and to recall written information by 12 years!”
Another beauty of PS is that it has absolutely no drug interaction.
Please do more research on your own for appropriate dosage. It is available at many natural health stores.
Conclusion: I’m finding there are many elegant natural remedies and preventatives for the deterioration of brain function. But as you add anything new and powerful to your supplement regimen, if you are under a MD’s care, you are wise to review it with him/her.
Sheila’s caveat – when I speak of Magic Bullets and natural remedies, I am emphatic that the rock solid foundation for any health regimen is full spectrum, high quality, food-based nutrition. One then adds specific supplements and nutraceuticals. But you cannot expect permanent results without a stellar food base. Also remember not every therapy works the same for everyone.
Why is locally grown food so very important to Joe’s? Why do we keep hammering on this “buy local” theme? There are many factors that are out of our hands when it comes to our food supply. Most of what ends up on the American dinner table derives from a shockingly few giant agribusinesses. Their influence reaches from designing the (GMO) seeds to planting, harvesting, processing and shipping. We as consumers cannot with confidence hand over the entire stewardship of our food to these few multinationals. Our passion here at Joe’s is for a local sustainable food supply – food produced by growers who are accountable for what they grow. KYG – Know Your Grower. We are able to look our local farmer in the eye and ask him about his growing practices or even visit his operation. This gives us the confidence that we are eating food that is healthy, wholesome, non-genetically engineered, often better than organic, humanely treated and minimally processed. It is grown with a smaller energy-use footprint and transported short distances. We cannot divorce human health, the economy, ecology, personal (perhaps spiritual) satisfaction or honorable work from food. Food is fundamental. What we eat, where it
comes from, the stewardship of food animals, the nurturing and building of soils – all these factors affect us at a cellular and visceral level … whether we slow down enough to be aware of it or not. We are fortunate in Santa Fe to have a dedicated farm base producing a wonderful array of goods. Here at Joe’s we do our best to offer this bounty to you, keeping dollars in the community. In the interest of transparency, in 2008 Joe’s spent $30,000 on local foods. In 2009 that increased to $60,000. And for 2012 we exceeded $100,000. During the growing season as much as 95% of our produce is locally sourced.
Land, economy, health – inseparable.
*Here are some of the farmers/ranchers we have developed long-standing partnerships with – Monte Vista Organics (Dave and Loretta), Camino de Paz Farm & School (Greg & Patty), Shepherd’s Lamb (Antonio and Molly), La Mont’s Buffalo (Monte and Lana), Green Tractor Farms (Tom and Mary), Synergia Ranch (Mark), La Montanita Co-Op, Sweetgrass Co-Op, Matt Romero Farms.
Need a quick gift? Joe’s own “melt in your mouth” French chocolate truffles. $1.99 @ or 6 for the price of 5 — $9.95
Tired of still paying for BB’s (big banks) bailouts? Tired of lining the pockets of the uber-rich Wall Street bankers? DiJa know… in 2011 a congressional audit of the Federal Reserve found that the Fed gave 26 trillion dollars from American taxpayers to bail out the “too big to fail” banks with a hefty portion of it going to obscene CEO bonuses. Can you imagine — had this staggering figure been re-directed to the people of the US, how different the picture could have looked today? Manufacturing starts, job creation, skills training, roads and bridges repair, national parks, education, etc. Every time we use a credit card, part of that 3%-5% fee contributes to the BB’s. Now let’s be real – in today’s world you cannot function without a cc, but there are still (legal) alternatives that can save money and reduce our dependency on and subsidies to the BB’s. We have a couple of suggestions: (1.) Are you on Joe’s Check List? If you are a “regular” and wish to pay by check, please ask your waiter to get you on the list. (2.) Joe’s own credit card/gift card – purchase a $100 gift card with cash or check, get a $10 card free!
Giggles: once there was a female brain cell that got trapped in a man’s head. She looked around the vast empty space and called out, “Anybody here?” From way down below she heard, ”We’re down here.”
Joe’s
2801 Rodeo Rd (at Zia Rd) Santa Fe, NM 87507
505-471-3800 www.JoesDining.com
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