namahatta.org - Congregational Development Ministry

Fresh locally grown foods cooked from scratch, sound familiar? While the “locally grown” part of Srila Prabhupada’s vision remains to be fully implemented, it is there.

Is Slow Food finally picking up speed in the US?

By SCOTT LINDLAW
Associated Press Writer

“America is in a hole and it’s getting deeper every day. We import 70% of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year - four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.

“I’ve been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.

The current temple in New Vrindaban is a wonderful place, but it is a post Prabhupada era project. Bahulaban is where Srila Prabhupada actually visited three times and is very historical.  Unfortunately, as New Vrindaban contracted after the troubles, it was abandoned.  Adi Guru has been organizing a project to restore it.

We have seen that material nature is everywhere, even in the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

“Home, country, family, society, wealth and all sorts of corollaries are all causes of bondage in the material world, where the threefold miseries of life are concomitant factors.”

SB 1.10.11-12

Home Canning Rises

By Holly Ramer

Associated Press Writer / August 15, 2008

One mantra of the environmental movement is “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”  Surely voluntary nonconsumption is the highest principle, but reuse works great.  As we were householders in New Vrindaban while it was still an avocation and before it became a vocation, reusing wasn’t an option, it was a requirement.

We learned that flea markets, yard sales, and auctions were great ways to get reusable things cheap. We were poor but we were good at it.

“Of course, in India, it was not considered to have a big tin car or plastic plates. Material opulence means jewels, gold, silk, butter, that is material opulence. Not plastic pots or plastic bucket, plastic cloth. It has no value.”

Bhagavad-gita 2.16 — London, August 22, 1973

Gardening can be part of anyone’s life.  Even in an apartment a potted herb plant on a window sill or a potted tomato on a terrace. There are even units you can buy that have lights and shelves and need no window for growing herbs or wheat grass or other small plants so something fresh and local can be in your life.

‘The peacocks became festive and cried out a joyful greeting when they saw the clouds arrive, just as people distressed in household life feel pleasure when the pure devotees of the infallible Supreme Lord visit them.’

Srimad Bhagavatam 10.20.20

Houses are much bigger than they used to be. People used to live outdoors and sleep indoors. Now many people, if not most, in consumer societies, live indoors. Outdoors is the space between the house and the car, and the car and the office, mall, or school.

Yesterday I followed an apple. The round kind that grows on trees, not the consumer goods kind.

The passenger side electric window on the Astro van had been operating slower and slower, then finally stopped working at all. I went to the junkyard and got a used lift motor. When I installed it the window would roll up but not down.  I assumed it was faulty so when I went into town to get my biweekly blood test, I swung by the auto parts store and bought a new one.

It used to be you could just go out and plant a garden in New Vrindaban and only be concerned with fertility, weather, diseases, weeds, and insects.  Over the last couple of decades the parameters have shifted and now it is mostly about getting to those problems past the destructive and voracious habits of ground hogs, raccoons, possums and deer.

A senior devotee in New Vrindaban calls his son in New York and says, “I hate to ruin your day, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing.  Thirty-five years of misery is enough.”

“Pita, what are you talking about?” the son screams.

NPR

by Allison Aubrey

Morning Edition, May 29, 2008 · A farming experiment at the University of California, Davis, has found that organically grown tomatoes are richer in certain kinds of flavonoids than conventionally grown tomatoes. And one researcher is curious to determine why this may be.

BBC NEWS

By David Loyn
BBC News, Punjab

The governments of many poor nations are alarmed at the rise in food prices. There are even problems in the Indian region of Punjab, where science once seemed to have found answers for a hungry world.

The first thing Satpal Singh sees when he walks out of his bedroom door in the morning is a gleaming tractor, without a speck of mud on it.

It is given pride of place and washed down before being put away for the night in its garage built into the middle of his house.

Vidya will be gone the next three weekends selling crafted gourds at Shakerwoods, a craft and music festival about midway between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, five miles off I-76 just south of Youngstown, OH, near Columbiana, OH.

The following are excerpts from a much longer in depth article found here. If you find the following interesting, you can read the more complex article there, if you can.