We recently attended and made videos for Transparency Camp hosted by The Sunlight Foundation and iStrategy Labs in DC. They invited the policy wonks and tech geeks to hang out, hack, brainstorm and collaborate. It was a great step towards getting online government transparency to be a reality. See the individual interviews, all of which are available in the open source Ogg Theora video format, on TransparencyCamp.org.

Milk, illegal? Yep. Unpasteurized, non-homogenized, raw milk is illegal for human consumption in 22 states (including my own Virginia!) because of ‘health’ reasons. And probably because the milk lobby doesn’t want you to not buy milk from big industry.

I ran across this article, More Dairies Go Raw, in The Boston Globe about how some industrial dairy farmers are deciding to down scale and sell raw milk. I was very excited to hear that. We just found a local source for raw milk, and if I don’t have to, I’ll never go back to using pasteurized, homogenized. Raw milk with the cream on top is simply luxurious, good for you food.

Check out the campaign for Real Milk for more info.

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We recently had the pleasure of making a screencast for OpenCongress.org, an open source, collaborative website that helps citizens keep track of everything happening in Congress. We think it’s pretty awesome. Check them out!
p.s. for all the video geeks, the video is overlapping the sidebar- i wanted to keep it big so you could see all the detail…enjoy!

One of our friends here in the Shenandoah Valley recently linked to this great site Vermicomposters.com, where lovers of worm composting can connect, trade secrets and show off their bins. We love the google map they have on the front page where you can find your local vermicomposting neighbors. We even found some of our friends in far off locations. It really illustrates how popular worm composting is becoming, as there are about 600 people listed on the map. Check out their Ning Social Network and add yourself to the map!

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Our dear friend, co-creator of the amazing Freshtopia.net, Oscar Grimm passed away last week after fighting brain cancer for the last two years. We are deeply saddened that the world has lost such a smart, creative and caring person. Our hearts go out to his partner in crime Tanja Andrews.

We first met Oscar and Tanja in 2006 at the Geeks Off The Grid Montana meet up, though they were our Bay Area neighbors at the time. Soon we visited their Oakland warehouse space where Freshtopia was born. The treated us to raw chocolate treats and fine conversation about being geeky and eating raw. Oscar, you will be missed.

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Update: If you are a media outlet and wish to use this video or photo, please do. As this is a Creative Commons Licensed video, please accompany media with the attribution “Courtesy RyanIsHungry.com”. Thank you.

Jay and I are shocked and saddened to hear that Kirsten Brydum, organizer of San Francisco’s Really Really Free Market, was found murdered in New Orleans yesterday. As you can see in this July 2007 interview we taped, she was extremely committed to educating people about alternative economies and passionate about connecting people to the idea that we can share in the abundance that exists all around us. Kirsten, you will be missed.

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We recently returned from a 15 day trip to Beijing for this summer’s Olympic Games and what some would call China’s “coming out as a global super power” party. Though we were not able to attend any of the official events, we had a very positive experience with Beijing citizens- their hospitality and generosity welcomed us at every corner. Every enthusiastic family we’d meet would exclaim in English “Welcome to Beijing!”.

Our mission was to document actions by Students for a Free Tibet protesting China’s almost 60 year occupation of Tibet. Using a small HD camera and a laptop, we were able to grab high quality video and photos, upload to a secure ftp server and get the media out to the world.

As independent media makers with no established credentials, it was a frightening task to attend an action, document it properly and not get arrested for just being there. We had no hand in the physical actions themselves, we were there only to document- much like The Associated Press photographers and British ITV reporter John Ray who, incidentally, got pushed around, questioned and media confiscated. These incidents made it clear that the cooperation of independent folks, videobloggers, photographers, etc with corporate media outlets was essential. Anyone with a camera, voice recorder or a pen was equally threatening in the eyes of the Chinese government.

In a country so locked down on free speech, we had to often speak in hushed tones and not even mention the word ‘Tibet’ in public for fear of arrest. The Tibetan flag is completely illegal and cannot be shown in all of China. Several of our fellow media makers, in town for the same reasons, were not so lucky and got arrested and detained for 7 days after being followed by plainclothes police for several days. We are happy that they have all returned home safe.

Reflecting on our trip to Beijing we have a more clear understanding that this is not just about the Free Tibet movement, this is about basic human rights in Tibet, China and the rest of the world. Tibetans can’t speak out about what is happening in their country. Chinese can’t speak out about what is happening in their country. If they do, they face harsh, life threatening consequences. Some might argue that this is the only thing these two cultures have in common, but we believe it will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and the tiny spark that ignites decades of dissent from all corners of China. The protests by Students for a Free Tibet demonstrated to the world that China, with it’s oppressive treatment of their people and the people of Tibet, cannot rise to the level of global super power without facing the consequences of their actions.

For more info on China’s occupation of Tibet and how you can get involved, check out Students for a Free Tibet. Check out this wrap up article on the CCTV Banner Hang in The Washington Post and an Op-Ed about China’s use of the Olympics to lie about human rights. Also we got interviewed by Xeni on Boing Boing TV.

Speaking of growing Red Fife Wheat in North America, I ran across this article on Boston.com about farmers in Vermont starting to grow grain again after a one hundred year absence. The price of growing and transporting grains from the midwest has given northeast farmers a competitve reason to start growing again.

The resurgence of interest in regional grain-growing picked up momentum about five years ago, as Vermont dairy farmers faced escalating costs for grain shipped from the Midwest to feed their cows. Costs have doubled while supplies have grown more scarce, farmers said, because of a host of factors, including crop failures in the American heartland, increasing global food demand, unprecedented fuel costs … more and more Vermonters, from all walks of life, are turning to locally grown foods, farmers and bakers said, creating new markets for, among other products, Vermont-grown wheat for making flour and bread.

I think we’re going to start seeing more and more of this as the price of oil goes higher and higher. Why get your wheat from 1500 miles away when you can grow it in your own county?

Before we started driving from San Francisco to Virginia, we loaded up the iPod with podcasts. One of the broadcasts we became quite fond of is Deconstructing Dinner, a weekly show out of Kootenay Co-op Radio in Nelson, British Columbia, Canada. The host, Jon Steinman, does some pretty in depth research into each subject ranging from where that bacon on your plate came from to the resurgence of Heirloom Red Fife Wheat in North America. In fact, this particular episode inspired me so much that I planted some heirloom wheat in our garden and have inflated dreams of becoming a small grain farmer. We’ll see if that ever comes to light, but for now I can hear about others successfully growing it in Canada and parts of the US via Deconstructing Dinner. Check out their archive or subscribe on their Podcast page.

Cathleen recently joined the Vermicomposting e-mail list, a place for folks to swap knowledge about worm composting indoors and out. She sent a link to her blog, North Carolina Family Living, where she’s documenting in text and video clips how their doing things in their backyard garden. The videoblog geek in me loves that she’s throwing clips up on her blogger blog using their new ‘upload video’ feature. It couldn’t get much easier than that. I love to see gardners blogging!

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The Great Village is a videoblog born from the peeps who make Seesmic, a microblogging site for folks to converse through webcams. Think video version of Twitter. Recently featured on The Great Village, was Melinda Stone of HowToHomestead.org. Filmmaker, teacher and farmer, Melinda shows how she’s livin’ in Northern CA. We were tickled that she mentioned our Apartment Composting 101 video. Thanks Melinda and Giselle for including a clip.

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Rupert and Kate of twittervlog fame, have recently moved their family from London to a small town on the west coast of Canada. Having a little more space has allowed them to start gardening in their front yard. As you can see, Kate is using the raised bed approach; instead of digging up the ground to start planting in, she’s adding a bunch of soil and some scrap wood to hold it all in. The advantage of this method is having instant, nutrient rich, aerated soil for your plants’ roots to really spread out and thrive, so expect things to grow fast. As you can see, her bounty has been really successful. Big props to Kate who was building this while 7 months pregnant, now that’s dedication. Can you say superwoman?

We got an email from another No Knead Bread Fan, Lucy from New Bedford, MA. She showed us her ultra geeky method of getting her dough to rise in a drafty, New England house- put it on top of the hard drive!

Me and the girls threw it together last night and then looked for someplace warm in this drafty old house of ours. Then I remembered I have an external hard drive that runs very hot. I’ve used it in the past to germinate little pots of seeds, and so I thought – why not?

Thanks Lucy, I’ll be sure to do this next time I makeathebread!

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Can I get a ‘hell yeah!’? I was reading this article in the New York Times today about the resurgence of young farmers when I saw a link to The Greenhorns film. Talking to our friend Chris from Wanna Farm he asked

there sure is a lot going on in our country involving small farms. i just can’t tell if we’re just standing in the middle of the choir or if change is really happening.

I’m hoping that change is really happening. Connection to our most basic necessities- food, water, shelter, community- have been close to lost in a few short generations. For me, I just want those things back. I’m hearing about and meeting more and more people who feel the same and are taking action to find those things again.

Go nominate a young farmer to be part of The Greenhorns documentary here.

Bruce F. left a comment on our Alemany Farm video last week and pointed us to a pretty amazing rooftop garden that he and his friends have built. After seeing the pictures, I think you’ll agree he’s being too modest. He says:

A few of us who live in the city of Chicago are trying to grow heirloom vegetables on our rooftops in cheap homemade earthboxes. It sounds more than a little preposterous to suggest that what we’re doing is a real solution to the huge environmental problems we’re facing, but it might be a tiny piece. We think they’re a great way to build connections in a fragmented social/political landscape. Not selling anything, I’m giving “it” away.

Here’s the Flickr link, along side the pics is a little how-to guide with plenty of relevant links.

We really love to see smart people start taking advantage of resources around them. Americans currently live in such abundance that making a rooftop garden, at first thought, might not make much sense. However, growing food is a great skill to learn and a valuable way to spend your time. Bruce has plenty of good info on his designs and links to online support.

The Rainforest Action Network recently started a video segment called The Greenwash of the Week. This was their first post and we thought it was clever, funny and it informed us of Virgin Atlantic’s most recent greenwashing campaign. It seems that as ‘being green’ becomes the most obvious and urgent thing to do, corporations that have been known looters and polluters are jumping on the PR bandwagon. Thanks RAN for keeping us informed and making us laugh.

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Our friend, Erik Nelson, is famous for the Carp Caviar and Wreck and Salvage video projects. He has also recently bought land in Vermont where he starts a new life with his wife and kids. In a smart move, he plans to build with as much reused material as he can which makes financial and environmental sense. We live in such a country of abundance that it’s so easy to use what is just lying around as long as you are willing to put the time into it.

In this video, Nelson shows the old barn that he plans to tear down for lumber. Ryanne and I are planning to drive out there to help this April. Best plan is to just hitch a tractor to the foundation beams and pull it down. As Nelson would say, “Get ‘er done.”

Our friend, Mikey Skylar, recently bought himself a diesel car which he converted to veggie oil. He found that he wanted a better way to know when to switch his diesel tank to a the vegetable oil tank. You do this because the veggie oil must be warmed up before it can efficiently run the engine.

Being the builder he is, Mikey made a device called The Greasy Mon that tells him when his veggie oil has warmed up enough. You can either download instructions on how to build your own, or he is now selling  these devices to other people who may want them for $100.

There are three thermistors which measure temperature changes based on resistance. Each of the thermistor sensors has four LEDs associated with it which the driver can see illuminate as the temperature increases. Each LED that turns on indicates that the grease has increased by 20 deg. fahrenheit in temperature. The temperature range is from 65F – 135F. Due to the sensors being placed on the outside of the fuel hoses the sensor range peaks rather low to allow for the insulation provided by the fuel hose.

Check out the video here:

I ran across this mention of this subterranean farm in an old bank vault under the busiest part of Tokyo . This blog explains how the farm works has has lots of great pictures showing the different grow rooms.

Though walled in from sunlight, weather and geology, it’s unbelievably verdant. Tomatoes, lettuces, strawberries, and other fruits and vegetables, as well as flowers and herbs, are grown in an area covering almost a square kilometer (!!!). There is even a terraced rice paddy.

This kind of farming can’t be an efficient use of energy, but interesting to see how urban farming experiments are taking shapes in other parts of the world.

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Our friend Chris at WannaFarm is now making videos about the details of farming. With his wife and new kid, they are farming FOR REAL up in Portland. We can’t wait to see more web savvy folks grow food or farmers using the web to share their experience. Can you imagine the practical farming knowledge we can share and archive with video?

Update: Chris’ farm is actually here. “We’re about 4 hours south of Portland about 20 miles from the California border.”

The folks at Frogdesign have launched a challenge:

“For the next two weeks, I will be living without a garbage can. Where will my trash go? I am going to start needing to think about that before I buy something because, according to the rules I have set up for myself, I’m going to have to live with it. My own garbage must be within five feet of me at all times”

Read the entire challenge here. The idea is to see how much trash you actually create by not being able to throw it “away”. Every two weeks a new person blogs about their experience keeping their trash:

“At the end of my two weeks, another frog will continue the project, experiencing his/her own two-week stint of trash-free living. The transference of this blog will highlight the differences in environmental consciousness across cities, environments, governments, and economies. And, ideally, it’ll mean a few hundred less pounds of garbage in our landfills – a small step, but a measurable one. “

Ryanne and I try to be smart about the garbage we generate. Whatever your political persuasion might be, it just makes sense to be more self-sufficient. So food waste goes into a worm bin or compost pile. Paper and cardboard goes into recycling. But what about all the plastic wrapping and bags that come with all manufactured goods? There’s nothing reasonable we can do but throw it “away”. A two week experiment where you must keep your trash near you at all times is a good way to demonstrate this problem.

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OMG! I love Etsy.com. How have I not heard of this site before now? Etsy is an online marketplace where only handmade, original goods are sold. Search by catagory, location or by color (that’s awesome!!). It’s not just for crafters either, there’s also a nice selection of edible goods. Next time you have a gift to give or you want something for yourself but are boycotting the box stores, check out Etsy. Rumor has it (ok its a fact) that our good friend and fellow videoblogger, Bre Pettis of Make Zine fame is now producing videos for Etsy! Wow, what a combination! More info about Esty here.

[tags]etsy, brepettis, handmade, crafts[/tags]

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Fellow videoblogger, Beth Tilston lives in an apartment in Brighton, England and she totally vermicomposts! She sent us this video recently asking if we thought it was ok because it was a little sludgy. If the worms are alive and thriving, then it’s good! Inspired by this conversation, she started a Vermicomposting E-mail list for fellow apartment composters to trade advice and success stories. So join up and let’s share our worm secrets! Side Note- we just recently got to hang out with Beth in Brighton during our Europe trip, check out the video on RyanEdit. Cheers!

[tags]compost, apartment compost, vermicompost, gardening[/tags]

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Beth Kanter’s son, Harry, is learning what a lot of adults don’t even seem to notice- that the things we use every day are made out of something and end up somewhere, but what, where and why? What are the smarter choices that we can make that are less wasteful? This shopping bag video is one out of (hopefully) many of Harry exploring and questioning the way things are produced.

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The infamous, most blogged, most twittered bread recipe of the last year has to be Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread, which was originally published in The New York Times and then spread like wild fire on the blog-o-sphere. This recipe has officially taken over my life. This is the best bread ever. It’s so damn easy and so damn good, you will never need to buy another loaf of bread from the store (and at about $6 a pop for the “Peasant Bread” at your local grocer, which is pretty much the same thing as this, why would you?). I first heard about it in Miss Bekah Havens’ video Make-A-The-Bread and really, my life has not been the same since. Go make it, you will not be sorry! I promise!

I like to double the recipe for a nice 3 lb. loaf that lasts, oh about 2 days. Just enough time to get another batch started!

No-Knead Bread

from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Yields one 1 1/2 pound loaf

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.