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Writing Book - Cooking with Medicinal Ingredients

Do you experience food anxiety? Too many diet trends to stay on top of? This book is here to help.

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Writing Book - Cooking with Medicinal Ingredients

Writing Book - Cooking with Medicinal Ingredients

Writing Book - Cooking with Medicinal Ingredients

Writing Book - Cooking with Medicinal Ingredients

Writing Book - Cooking with Medicinal Ingredients

Do you experience food anxiety? Too many diet trends to stay on top of? This book is here to help.

Do you experience food anxiety? Too many diet trends to stay on top of? This book is here to help.

Do you experience food anxiety? Too many diet trends to stay on top of? This book is here to help.

Do you experience food anxiety? Too many diet trends to stay on top of? This book is here to help.

Elona UnderWood
Elona UnderWood
Elona UnderWood
Elona UnderWood
1 Campaign |
Underwood, United States
$610 USD 16 backers
6% of $10,000 Fixed Goal Fixed Goal
Overview
There's no book like it. I checked Amazon.com and Powells.com. At least there's no book that's in print today that will tell you how to cook like a chef, rebalance health like a country doctor, and think like a systems scientist. It's my moonifesto and I hope you will read it *if* it comes out. If I don't meet my funding goal, it'll get put off another year or more. I've been waking up early and writing every morning, it yearns to be born.

Rough Draft, Chapter 1:

Are We What We Eat? 

 

Laying on the couch after a long day of high school, a cerulean and silver sea of glistening wrappers scattered below me. Snap, Crackle and Pop were my afternoon pals. The big box store down the street had conveniently packaged enough for two days of television fuel - 40 pieces, now with 20 percent more! More what? More puffed rice? More high fructose corn syrup? More boiled cow hooves and horns?

Hoof and horn, hoof and horn. All that dies shall be reborn. (Chant it with me) 

I had no idea at the time but the gelatin, made of boiled bones, hooves and horns was definitely the most nutritious ingredient in that absolutely addicting rice crispy square. This is how I spent my teen years. Since the age of eight, I’d been a latchkey kid. My older sister could barely fry an egg and she was too busy anyway being boy crazy or working towards that sports car of her dreams to slow down and cook a meal for us. My parents worked. Long, and hard they worked to push themselves from the position of poor immigrants to two-car garage house owning American suburbanites. 

In 1988 my family finally got the OK to pack their lives up into several suit cases and embark on a journey whose trek had been worn well by countless Eastern European Jews before them. The Soviet Union had been receiving pressure from Israel, the US, protest movements and NGO’s to allow Jews to emigrate out. According to my family, being behind the Iron Curtain wasn’t pleasant. The colleges and institutes where many Jewish families hoped their children would graduate from would not accept them simply because of their Jewish sounding last name. Jews were being scapegoated for causing WWII. The dreams of an egalitarian society under Communism were cracking to rubble and someone had to be blamed. Enough Western media had been leaked through the underpants-smuggled records and magazines to give Soviet Jews a new dream. My family wanted me to wear Levi’s. And so we packed up and left, along with many others, to the land of milk and honey. (Which, subsequently, turned out to be hormone-filled and pesticide laden, but we’ll get to that). 

Life wasn’t all bad in the USSR. We didn’t know how lucky we were, yeah, at least when it came to quality of food. Though we weren’t too far from the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, we weren’t that close, either. What we were close to were traditions of food growing and gathering that were indigenous to place. On the weekends we’d leave the city and head out to the datchya, a cabin in the woods that every Soviet had a natural born right to. Thanks to our regular food-focused outings, at three years old, I was already able to identify several edible and poisonous mushrooms. I scouted the ground for wild strawberries. I knew which fish swam in the lakes and rivers. Being a forester, my grandfather would point to various trees and shrubs, animals and insects and give me their names. The act of giving name to our wild relatives allowed for the forest to become my family. I began to know them personally. 

The thought of the smell of a pike stew (Ooha) simmering on a simple fire at the shore of the lake still gets my salivary glands working. The threads holding various dried mushroom slices still hang in my mind. The forest was our farm, our larder, our kitchen. Regardless of how long my ancestors had interacted with their landscape, we were certainly recreating the patterns that were set by humans who first wandered into the recently hospitable meadows and forests of the Dnieper watershed after the glacial melts of the last ice age. They watched what the bears and squirrels ate and followed suit. They collected tender greens, trapped furred brothers, followed herds, and waited til the late summer rains awakened invisible fungi communities underfoot to collect prized boletes and chanterelles. They warred with their neighbors over the best hunting and foraging grounds. They healed their wounds with the medicines that grew all around them. And through all that, they developed ceremonies and rituals to pay tribute to the abundance. My Eastern European features are tempered by Mongolian ones, which bring serious doubt to the family story that not a single ancestor married a non-Jew, and so I explore the culture of the Eastern and Central Asian peoples. 

(ASIDE)

Our faces are molded by places. Does hearing this tale make you yearn to connect with the ancients of your past? Good. This is an incredibly important step to cooking with medicinal plants, fungi and lichen. With the internet’s ability to track down your ancestry, embark to do so. Look at traditional and pre-colonial recipes from these region(s). Find yourself a piece of clothing that resembles something your ancestors would have worn or make something yourself. Learn an ancient tale from the area(s). The only reason the wisdom contained herein exists is because people like you and me were willing to sit and listen and then retell the stories of our indigenous experiences. 

(END ASIDE)

Traveling across oceans and cultures, my family arrived with little more than a few established relatives in Chicago and a few hundred dollars in our pockets and the smell of McDonalds french fries in the airport. We breathed in deeply. Liberty! Freedom! The American Way! My mother’s parents had lived in the Windy City since the 70’s with her sister who soon following her parents. My father’s parents joined us in the culture shift. My grandmother recalls how she and I were the most reluctant to leave our old life behind. As she walked me to pre-school in the early morning, I’d look up at the moon and announce that my sister, Luna, was joining us on our stroll. One day, I looked up at my grandma with a worried expression. Would Luna find me on the other side of the world? She squeezed my hand and said, of course Luna would find me. She was very good at those kinds of things. A feeling of relief came over me. Maybe life wouldn’t be so different after all. 

I will get 10K in funding & You'll get the rest of this book

Other Chapters:

  • Recognizing Medicinal Benefits By The Senses

  • Tissue Soothers and Membrane Restorers

  • Heart Tonics

  • Aphrodisiacs

  • Immune Boosters

  • Joint Strengtheners

  • Nerve Soothers & Rebuilders

  • Organ Healers

  • Blood Cleaners and Builders

  • Mind & Soul Medicine

  • Resource Guide

Where the Money Goes

I believe in transparency. Here's a loose budget for my time and your book: 

  • Pay for living expenses while writing it (gas, food)
  • Pay living wage to write it (estimating 200 dedicated hours @ 15)
  • Pay fact-checker ($500)
  • Pay editor ($500)
  • Pay Layout Person ($200)
  • Pay Printer (4,000)
  • Pay for Traveling and Promotional Fees
  • Pay for Scholarships to my workshops (if there's any left over)

Any reason why this project wouldn't happen?

Volunteer time is always difficult to carve out when you don't have a steady paying job. I work as a farm manager at the Little White Salmon Biodiversity Reserve, and while I'm earning my keep there and it's a serious time commitment, I also have to pick up side work for what few living expenses I have.

Do you want to see this book made? If so, I'm going to need some of your green printed hemp paper to fertilize this cook book seedling of mine.

Other Ways You Can Help

Some people just can't contribute, but that doesn't mean they can't help:

  • Folks can get the word out and make some noise about the book.

    Here's a prompt:
    My friend Elona is making this rad cookbook about using medicinal plants, fungi and lichen in everyday dishes. Interested in a copy? Check out her indiegogo page
     
  • There are also convenient share tools right smack dab on this page. 

Thanks again for your support and I hope to have the writing done by Equinox 2017. From now until March I'll be snowed in at the farm so it's the perfect time to cozy up beside the fire, crack open the hundreds of botany, biology, chemistry, herbalism, healing, ancestral cooking, etc... books I have along with the trusty internet and pour this book forth from my fingertips. 

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Choose your Perk

An E-Book and a Daily Journal

$25 USD
Since Eberhardt Press will be doing the big book and you're getting the digital version only, you'll still get a real journal featuring artwork done by me.
Included Items
  • E-Book
  • A Daily Journal with My Art
Estimated Shipping
April 2017
3 claimed
Ships worldwide.

Spirit Supporter

$100 USD
You'll not only get the E-Book and the Daily Journal printed locally, but you'll also get a sweet patch designed by me and made locally along with the actual, physical hard copy of the book. FREE SHIPPING! WHOOPEE!
Included Items
  • E-Book
  • A Daily Journal with My Art
  • Hard Copy of The Book
  • Patch
Estimated Shipping
May 2017
0 claimed
Ships worldwide.

Fairy Godmother

$9,999 USD
If I ever have a baby, they're yours. I will have visitation rights and they will be able to come live with me if they choose to at some point in their lives. I'm not abandoning the child.
Included Items
  • My First Born
Estimated Shipping
December 2050
0 out of 1 of claimed
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