Cultured Carrot Fermented Foods

How do you get your kids to eat sauerkraut? For Kristin Simpson, the solution was to develop a line of fermented foods that their palates would accept. The resulting array of garnishes is now available in Austin and around Texas. 

They say about themselves: 

Kristin Simpson and
The Cultured Carrot
https://theculturedcarrot.com

Launched by two women in Austin, the Cultured Carrot has revolutionized ancient fermentation. While we were amazed at the exploding amount of information about the microbiome, gut health and the amazing benefits of fermented foods we knew there had to be a better way to get them onto our plate and into our families tummies. 

The Cultured Carrot was founded by Palak Sadarangani, a health coach practicing an Ayurvedic lifestyle and Kristin Simpson, a pharmacist with a holistic lifestyle approach. Both busy moms of young kids were blown away by the research and study of the microbiome. Up to 80% of our immune system is found in the gut. Eating fermented foods adds good bacteria to our guts to help maintain the balance we need for a healthy immune system.  A healthy microbiome was the key to our families overall health. We knew we had to get more probiotics from fermented foods into our families tummies. Currently all the fermented foods on the market were traditional kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, kefir, miso etc. Remembering to take these traditional fermented foods everyday became difficult. We had to create something that was convenient and part of our everyday palates. That's when the idea was born, to create fermented vegetable dressings for salads, marinates and sauces. This concept is the new revolution of fermentation, making traditional ferments more convenient and bringing them to today's busy modern tables. -- https://theculturedcarrot.com/pages/about-us

Kristin told me that she graduated with a degree in pharmacy and worked for local hospitals in Florida before moving to Texas and working in a hospital here. Her goal has always been to introduce healthful, natural alternatives to the over-prescription of synthetic antibiotics. 

Her products have a three-month shelflife. She said that refrigerating it keeps the biotics more potent through that time.

It was really nice to meet another vendor at the Wheatsville coop. We went about 18 months without visitors from among our local providers. 

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Tofurky: For Paleolithic Vegetarians

If our ancestors had not eaten animals, we would not be here.  On the other hand, not everything paleolithic is appropriate to the 21st century. Bashing each other is just one example. To satisfy that primal need for the genuine down-home taste of burned meat - without the cholesterol and carcinogens - there is Tofurky.  

"In 1980, after making from-scratch tempeh to share with friends and family, 30-year-old teacher/naturalist/hippie Seth Tibbott opens his own company in Forest Grove, Oregon. He expands operations to a vacant elementary school in 1983 -- and decades ahead of the tiny house trend, he builds a 300-square-foot treehouse to call home. Fast forward to 1995, Tofurky debuts the very first Holiday Roast. It strikes a cultural chord with a nation hungry for a tastier meat-free Thanksgiving. 2000 and beyond welcomes even more deliciousness, with the addition of deli slices and sausage and frozen items. Today our growth plans include new products, but also new countries. We're so inspired by a world that is waking up to the benefits of veg cuisine."  -- www.tofurky.com (of course).

 

Lauren of Horizon Marketing in Austin
visiting Wheatsville Co-op to bring us
the new flavors.

"The tale begins in 1980, when Seth Tibbott’s beard was still dark and Forest Grove was home to a few thousand fewer people.

"Tibbott longed for alternative environmentally friendly menu options for vegetarians like himself. His quest led him through two states and the founding of Turtle Island Foods, a company now based in Hood River, poised to sell its 3-millionth Tofurky this year.

"That was unimaginable when Tibbott ventured out to Oregon and found a job that “changed my life” — teaching at an outdoor school in Cherry Grove, where he made $25 per week in addition to a place to stay.

“ 'It opened my eyes to the natural world I had been missing all these years,' Tibbott said."  (Portland Tribune here: http://portlandtribune.com/fgnt/36-news/123488-turkey-or-tofurky--its-still-thanksgiving).

When our vegetarian friends get insufferable, my lawful wedded wife, Laurel, says, "Carrots have feelings, too."

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Epigenetics and Evolution

The mechanism of evolution has not been discovered.  No consistent theory exists. Random mutations adapting to changing environments was the first suggestion.  When subatomic radiation was discovered, that became a proposal.  Now, epigenetics may indicate another, more powerful, model.  

Darwinian evolution does not explain the lack of intermediate forms. Scientists have bombarded fruit flies and mice with every radiation known and produced no new species.

Jason Head, assistant professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences,
at the University of Nebraska Lincoln
holds a fossil and fossil cast from the jawbone of
Barbaturex morrisoni, a large ((2 meters; 30 kgs) lizard
that coexisted with mammals in southeast Asia
40 million years ago. (Press release here.)

Epigenetics is the study of how environmental factors affect the expressions of genes.  We know that we share something like 90% of our DNA with yeasts - and yet we are very different from them. We know that strawberries have not a double helix, but a quadruple helix - yet they are not "superior" to us double helix lifeforms.  
  

A series of prehistoric creature illustrations demonstrates
the evolution of mammals through the ages.
More fact than fiction, these wild characters followed transitional Jurassic period animals
that sported mammalian skull traits and reptilian teeth.
A more familiar design, humans, mark the present.
- National Geographic, "The Rise of Mammals"

Random mutations adapting to changing environments is a (partial) explanation. Radiation seems to create such mutations, also. Epigenetics offers another aspect of understanding. It seems that the mechanisms of process are inherent in all life, but the millions of components are active or inactive according to causes we may now be coming to understand -- given that in 50 or 100 years some other engine will be discovered. 

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