Lately I’ve been delving into the world of gluten and sugar-free baking.  Refined sugar is something that I’ve been taking out my diet on and off for about six years.  I’ve currently been sugar-free for eight months and it feels amazing!

A few years ago, I started avoiding wheat as well.  I realized I feel sluggish when I eat wheat.  So, for a while I stuck to the gluten-filled wheat alternatives like spelt bread.  But I realized, gluten gives me that same slugish feeling as wheat, just to a lesser degree.  So I ended up giving up bread (except for the many times I would give in and indulge in pizza and bagels – my two weaknesses).

But then I moved to Vancouver and discovered rice bread.  Not that white cardboard nastiness that they used to sell 5 years ago, but good tasting rice bread.  The only problem was it was $6 a loaf and after a closer look at the ingredients, I learned it contained an ingredient that is also the main ingredient in KY jelly.  Ewww!

Sadly, when I looked for rice flour recipes online, almost all of them contain weird ingredients as well.  Most contain xanthan gum, bacterium fermented glucose (from corn), in addition to a large variety of other flours that are expensive and hard to find.

Then, I learned about flax. I was skimming through one of my favorite blogs The Medicine Woman’s Roots when I came across a recipe for Golden Flax Bread.  I now make it all the time (I use 1 egg instead of 2). And, I’ve started experimenting with recipes of my own.

Lately, I’ve really been wanting to bake muffins.  So, today, I experimented in my kitchen and came up with this recipe for apple flax muffins, which I must say came out really good.  (Now, some of you may be wondering why I am calling these muffins when the picture above is obviously bread.  I don’t own muffin tins. So I created a muffin recipe and had to turn it into bread.  However, this recipe would work much better as a muffin;  it comes out super soft and will not hold up well as a bread.)

Apple Flax Muffins

3/4 cup flax meal

1/2 cup almond meal (Hazelnuts would work well too. I used the strained bits leftover from making almond milk. You can also use freshly ground nuts.  I often use my coffee grinder to make nut “flour”)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup chopped walnuts (hazelnuts, almonds, or pecans would work well too)

1/2 cup diced apple (this was 1/2 an apple for me)

1 cup apple sauce (I used homemade applesauce see recipe below)*

1/8 cup vegetable oil

2 eggs

Mix all dry ingredients together (flax – salt).  Add walnuts, diced apple, and wet ingredients.  Mix.  Pour into well-greased muffin tins (or bread pans). Bake at 350 until done.  The cooking time will vary depending on the size of your pan and how soft you want them.  For the two mini loaves above, as well one of the small pyrex 6oz dishes, I baked them for about 45 minutes (the top is brown, the toothpick came out clean, but the center is a bit gooey once you cut in.  They definitely needed longer).  If you are making muffins check at around 20 minutes (but they will probably need longer).  They’ll be done when the top is browned and a toothpick comes out clean and they don’t feel soft to the touch.

* Making your own applesauce is super easy.  I do it all the time.  Roughly chop up some apples, being sure to remove the core.  I leave on the skin, partially because I don’t have a working peeler and partially because its full of nutrients.  Add the apples to a pot with a small amount of water.  Cover, bring to a boil, then simmer.  Add a pinch of salt and some cinnamon.  After a while the apples will have broken down and you will have apple sauce.  If you are like me and tend to add too much water, you may need to remove the lid for a bit and let some of the water boil down.  Since I leave the skins on and they stay intact through the cooking process, I put my applesauce in the blender to puree it. If you have a foodmill, they work as well.

- Leo Tolstoy

We are slaves to the capitalist economic system. It is practically impossible for us to function autonomously without the use of money.  It is illegal to live off the land.  Land is no longer commons; it must be owned.  If you are lucky enough to own land, you’re still not allowed to live off of it without the use of money.  For we have taxes, payable only in legal tender (national currency).

While I’ve been aware of all of this for a while, I just watched the movie “Money as Debt” and my desire to free myself from the national dollar has strengthened.  I have been aware of this film for a while, but did not take the time to watch it until tonight and I’m really glad I did.  It’s a great film that explains the history of our banking system in an understandable, easy to follow manner, while also explaining how unsustainable our national currencies are.  While it does not focus on the ecological impacts of this, it explains how our monetary/economic system cannot survive without expansion and, thus, environmental exploitation.

Watching this film has strenghtened my desire to stop using our national currency as much as possible and rely on trade/barter and local currencies instead.  It has also reminded me how thankful I am to no longer have any money in corporate banks.  I’ve always been against corporate banks for their investments in war and the destruction of our planet, yet this film really brought home the fact that putting money in banks means investing in the expansion of the capitalist system and the perpetuation of an unsustainable economic system.

You can watch “Money as Debt” for free here.

As a strong believer in the power of positive energy and intention, I refuse to concentrate on the negative. Now that we have a greater understanding of  why it’s important to shift away from the national dollar, we need to look towards the solutions and the positive future we can create! How can we invest the money we do have locally and sustainably? How can we shift towards alternative currencies and make them strong enough to replace our dependence on national currency?

In an effort to answer my second question, I plan on studying the education around local currencies as my graduating project for my Masters. Hopefully I will have some insight to share soon…

There is no incentive in Ithaca Hours to encourage customers to use it.  For customers, it is just an extra form of money to have to carry around and a longer transaction time when purchasing goods at a store.  In Ithaca Hours, the denominations are in hours with one hour equivalent to ten USD.  The currency comes in the following denominations: 2 hours ($20), 1 hour ($10), 1/2 hour ($5), 1/4 hour ($2.50), 1/8 hour ($1.25).  While the hour denominations are a great way to get out the message about our society’s wage inequality, imagine how confusing transactions that are half in cash and half in hours must be.  Therefore, people who are really excited about the idea of a local curency will take the extra effort to carry around two forms of money, but those who aren’t might not.

BerkShares, however, tackles this problem by creating an incentive for people to purchase goods and services with BerkShares rather than USD.  One BerkShare is equivalent to 90 cents.  BerkShares can be exchanged back and forth for dollars at over ten banks in the area.  Therefore, customers who make purcahses with BerkShares receive a ten percent discount on their BerkShare purchases.  Stores can then trade the BerkShares back for USD, in order to pay taxes and purchase goods from outside the local area.  However, when stores trade the BerkShares back for USD, they lose that ten percent.  So, BerkShares offers the businesses an incentive to purchase locally because keeping their purchases within the system allows them to keep that ten percent and support the local economy.

BerkShares have been mentioned in many news articles recently – some of which can be found in my earlier blog post: Articles on Local Currencies.

Some more recent articles I’ve found:

Going green: Communities make their own currencies

“BerkShares” Currency Helps Keep Up Local Western Mass. Economy

A note on the paper:
It was written for an academic course where I was doing a practicum during which I was going to create a LETSystem in Vancouver. Upon reading the academic literature on LETS, I realized that there was an extensive body of literature on LETS that I had never seen before. So, rather than actually starting a LETSystem, I decided to first read the literature. What I found was a lot of critique and reasons why LETS are not an effective means of local economic development. However, I noticed that a majority of the academic literature I read evaluated the LETSystems they studied against criteria that were sometimes different than the reasons for creating LETS that I had read about in the non-academic descriptions of LETS. In addition, the academic literature focused on the problems with LETS, but it did not give any solutions to these problems.

LETSystems definitely fall short in their ability to fix wage inequality and substantially improve the standard of living for the underemployed, but what are they doing just by existing? One thing they are doing is showing people that we can create alternatives if we work together.  So, how can we work to fix the problems with LETS to make it a more effective alternative? I, personally, don’t think they are an ineffective local currency. I do, however, think they require a lot of education on how to use them, as well as group processes on how to overcome the issues that arise, such as: wage inequality, people who only give and people who only take, and low usage rates. We can’t shift economic paradigms without working together to rid ourselves of the baggage we hold from the last one. We need to create forums for discussion, support systems, and educational opportunities on how to shift our mindsets from an economy of hoarding to one of balance.

My hope in sharing this paper is that those of us connected to LETSystems, or who are thinking about creating other forms of local currencies, can collectively pay attention to the issues that often arise with LETS.  If we know about the challenges we might face, we can more effectively work together to find solutions so that our currencies not only act as a symbol of the anti-globalization movement, but are effective means of strengthening local economies.  If we work together to rid ourselves of the baggage we hold around money and economics, we can move towards and create holistic, balanced economies.

An Exploration into the Creation of a Vancouver LETSystem