Thoughts on things + Nitrate poisoning

Olive harvesting is a fairly mindless task, which leaves me a lot of time to think about things. Today I was thinking about what I would like to learn and incorporate into my daily life. Here's a few of them:

1. I want to learn how to build a brick oven. I have a diagram for a small one that can bake two loaves of bread at a time, which would fit perfectly in a back yard. However, it seems like every farmhouse in Italy has a large brick oven attached to the house. Some of the ones I have seen would rival the oven at Scratch in size, and these were all once considered integral to daily household life. I want one, and I want the satisfaction of having built it myself.

2. I want to learn how to care for animals, and following that, I want to learn how to make cheese and cured meat. Artisanal cheese and salamis have reached the levels of sublime artforms in this country. In America, these things are luxuries. In Italy they are simply taken for granted. I want to eat well crafted salami and know that I raised and cared for that animal. I want cheese made from the unpasturized milk of cows or goats that I pastured on fresh grass. I want to know where my food comes from and to feel good about that knowledge.

3. This last one is inspired by Micheal Pollan, whose book, The Botany of Desire, I Have just read. I want an orchard of wild apples raised from seeds. I want an apple press to squeeze them and large wooden barrels in which to ferment them. I want to drink hard cider in the winter with my friends.

What would you like to do with your food? Don't be shy, post a comment!

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On another note, I think we've been poisoning ourselves these past two weeks. Ursula warned us when we arrived to not drink the tap water, but didn't elaborate why. Given that I have spent about 6 months in Africa, I interpreted this as, "Don't drink the tap water because it contains microbes that will make you sick." In this situation, boiling the water, say for things like making coffee, is usually ok. Also, I figured that in Italy, microbes really ought to not be a problem and that maybe she was being a little paranoid.

Last night over dinner, Sigismund somewhat off-handedly told us about the results of a water analysis he had carried out last year. Apparently he noticed that when he traveled he felt remarkably more healthy than when he was at home. He finally narrowed it down to the water supply and had it analyzed by a friend of his from Germany. The results showed a significant level of nitrate contamination. A quick search on wikipedia told me that nitrates prevent red blood cells from carrying oxygen. Since we usually have a couple of cups of coffee or tea with breakfast, we have probably been ingesting poisonous levels of nitrates for the last two weeks. I have been feeling light headed in the mornings lately, which could be explained by this. Starting today we will only be drinking bottled water and I can only hope that things will change.

Thanks industrial agriculture for poisoning our water supply! What a terrible and boring world we would have without you!