Weekly Sausage Links

I scour the internet for you the faithful reader to find bits and bobs. Then I put them into the Jesus meatgrinder and crank out your weekly sausage links:

As Food Costs Rise, So Do School Lunch Prices

Rabbis Debate Kosher Ethics at Meat Plant

Harvest Home Brings it Home

New Vision for a 21st Century Food, Farm & Agriculture Policy

True Cost Pricing the Food on the Table

Federal court blocks beef exporter from testing for mad cow disease

Marion Nestle contemplates the recent CDC report showing that, despite the childhood obesity epidemic, about 80% of public schools still sell snacks or sodas to kids during school hours.

Thrifty Thursday – Five Ideas for Using Up Leftover, Cooked White Rice

Cultivating the Web free online resource for finding sustainable, local, and organic produce from Eat Well Guide

Go Green by Doing Good

The invisible workers: A Labor Day tribute: a week late, but worth remembering.

Fishing for Mystery

Speaking of Faith once again had an outstanding interview with James Prosek about fishing, nature and faith, Fishing With Mystery. Here’s the description:

James Prosek is a 33-year-old artist, writer, and fly-fisher who has always, as he puts it, found God “through the theater of nature.” From a young age he has been fascinated by trout, and now eel — which he sees as “mystical creatures” — and he’s captured them physically and artistically, by way of both angling and paint. We explore the sense of meaning and ritual James Prosek developed along the way, including his concern with how we humans limit our sense of other creatures by the names we give them. We’ll also hear the words of Henry David Thoreau, Bruce Chatwin, and Izaak Walton.

After hearing this interview I’m ready to buy all of this guy’s books and a Patagonia shirt with one of his trout watercolors on it. I was captivated.

Discuss.

Make Money By Simplifying Your Life

So my wife and I are leaning towards interning at the World Hunger Farm for a year. They teach sustainable agriculture and development from a Christian perspective. We would gain some skills that would help us get involved with organizations doing this kind of work around the world.

There’s a catch though. This internship is not paid. That means a family of four living on a farm for a year with zero income. So we’ve been going over the finances and subsequently increasing our stress levels and blood pressure. This is where I find it hard to figure out the difference between stepping out in faith and making a bad decision.

As I’ve been trying to figure out possibilities for extra income and how to make this work, I realized that the best solution so far is ridiculously simple.

Be a full-time stay-at-home dad.

It blows my mind that we would make more money by reducing our expenses than by adding income. It costs more to send two kids to day care than any job I can get on short notice to make some extra money. This is the problem with our mentality about finances and life…this includes food. We have a one track mind that asks, “How can I make enough money to fund the life to which I’ve become accustomed?” We (even me) forget to question the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed.

It turns out we also have a lot of junk that we could sell for some pretty good cash, like camping gear and nice bikes that we rarely use. I’m going to be putting a lot of this stuff on craigslist soon. I will post links for those of you with lots of disposable income and time to use the gear collecting dust in my house.

How have you or could you make money by simplifying your life?