It is for ideas that lives are willingly laid down, nations built up, and many a fulfilling life’s work discovered. But these are challenging times for ideas when the web culture consists principally of reacting to, rejecting, and piling onto other people’s ideas instead of generating one’s own. Within the largest exchange of words in history, we are saying less and less of import and substance. It seems humanity is all out of large inspiring ideas, leaving us bereft of hope -the most potent of fuels for the human spirit.  

We face the most incredible peril humans are ever likely to confront – ourselves – and our outrageously acute exploitation of the natural world for the love of commerce. Large corporations are accelerating demand for meat and dairy, causing accelerated deforestation of the Amazon. Felling majestic forests to make land available for soybeans and corn – cheap animal fodder. Land that without the trees is nutrient-poor and loses productivity quickly. Creating a cycle of slash and burn agriculture where forested land is constantly destroyed for short-term profit. Palm Oil companies mechanically scythe and burn virgin forest at alarming and clearly unsustainable rates in the tropics. It’s a heartache, nothing but a heartache.

Destroying forests is such a stupid thing to do at this stage of human history it is unimaginable that any thinking person agrees it is a way forward for humanity. 

Because corporations are just piles of money to which investors have sold their souls, they can’t be reasoned with. There is no heart or conscience to appeal to – they are answerable only to their shareholders. All-consuming greed and deepest fear drive shareholders to seek ever more financial security – as illusory as security is in a warming world. 

Corporation eco rape will never end of its own volition; enough is never enough for the few and the very few, who dwell at the top of the money and insecurity pyramid. 

The difficulties and dangers life-on-Earth faces will not be solved by closing our eyes, ignoring them, and hoping they go away. However, though the word crisis is aptly applied – there is a flicker of hope. Crisis, has a second meaning – it also means opportunity, a chance or occasion to alter direction. Let’s do that!

Most troubles are worse in the prior period of gnawing contemplation than in fact. Nothing about the climate crisis points to it turning out to be more benign than expected. Sadly, the opposite is likely – a turbulent cascade of intense suffering, privations, hollowing fear, death, and overarching heartache. 

Accepting that crisis also means opportunity can be invigorating. History demonstrates hope restored, and hope burning in the human heart, fanned, and inflamed through action, is enough, and more than enough. Humans rise to challenges, endure, and prosper even in crushing adversity through the sparkling luminescence of our invigorated spirit. Our spirit becomes an unquenchable torch lighting our way when its burning with conviction and hope. 

We have opportunity right here and now, shining, and radiant – To dawdle, trifle or turn away will bring on us inescapable, long, and bitter self-reproaches through ever-darkening tomorrows.  

Corporations don’t have a heart, but many of their investors do – we need to make appeals to them to engage their conscience when investing. Their desire for financial security should not be costing us the Earth.

We need to be aware our values matter little to them, and that’s fair enough; we should not waste opportunities attempting to impose them. However, we should ask them to take careful note of their own values and conscience when choosing investments.

Addressing our fellow human beings who invest in corporations is an important task; however, that is not our most vital strategy. Corporations are most interested and closely attentive to three things, their sales volume, market share, and profit margins. By collectively and consistently directing our purchases away from the most destructive corporations and switching out their brands for others who cause less eco-damage, we gain a voice and a virtual but decisive vote in the boardroom. 

Ultimately, consumers’ support of brands allows corporations to bloat into the monsters they have become. Corporations have made it nearly impossible for consumers to know how corrupted and deliberately eco-careless favorite brands have become. They feast off our purchases – we are their sole source of income. 

To make your opposition to deforestation for stock feed count, eliminate or use much less dairy. Alternatively, only purchase from smaller dairy farms practicing regenerative farming.  

Eat less or preferably no meat – at a minimum only purchase genuinely regenerative grass-fed, not from the large feed-lot farms. 

Choose products that don’t use palm oil. 

Doing so will complicate shopping because so many products contain palm oil. 

People are generally shocked that many of the bright and cheerful brands they have loved long are, in fact, utterly irresponsible and eco-destructive at the back end. These big brands advertise cheerfully, greenwashing and virtue signaling frantically to keep us from knowing how unethical and dishonorable they are willing to be to win. They allow ethics to slip to retain our patronage, and they will do the other; they will do right when our purchasing pattens demand it. 

The beauty and skin care industries are major palm oil industries, read labels.

If we do these three things: cut out or reduce dairy, cut out or reduce meat consumption and switch out brands that use palm oil, we stop being helpless pawns and start making the significant difference we want.

It is said humans exploit what they merely value – but save that which they love. Do you value the tiny blue dot in space that is our home, or do you love her? The answer is evidenced by our actions. 

Are we to be peril or pearl?

The post We are the Peril – and We are the Pearl first appeared on milkadamia.

The post We are the Peril – and We are the Pearl appeared first on milkadamia.

At least the current pandemic wave seems to be waning, allowing us the headspace to meditate on the import of the other big one, the climate issue.   

Reflection

When I was younger, I did an exercise someone recommended to me. I wrote in detail what I wanted aspects of my life to look like twenty years ahead. The next step in the activity required I note where I must therefore be in ten years? Then in five years, two and a half years, and on down to what must I do later that very day (Smarten my appearance and get a haircut). 

It was a powerful exercise. It turns out that once we have a clearly defined goal, things happen rapidly; buffeting headwinds become smooth tailwinds. It took less than four years to achieve it all. I clearly should have set higher marks, but it already seemed overly audacious as I wrote that day.

Were I to repeat that exercise, twenty years takes us to 2042. What do we expect things to look like by then? It probably is not how we want them to look, but the specifics elude millions of us laypeople; there is too much we don’t and possibly can’t understand. It isn’t possible to reduce the instability, multiple cascading climate events, and the simultaneity of it all to a neatly delineated straight and narrow path. The thing about instability and uncertainty is they give us no line of sight into the specifics of the outcome. The danger of the absence of knowledge is replacing it with the arrogance of some false certitude unsupported by evidence. The evidence is we face a gargantuan task just up ahead of us. 

Acceleration

We gather from reports many things are occurring earlier and advancing more rapidly than predicted by the climate models. While nothing terribly untoward is happening to most of us – the climate crisis remains chiefly forecast predictions or prophecies of science. We accept the sea is warming, ice is melting, and greenhouse gasses are accumulating. But outside, the sky is blue and cloudless; flowers bloom, and birds chirp on the fresh green lawn; as climate crises go, this one is, to date, underwhelming—this paradox of the present blinds. Still, the emerging patterns of a steady acceleration of all the issues driving the crisis pick away at our calm. We can only hope a general lack of composure will eventually generate enough critical-mass anxiety to influence business and the way society works and that it happens soon enough. 

It shouldn’t seem overly audacious to believe that the common sense of the ordinary people will work to divert us from climate calamity. We know our leaders have proved pathetically meek in the face of humanity’s greatest challenge – so we are the last best chance. Any less audacious expectation does injustice to our complexity and humankind’s sometimes irrelevant brilliance. 

Action

As the crisis bites ever deeper into our lives, we are likely to discover new layers within ourselves, and within them, footholds for new possibilities. In the ceaselessly twinkling constellation of challenges ahead, we must protect and save what we love while maintaining our humanity, our power, poetry, poise, and grace. 

The age-old human quest of seeking the meaning of life may have to give way to an all-consuming purpose – granting us the experience of being fully alive as we confront the most urgent and consequential all-hands-on-deck moment.

What to do?

 Imagine immensities, save what you love, remember to stop and laugh sometimes, but don’t compromise or waste time.

The post No Calm Storms or Gentle Crisis first appeared on milkadamia.

The post No Calm Storms or Gentle Crisis appeared first on milkadamia.

Amazingly we are experiencing it right now and are deep into the existential fight for life on Earth, but it doesn’t feel like it. Yet many don’t want to hear much about it. Indeed, many don’t want to take personal action for fear of reducing modern convenience or lowering living standards. Despite plenty of high and low-level talk, deepening angst, and widespread emotional handwringing, we have been accelerating our demise by every measurable data point since we first learned of our impact on the climate. Now aware of our danger, we are in fact hastening towards the cliff. OK, this is our first climate-induced end of life on Earth experience; we will naturally make a mistake or two. I am sure we will do better next time. 

It all seems too immense to contemplate. We cannot independently grasp the knotty plumbing and impossibly complex global interactions of climate. We are at the mercy of science to inform. Ironic that, given that without science’s insatiable lust for the power of knowledge (and our adoration of technology), we wouldn’t be here in the first place. 

Wendell Berry states, “We live in the most destructive period of human history – therefore the most stupid.” How irritating is the truth so evident in that statement? It challenges everything we believe about the advancement of humanity and dulls the luster and sparkle of the technological wizardry that has so blinded us to our peril. We are more knowledgeable, connected, advanced, and educated than all previous generations combined – and more destructive – what the hey?

There is a misfit – the climate models are silicon-based and digital while we are carbon-based analog bags of emotions, feelings, and passions. Something’s getting lost in translation. How can a warm creature of blood, substance, and mass fathom a thing without substance or mass? It hasn’t helped that, for the most part, the climate crisis is presented as hotly debated, ever-revising climate models and changing projections. 

Then the media’s handling of the climate crisis is a seesaw of partial credence and proviso, always rounded off with the bland assurance that we still have time – if we act soon. We are left with a startling lack of exactitude and wracked with uncertainty about what to do while increasingly anxious that we’ve become mere pawns in a gradually but steadily unfolding terror.  

The advance of knowledge was supposed to usher in an idyllic epoch in the human occasion. We indeed went at it with vigor, digging deep into the Earth’s treasure-house; we developed a genius for inventing gadgets and creating novel uses for materials. For the most part, humanity was greatly advantaged, at least in the short term. Across large regions of the planet, famine and disease retreated, life expectancy advanced. We overcame and tamed the wildness of the Earth – separating it into human civilization and Nature as though they were each disconnected entities capable of independent existence. We aggressively exploited Nature to provide for human society. The piper is now demanding payment.

Just how nigh is the end?

Apocalyptic doom and end of the world predictions usually come from those living at the fringes of polite society or on the very edge of sanity. “The end is nigh” sandwich-board is a cartoon standard and prophets of doom rise and pass as regularly as the date marked in red on their end-of-the-world charts. We are, thus, primed to be skeptical of apocalyptic prophecy, and rightly so, it’s clear enough none has yet proved accurate.  

Daily weather reports are too frequently inclusive of overblown, dire warnings of severe weather events that are hyped and amplified for ratings. As the majority (not all) pass without serious incident, our confidence in the predictive capacity of supposedly authoritative voices and news entities diminishes. 

The media also pelts us with stories of impending financial ruin. There are always headlines predicting a catastrophic market crash. Catastrophe headlines pull in the punters, so the media dials to the max any prediction of disaster, no matter how speculative. Exciting predictions and rumors of wars fill many of the remaining media time slots or pages. Is it any wonder that when climatologists started crying wolf, our alarm response, jaded through years of media overstimulation, barely stifled a yawn? However, even inoculated as we are by over-exposure to all the trite and excited attention-grabbing headlines, the crisis of all crises requires our attention. 

Our world is choked horizon to horizon with pandemic surges, planet bruising climate whiplash, mountains of garbage, and oceans a-chock with pollutants and plastics. As free-range icebergs the size of countries calve and melt, they are altering vital ocean currents; collectively, it becomes clear something truly untoward is upon us this time. It is also clear we are a significant part of the problem and must become the solution.

Our tomorrows, and increasingly todays, are shaped by the pandemic gauntlet and the global climate crisis. Yet believing we have no influence is to surrender to the notion we are mere human debris driven by the currents and eddies of other people’s choices. 

Suppose we choose to work with Nature instead of against her, accepting that what is good for the natural world is ultimately good for us. In that case, we gain the most potent ally possible in our quest to alter the predicted climate trajectory.

Dishing dirt.

It may be humbling to acknowledge the centrality and importance of soil to life on Earth, but we, and our every aspiration, are entirely dependent on fertile ground. Over-exploitation of the soil has preceded the collapse of every previous civilization on Earth, and ours will not be an exception without change. In another irony, we currently scour lands for precious-earth ignoring the fact the most precious earth is the top six inches we greedily push aside. 

Milkadamia supports regenerative farming. Regenerative farming focuses on soil health which is the first and most critical step in the right direction.

Every dollar we spend on food to sustain our families also supports industries and agricultural systems. By demanding only Regeneratively Farmed products, we consumers hold a powerful lever for change in our own hands. Consumers can force change faster than any legislation or protest could achieve. The oft-used term “consumer buying power” is an apt description – consumer purchases drive a large enough chunk of commerce to impact the health of our planet significantly. Collectively we are not pawns at all – business serves us, not the other way round. 

We seek to change all destructive agriculture practices, yet cultivated land is scattered across borders, separated by oceans, rivers, cultures, politics, and seasons. No single entity has governance, but fortunately, none is required. The force that can convert agricultural practice to Regenerative Farming is also scattered across borders and oceans and separated by politics, race, mountain ranges, and rivers. It is we, the people.

It is evident we must remake the very soul of our times. The irreparably fragmented consciousness of humankind may only ever achieve unity of purpose in the commonality of love of land and life and desire for a future for their children’s children. We love and share the same sky. All rivers feed into the seas and intermingle. We are in this together. In the very endeavor of rejigging our relationship to the soil and engaging in restoring health to our lands we also experience profound reconnection.

 “What we do need to worry about is the possibility that we will be reduced, in the face of the enormities of our time, to silence or to mere protest”. Wendell Berry

 We hold a large enough chunk of our fate and future in our own hands to allow facing the future to be helpful, hopeful, and bearable. 

The post Remaking the Soul of Our Times first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Remaking the Soul of Our Times appeared first on milkadamia.

We know this in our bones and bodies instinctively, and we know it intellectually and rationally via the science and the evidence of our own eyes. We know it results from human industrial activity. We know those who profit from the industrial activity fiercely if clandestinely, resist any shadow of real change that they fear may impact their finances, positional power, and social standing. We know that they are tightly aligned with the inhabitants of the political sphere in this endeavor. Welded and stitched seamlessly through lobbyists, money, ambition, and that insatiable hunger for personal prestige. 

Like with like – the pillars of their character anchored in the same foundational creed, they scramble and strive for ever higher positions on their chosen totem of success. They well know the price includes some of their own humanity and the random diminishment of options for other humans, yet willingly continue to make that exchange.  

Civilizations are built upon and dependent on an excess of resources beyond the basic survival necessities of life. It requires a degree of stable abundance to enable any culture to exist and flourish, for markets and economies to function, and for investment in infrastructure and public works to be made at scale. We have, however, taken excess to extreme excess.  

A period of stable and largely benign climate greatly facilitated the advance of human civilization. A less stable and less benign climate will progressively test the functioning of culture and batter and degrade our infrastructure. It needn’t have come to this. Political leaders, and parties present and past all failed to demonstrate the vision, character, and courage the occasion required. Industry, education, politics, and the media, with few exceptions, have catastrophically failed us. They still control the agenda and set the pace for mitigation and attention to the crisis. 

The stark truth is, because of the climate crisis, our world will never again be as stable as it is today, never be more achingly beautiful, never be more benign or productive.  

COVID’s lockdowns taught many that small domestic pleasures, like inhaling the passing moments of breathless beauty surrounding us, have surprising gravitas. Pleasures inherent in attention to the progress of the seasons draw us toward a place of gratifying, gently exhilarating, and unexpectedly fulfilling contentment. There are pleasures aplenty buried and lost under the avalanche of the consumerism experience to be recovered. For instance, thrift is sniffed at as a relic of harder times, but we will learn its enjoyments and satisfactions again, through choice or grim necessity. Maybe it’s just me but reusing, repurposing, and restoring stuff strangely intrigues and brings delight, calls forth creativity, and delivers a sense of satisfaction. Something no amount of fevered purchasing ever bought.  

The hollow inside is not filled by items external to us. Wholeness comes from what we do and why we do it, not what we buy. Multitudinous storage units stacked to the ceiling with the soulless junk we traded the health of the planet to obtain are proof. Each item came with a promise to make us or our life better, easier, and more complete. There is no raw material so amenable to being uplifted by possibility and aspiration as is the human heart – and they exploited that as thoroughly and mercilessly as they exploit the Earth.

Hope and tenacity, those great vitalizing biceps of the human spirit reached their most muscular expression during the London blitz. With death and destruction raining down from the sky each night, people found strong fibrous character and stubborn resistance existed within them and among them. We need to find those reserves in and among ourselves once again.

No one is coming to save us – all who had the opportunity have failed, and they failed miserably and cowardly. If the Earth, so abundant with the life, awe, and beauty we love, is to be preserved, it’s now up to us.

What we consume will either consume us in turn or consummate change.   While they disregard our voices, they are vigilant about our choices. They pay careful attention to their market share and share price. It is our purchases that allow them to bloat and float. We, through what we purchase, give them the lolly to lobby. We give and we can take away. 

We can non-consume, apply thrift and creativity with earnestness of purpose. When we must buy, we won’t buy products from companies that are, and long have been, part of the problem – purchasing instead from businesses striving to be part of the solution.  

We should not make perfection the enemy of good – even the most genuinely concerned and earnestly striving companies have a long path. Stop dealing with them when they stop making progress. It’s the big dominant and established polluters, brands that are purveyors of single-use plastics, fossil fuels, and palm oil that need to hear a clear, immediate, and loud message. Stop trashing the planet – or we stop purchasing from you.  

However, it is not all gloom and doom. From the original Greek, the word ‘crisis’ has a second, less known meaning – a turning point, an opportunity. Let’s focus on grabbing the opportunity with both hands – it won’t come again. 

The post The Climate Opportunity first appeared on milkadamia.

The post The Climate Opportunity appeared first on milkadamia.

Halloween is a great celebration for kids – an adventuresome, slightly spooky calendar event that is anticipated and enjoyed in equal measure. For kids, the pain of heightened anticipation seems to make time slow to a crawl as the day approaches. Then the costumed, candy-filled evening speeds by, and it is a whole year before Halloween returns, an eternity to kids.    

Time is funny like that. We, adults, orient ourselves to time through understanding ourselves to be moored, albeit temporarily, within its passing current. We understand our past slipstreams out behind us while the future flows toward us with its metronomic, relentless intent.   

Occupying the space between the future and past is a brief sliver of time we call “the present.” It is where we live and where we are advised by life-coach types to always “show up” and “be.” Yet, the present is a single tick of the clock. It marks the spot and moment we intersect with time. The past, though illuminated, is behind us, and the future, yet to manifest, remains cloaked in impenetrable darkness ahead. All we actually occupy is the present.

Time is understood differently by the people of Papua New Guinea; for them, it flows in the opposite direction.  

Because the future is yet to be visible, they reason it must still be behind the eyes. Whereas the past which has already been seen is in front of their eyes. Therefore, for them, the future is always approaching from behind, and the past is laid out in front. Their present, however, like ours, is a single fleeting heartbeat.

The direction of the flow of time is something humans made up. The only constant we all share is the present, which as soon as it arrives becomes immediately part of the past and thus, beyond and behind us – or possibly in front.    

As certainly as we can know anything, we know that we cannot change the past nor, unfortunately, avoid its consequences. However, it is also generally agreed we can change the future – and we do that by being deliberate about what we do in the present.   

In my youth, riding a dirt bike at pace seemed to alter my relationship to time. The connection between present actions and future consequences was compressed sharply into focus as I tore heedlessly through the landscape. In those moments, I lived my life about 40 feet in front of myself, making constant adjustments to the bike’s direction and balance. Future, present, and past threatened to otherwise collide in a blur of trees, rocks, mud, and adrenaline. Life-coach types would surely have approved. I was fully present and totally focused – on the potential short-term consequences. 

However, consequence can also be long-term; consequence has a long memory and an implacable and exacting sense of justice that ensures we will indeed reap what we sow. It is this longer arch of consequence we face over the human-induced phenomenon we are living through. We are experiencing wildly oscillating, randomly dispersed, calamitous climate fluctuations percussing the present and darkening the future outlook.  

As scientists project ever more sophisticated and powerfully granular climate models forward, the resultant graphs and charts are a real horror, very Halloween-worthy. Wrap yourself in one of their scary scenarios as a Halloween costume and watch the fun evaporate. Or don’t do that because Halloween is for kids to enjoy. We go to great lengths to ensure they are jolly and safe, enjoying themselves in the company of their cutely costumed friends. We wouldn’t willingly do anything to spoil their innocent fun.  

The future also belongs to those same kids, and we most certainly don’t mean to spoil that for them either. The thing about the future is that it’s always arriving, ready or not, shaped in part by actions we took back when the past was temporarily the present.

While kids love the thrill of slightly scary events, will today’s cute little trick or treaters grow to face more terrifying events than they would ever choose? If we adults continue to live in the past or focus only on the present, that is the only future we will leave them. 

If, however, we choose to focus on the consequences of our choices about 20 years ahead of ourselves, adjust and seek balance to avert disaster, even the worst of what our kids may have to face will be bearable. 

It’s the kids who will be present when our past and their futures collide. It could be Halloween-like, minus the treats: an unendingly scary night – or not.   

All the evidence points to the same thing – the occasion for us to choose their future is right now – in this sliver of gifted time we call the present. 

We can yet spare our kids a lot of scary stuff. The challenge and the trick is, we will have to sacrifice some, maybe a lot, of our accustomed treats. Pounding ever louder on our front door is trick or treat on a global scale. Turning out the lights and ignoring it will not make it go away.

The post Halloween, Time first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Halloween, Time appeared first on milkadamia.

There are some lasts we ache to see – the last acre of forest destruction, the last record-high ice-melt, the last coral bleaching, the last extinction. Then there are some lasts where the very thought bruises and cuts us – the very last kiss, the last tree, bee, flower, or flamingo, real, not plastic lawn ornament.

Happily, some lasts clear space for new beginnings – last, is just the flipside of first.

Asking people to have their last glass of dairy milk ever, ends personal support of harm by farm and heralds first days of living with cruelty-free, eco-positive plant-milk.

At milkadamia we are here for trees, we are also here for soil, and we are here for celebrating the accumulating positive eco-impact of ever more people declaring their last glass of dairy milk. Which makes us curious, “What are you here for?”

Take no special note of our values – but do take special note of your own.  If you are ready for your last glass of dairy – we are ready to celebrate your “last glass” with all the enthusiasm the Olympic games muster to celebrate firsts – the difference is, this is not a game we are playing: If we gather enough people taking their last glass of dairy, all that we love will last.

This idea will become manifest in today’s social media channels, but really it is a personal decision. We are not concerned if you feel the need to broadcast it or internalize it. That’s yours. But our marketing folks put this together, bless their little hearts:

Take the milkadamia Last Glass Challenge & pour out your #LastGlassofDairyEver — Make the switch to milkadamia. It’s good for you & great for the planet.

Create and share a pic, video, or story of your #LastGlass of dairy milk and use the hashtag #milkadamia. Maybe it’s your Last Glass Last Dance! Or perhaps a Last Glass Limerick! Then @ or tag 2 (or more!) of your friends to let them know you’re ditching dairy.

We’ll pick winners (lasts) at random to get amazing stuff from our milkadamia store. #LastGlassChallenge #MooIsMoot #milkadamia

So this is the last of it. All you need to do is put the proverbial last straw in your #LastGlassOfDairyEver!

.

The post A Life That Lasts is Full of “Lasts ” first appeared on milkadamia.

The post A Life That Lasts is Full of “Lasts ” appeared first on milkadamia.

ONCE UPON A TIME, in the plant-based milk section of your local grocery store, soy reigned supreme. Then, just like that, it fell out of favor, and almond milk became all the rage. Now, with Oatly’s recent IPO and nationwide presence at Starbucks across the land, the faux milk of the moment is undoubtedly oat.

According to data commissioned by the Good Food Institute and the Plant-Based Foods Association from data-technology company SPINS, in the last year alone, sales of plant-based foods that replace animal products have grown 27% to $7 billion, a rate twice as fast as that of overall food sales. Milk alternatives represent the lion’s share of this swiftly expanding category at 35%.

We sampled a slew of dairy alternatives, evaluating how they fare in hot beverages, smoothies and cereal, as well as how they hold up on their own.

Along with the aforementioned usual suspects, options include milks made from rice, coconut, hemp, flax seeds, sesame seeds, peas and all manner of nuts. Still, whether you’re an omnivore or a vegan, lactose intolerant or quitting dairy for environmental reasons, you want an alternative that performs on par with good old cow’s milk in a variety of scenarios. We sampled a slew of options, evaluating how they fare when standing in for dairy in hot beverages, smoothies and cereal, as well as how they hold up on their own, with nothing to mask off flavors. The following were the most versatile and delicious.

For the Mission-Driven

In a nutshell, Milkadamia, maker of macadamia-nut products including milk, aims to restore health to the planet. CEO Jim Richards, who sources macadamia nuts from farms in Australia and South Africa, has made a commitment to regenerative agriculture, a practice that enriches depleted soil and draws carbon from the atmosphere back into the earth. These milks have a pleasant flavor that borders on tropical but goes with the flow in coffee or tea. The Latte da Barista has a velvety texture and foams well, while the Unsweetened Milkadamia is a solid sugar-free option. $27 for a 6-pack, shopmilkadamia.com.

The post Adding our Take on a Wall Street Journal Article first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Adding our Take on a Wall Street Journal Article appeared first on milkadamia.

Trees are a gorgeous and glorious adornment to any landscape; they also bind, feed, and shelter the soil biome. Trees stay in place for very long periods, all the while absorbing carbon and encouraging soil health. Trees actually exhale the sky, and they purify water; they create beneficial microclimates, where birds, bees, and insects abound.  

Of course, humankind cannot live on trees alone; however, we should, wherever possible, preferentially chose to support food products that come from trees. Doing this encourages the widespread wholesale planting of trees.

Four things we can do to make a difference to the timing and severity of the global eco-crisis is:

1. Cut meat and dairy consumption – way down, or better yet, stop altogether. 
2. Limit our use of fossil-fuel intensive transport, heating, and cooling.
3. Drop to our knees on the bare ground, scoop out a hollow – plant a tree – repeat. 

Do this every day – plant clusters of trees – do it frequently. Planting trees and caring for them connects us to the land and to the future. By dropping to our knees, there is a chance we may not so soon be brought to our knees. Visiting saplings as they start to take space, sprout life and reach for the sky is a more intense slow-burn joy than you would expect.  

1. Those who can’t plant trees can take equally appropriate action by choosing products without palm oil, thus saving tropical rainforests. Spending on palm oil products directly encourages the widespread wholesale destruction of billions of trees. 

 Following 2020 we are more aware of nature’s beauty, close kinship, and exquisite fragility. We will be the first generation to positively put the Earth’s needs before our own, or among the last even to have that option.  

If there is an upside – the climate countdown demands we experience the raw immediacy of being fully alive and fully engaged right now. We have all been unwillingly life-thrust into facing scary immensities with potentially fraught and monumentally consequential outcomes. We, it turns out, are last-responders. We may have to change everything. It will likely require the most seismic philosophical, cultural, and behavioral shift – ever. Aren’t we more primed and up for that than any previous generation? – bring it on.

Unlike previous generations, we cannot sleep-walk life in a glutinous stupor, believing eternity is at our disposal and Earth is provided for our plunder. We decidedly know otherwise; it will be our roar that echoes beyond these times, our defiance that alters the trajectory of events, or nothing will. Our focus is crisis-sharpened to the bright connection of everythingness. We will demonstrate the human spirit is most alive, potent, and present when facing blistering challenges and adversity – or prove it is not!

To misquote, quality of life is not simply about the economy anymore; “it’s the ecology stupid.” We are almost out of time to turn our love for Earth’s astonishing wonderments and matchless beauty from exploitation into practical, proactive nurturing and care.  

Knees – trees – please!

The post Knees, Trees, Please. first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Knees, Trees, Please. appeared first on milkadamia.

Horses were once ubiquitous; as precombustion-engine cities grew, so did the number of horses require for transport of all kinds. Farmers committed vast areas around cities to growing horse food, which had to be harvested and transported by still more horses. All that water, hay, and oats passing through the digestive tracts of over a hundred thousand horses in a city like New York produced more than 2 million pounds of manure a day, along with 25 thousand gushing gallons of urine. Horse manure was piled up to four stories high in vacant lots. Flies abounded, disease rampaged, and the dust blown from these piles coated everything outside and inside.  Dinner plates were laid on tables upside-down to avoid a dusting of dehydrated horse poop — city dwellers, often in their evening suits and dresses, negotiated streets reeking with fresh and stale horse excretions with raised hems and careful steps. 

The combustion engine liberated cities from horses, and equally importantly, it released horses from cities. While it seems contrary to our experience, the air became fresher, the streets cleaner, and the city more sanitary. It is interesting to note that electric vehicles hold out the same promise.  Still, as if we’re still stuck in 1897, horsepower as a measure still lingers. 

How does this relate to consumer package goods, circa 2021? Well, the idea that cow’s milk is the nutritional gold standard for humans also still lingers in some consumers’ memories yet is as antiquated a measurement as horsepower.  The gold standard for calves is cows’ milk, just as the mother’s milk is the gold standard for her baby, be they mother elephants, whales, or humans.   

Whole industries are developing around the lingering effect. Laboratory concocted “meat” is one of these. They anticipate the idea that animal flesh is a vital protein source and will be as durable as the term horsepower. However, the horse has already bolted, plant-based food choices and protein sources are off and running. 

Millions are enjoying the adventure of new foods. Vegetarians, vegans, reducetarians, and foodies of all kinds are creating interesting, nutritious, tasty meals – they are not longing for, or referencing back to, flesh and blood; they seek instead fresh, clean-ingredient, natural foods from plants.  

Maybe it’s because horses can’t fly that NASA has abandoned horsepower; they rate rocket power in millions of pounds of thrust. The investors in Lab-meat are rating that opportunity in billions of dollars of profit. They are betting the concept has the horsepower, or pounds of thrust, to overcome its Dr. Frankenstein style lab origins. It is alive; it is alive! 

But is this lab-flesh alive in any sense? Is it fully animal, fully plant-based, or just the undead? If you prod it, does it twitch? Is it bovine, equine, canine or porcupine – all we know so far is it’s clandestine?  

Our current food all originates with life from the natural world.  Foods labeled plant-based are clearly and exclusively from plants.  What is the correct category for mystery lab flesh? Before galloping along and putting this gift horse in our mouths, we at least want to know, is it horse?  Does the concept make good horse sense? Or is it simply a Trojan horse masquerading under the plant-based banner? 

The post The Linger Effect first appeared on milkadamia.

The post The Linger Effect appeared first on milkadamia.

Regenerative agriculture is farming practices that rehabilitate entire ecosystems by returning nutrients to the earth rather than depleting them. Regenerative is farming without synthetics and chemical sprays, diversifying crop rotations, cover cropping, and, where appropriate reintegrating large ruminants with rotational grazing.

Industrial agriculture wants everyone else to pay up and shut up. Even in matters that directly impact our families’ well-being and their future – like how they produce our food. It is no secret the industrial mono-cropping agricultural system is seriously depleting the nation’s soils. What may not be as widely known is the food grown today is less nutrient-dense with lower amounts of vital items like protein, phosphorus, iron, calcium, riboflavin, and vitamin C than just half a lifetime ago. Robust, healthy soils make robust, healthy human populations. Agricultures’ most valuable asset is healthy soil, but industrial agriculture treats this vital asset like dirt.

The industrial mono-crop agriculture system is a politically entrenched apparatus supporting heedless aggressive exploitation of the land, massive chemical application, and waste. They are driven by greed that obstinately obstructs the change consumers so ardently desire.

What we can do about it is purchase regenerative or organic foods and speak out. We can no longer shut the folk up and eat whatever is put in front of us.

The post Shut the Folk Up first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Shut the Folk Up appeared first on milkadamia.

Ambushes, frights, and being chased by a sibling, who at that moment represented all the terrors of the night, ensured we were flushed, wild-eyed, and fully hyped by bedtime. The nightmares we conjured as entertainment became real enough for our Mother as she attempted to quiet six uncooperative ratcheted kids and settle each in bed.

When the noise level threatened to lift off the roof, our Mother would throw open the door she had shuttered behind and yell at us to “BE QUIET” then she would add the line we came to despise. “What will the neighbors think?”.

In Mom’s defense, on many evenings, it sounded like a massacre was taking place.  Yet we came to resent the neighbors deeply – “they” spoiled our fun.  We perceived, in the way children do, that they were judging us. The neighbors became the focus of all our kid grudges against the world.  They of course, knew nothing of this, and the daily file of sullen, scowling school-bound children must have been a fount of some wonderment to them.  

“What will the neighbors think’?  Was so overused by our Mother we eventually cared not a whit what the neighbors thought.  We became emboldened to do what we wanted, even in (especially in) the teeth of others’ clear disapproval. 

I have since met many talented, capable people who are so in thrall of their version of what the “neighbors” might think they will not take the risk to be fully themselves. They are tiptoeing through life – a collection of performed duties and an endless round of people appeasing.  Taking the least frowned upon path to the sanctuary of the grave.  I have often wished I could reach in and flick the to-heck-with-the-neighbors switch and free them to be fully, gloriously, messily themselves, but I digress.

One of the larger questions ever asked cuts to the chase – who is my neighbor?

We are discovering the impending climate nightmare scenario is not kid-stuff, but global in scope, and devastating in scale.  We are all in a single atmosphere together, we are not climatically independent, there are no boundary fences, to separate our fates, no sheltering hedges.   On the planetary scale Earth it turns out is just one home, humanity one family.

We thought knowledge and technology might prove us separate and above interdependence – extinction of vitality on our lush raft in space could be the high price of our conceit.  What we each do from here on in percusses everyone else. Loving and looking out for our neighbors is loving and looking out for yourself  – this can’t be separated either.

Maybe if other planets are inhabited, they consider us neighbors.  Watching what we are doing to our beautiful world must be a wonderment to them.  If we do not collectively turn this around, Mother Earth might well enquire of us – what must the neighbors be thinking?

The post What Will The Neighbors Think first appeared on milkadamia.

The post What Will The Neighbors Think appeared first on milkadamia.

It is said that if we have the opportunity to look back from the summit of our lives, we will see unfurled a lifelong quest for meaning, purpose, and belonging.   Some look most earnestly for meaning, peering under rocks, thumbing pages, enquiring of the ancients, and traveling to all points of the compass.  The tools they employ in the hunt, their curiosity, their eyes, hands, openness of mind, persistence, and vitality are not solely for seeking answers on how and why you are supposed to live, these very tools can be redirected to actually getting on with it – living.  The experience of being alive, fully alive is what is truly transcendent, and the ultimate goal of the quest.

At the speed of time, our past expands, our future, diminishes. It is in the region between, the present, that we either risk being alive by opening to the idiosyncratic individual we are born to be, or we don’t.

The final words of too many are “I wish I had lived the life I wanted”. In the place of knowing who and what they could have been, is a yellowing page of performed duties and met expectations.  Mostly others, expectations!

Purpose meaning and belonging are syncopated with being yourself.  Our uniqueness is our piece of humanity’s jigsaw, our gift, and contribution. What holds so many back is fear and risk. Risk of better options, risk of being exposed as an amateur, the risk of ridicule, the risk of not being enough, of being unloved, hurt, and feeling unappreciated, these fears imprison.  Yet the bars have no more substance than smoke. They are only ideas – comfortable thought hammocks that cradle and soothe us with our accumulation of self-lies and little fears.  Yet they loom so large in our minds we think great courage is required to break free, where tiny baby steps will do just fine.  Gathering all our resolve, huffing up muscle and bluster, is unnecessary,  just a little momentum, works best.  If the journey to ourselves starts out as terribly humanly messy and imperfect – great, you are getting warm.

Perfectionism is the greatest enemy of creativity it is also the greatest enemy of yourself.  Allow imperfections – don’t try to make the imperfect perfect – strive instead to make the imperfections beautiful. Do that and somewhere along the way things turn about and meaning, purpose and belonging begin seeking you.

The post Allowing for Imperfections first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Allowing for Imperfections appeared first on milkadamia.

1. We can turn a blind eye.
2. We can accept the ethical custom that the imperative of delivering profits to shareholders trumps all and every other consideration. We can cut our production costs by using palm oil. Doing so is the business-accepted path, and no one in business will blame us for taking it.
3. We can accept the thin curtain of respectability that Sustainable palm oil affords. Even as we know, it is a lie constructed to appease consumers. It is not attending to the multiple eco and inhuman issues with any genuine urgency or meaningfully.
4. We can choose not to lose the reins of our character even as we are confronted with the subjugation and diminishment of children, women, girls, boys, and men. We can choose not to partake, even indirectly, in extinguishing their hope, prospects, possibilities, and potential. We are small and do not have the heft to bring muscle and bluster. We can, however, use our words. We can declare our opposition. We can shine some light on this systematic abuse and exploitation of the vulnerable. We can help bring the hidden into the light. Accepting this happening in our time, on our watch, and that we know about it should pain us all. Ignorance is no longer an option, and silence is support. About 50% of grocery goods contain palm oil. It is subjugation bent backs that support the low price designed to attract our patronage. The duty of straightening the backs of palm oil workers belongs, in part, to all who have, and continue, to support the abuse through their purchases. We each have been inadvertently building up a tab, an IOU to the indentured, enslaved, trapped, and exploited Palm oil workers. Every dollar we spend on products with Palm oil affirms and encourages the companies and countries that profit from the wretchedly eco-destructive and stunningly abusive palm oil production. For our small business, opposition to palm oil will be a most challenging, most fraught route, and we have no line of sight as to how it will play out. The forces arrayed to protect the profits companies make from Palm oil are formidable. The hired apologists for Palm oil are talented and well rewarded. There is a gross imbalance of power between the wealthy owners and the vulnerable kids and women. As always, power corrupts, creating tyrants drunk on money and power. We are not ennobled, leaving kids to marinate uncomfortably in the toxic mix of bullying, crime, exploitation, and abuse without at least trying. There is hope, no power, or authority, and no military might, can stand once its moral authority amongst the people is lost. It is a truism that the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead We maintain an unswerving conviction that human dignity is an absolute, not a piecemeal notion; it is all – or it is nothing. Palm oil is a terrible situation for workers. Palm oil is disastrous for tropical forests and calamitous for the planet. Palm oil is corrosive to the principles of our business leaders who are required to harden themselves against the plight of women and kids for shareholder profit. Our collective contribution is needed to save our business leaders. To help palm oil employees and save our civilization. The word civilization does not apply to any culture that allows the level of inhumanity to women and kids that palm oil does: and, untimely, to save ourselves. For milkadamia, it is not the conviction that this will turn out well for our business, rather the certainty that we can do no other regardless of how it turns out. What can you do?
5. You can write to the companies that use Palm oil and tell them what you think and plan to do about it. As you do this, take no particular note of our values, but take special note of your own.
6. Don’t underestimate the power of your voice, of your choice – of the power of one who dares.
7. Switch to brands and products that don’t use Palm oil. This action will complicate shopping greatly, it will be hard and require sacrifice on your part, and it will likely cost more. It may test how much you care and reveal something that may surprise – how, once gripped by conviction and purpose, you are entirely sufficient for any challenge and unstoppable. Be encouraged to speak to businesses in the language they listen to most attentively and react rapidly to their sales, market share, and reputation.
8. Research Palm oil – information is at your fingertips.
9. Talk, write, and tell your truth. Note: Sustainable Palm oil may one day be consequential in bringing about a degree of positive change. However, currently, it is mostly a toothless and truthless exercise in consumer placation. The more virgin tropical forest is being felled by supposed Sustainable Palm oil than the others. There is just no such thing as sustainable tropical forest destruction at this stage of Earth’s history – indeed, there never was.

The post We All Have Choices first appeared on milkadamia.

The post We All Have Choices appeared first on milkadamia.

While Thanksgiving is a national celebration, it is experienced in a private family setting.  The traditions, rituals, and particular values and mannerisms of our family are the building blocks of those memories, treasured or trashed, that make thanksgiving such an intensely personal national holiday. While no place in the U.S. is completely safe from the abrasion and spark of ideology clash these days, thanksgiving thankfully allows a reset and reconnection at the family level.  We, within the embrace of our family, are reminded what we all want to be free for, not just what we want to be free from. The “free” we as a nation demand includes the sort of freedom that has the space and grace to allow the side-dish of mixed-nuts we call family, to blossom freely into their full idiosyncratic whimsy. Whimsy that we sometimes find embarrassing, frequently find frustrating, but will always accept and ultimately love dearly.

The acceptance of differences that we learn in the family setting becomes the cornerstone of acceptance of differences encountered outside our immediate family. There is an awful lot going on in 2020 – a lot of it awful.   The lessons available at Thanksgiving can help us to be the nation we set out to be.

The post Reminding Us of What Binds first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Reminding Us of What Binds appeared first on milkadamia.

We gather these chips rather than waste them and turn them into a paste, then into milkadamia. It takes effort to separate the tiny shell chips and macadamia chips, but by doing so, we ensure nothing gets wasted. The shell pieces become part of the biochar used to fertilize our macadamia trees. The macadamia chips become milkadamia.

Taking something considered a waste stream and turning it into a beautiful, useful product is both enjoyable and motivating. The macadamia chips are perfectly good high-quality food, just the wrong size and shape for most uses.

Once we started making something beautiful out of rejected chips, we were motivated to look for other opportunities, as you do. When people chose to undertake even a little thing, like doing away with plastic straws, it is a good thing in itself, but these types of actions’ significant contributions reside in the truth that movement begets more movement. We turn inertia into momentum.

Googles momentum definition – “The strength or force that something has when it is moving.” By taking one action to help combat food waste, our team has become captive to the power of momentum that impels us to strive for more.

Offering an alternative to dairy milk and promoting and practicing earth positive regenerative-farming led to speaking out against the insanely destructive palm oil industry and sourcing and manufacturing alternatives to palm oil products. Momentum, Google claims, also allows something “to continue moving or grow stronger or faster as time passes.” Hope so.

As in many life-defining moments – starting the ball rolling is a beginning. Maybe it will instigate a life impelled by adventure and enriched through meaning and your values manifesting in action.
At milkadamia, momentum is causing us to aim ever higher. We want to be part of altering the trajectory of the global climate crisis. As we said, some things are hard, and some are incredibly hard, and maybe we are just clutching at (non-plastic) straw’s, but we rather risk that than inertia because we already know what happens when we do nothing.

The post Chip Happens first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Chip Happens appeared first on milkadamia.

Please watch.

The post The ‘deadly’ food we all eat first appeared on milkadamia.

The post The ‘deadly’ food we all eat appeared first on milkadamia.

A lace of shifting shadows spun of sunlight, breeze, and leaves

Each silhouette in shadow but a moment on the grass

Like portend dreams of slumber that surface – then they pass

A “stand of trees” a point that’s fixed amid the flux of life

Sentinels of centuries take the long view of our strife

They gift us shade and majesty, point to heights we cannot know

Trap secrets of the universe, stand steady in the flow

Their stillness is prescient in histories sad gyration

And trees there be near you and me that’ll eclipse “civilization”

Our passing goes unnoticed long before they fall

Living with our trees we are not central after all

Alone they stand upon this land rooted in one place

Curing our souls, soil, and air while all around we race

What in life is not improved by a moment in their shade

Just you and me, a macadamia tree – our cathedral in the glade

The post you, me and a macadamia tree first appeared on milkadamia.

The post you, me and a macadamia tree appeared first on milkadamia.

Meanwhile the crash, roar, and thunder that accompanies so much of our usual activity remains muted and hushed.  That all this comes at a high price in human lives and is accompanied by grief and loss, ensures any acknowledgment that the Earth is being gifted some much-needed breathing space, must also be appropriately muted and hushed.

Earth Day – every day.

Milkadamia.

The post Happy Earth Day to You… first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Happy Earth Day to You… appeared first on milkadamia.

Click here to read the full article.

The post Taking on Palm and Dairy first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Taking on Palm and Dairy appeared first on milkadamia.

Keeping updated on the emerging data of our climate crises and the actions taken to alleviate its impact, permits a similar idea to bud.  Within our own planet, there also exists worlds in parallel, upside-down and opposite worlds. In one the need for immediate and decisive action on the climate crisis is obvious, while another parallel world prefers its citizens just keep calm and carry on.  In one world we are invited to take up the yoke of responsibility and the other world prefers we just leave things and let the-as-yet-unborn deal with it all.  In one, the doctrines and processes of governments and politics employ cemented static mindsets even as the climate proves a tumultuous cascade of dynamic processes potentially propelling us to who knows what.  Parallel but opposite worlds.

Between the extremes is yet another world, the one we common folk commonly inhabit.  It is our neighborhood, where we live and work, our town, our city.  A place mostly comforting and familiar because over time it has been sculpted and shaped by the actions, motives and cares of local people to fit local needs.  This is our sphere of influence and the world we want to preserve.

We care about orangutans, koalas and polar bears, we really do, but the sheer breadth, scale, and complexity of the problems overwhelm. The many eco-urgencies progressively lose impact as they increase in scale and are located far beyond our reach.  Most of us have skill and geographical constraints on our ability to positively impact big issues like rising sea levels, melting glaciers and bleaching corrals.   We are best placed, and frankly most incentivized, to start where we are and work from the bottom up. Where we can be busy is in saving those things near us that we love, and then enlarging the space of our influence as we go.

Of course, we understand ecosystems are not respecters of town boundaries nor do they care about the depth of our attachment to local amenities like river-walks, and parklands.  We know our homes and towns cannot be insulated from the causal network in which everything is bound together.  Yet that same causal network allows that we can remain local and still have global influence if we choose our actions wisely.

Transportation of all forms is the cause of about 14% of the human-generated carbon, and incredibly Palm oil production is the cause of about the same amount of carbon going into the sky!

Our use of transport is not always a choice, it is hard to imagine life without some form of transport.  However, our use of palm oil is always a choice furthermore it’s easy to imagine life without it, after-all humans thrived until the 1960s with most not knowing palm oil even existed.  Not only is palm oil a choice, ultimately and critically, but it’s also our choice.

One important reason we need to actively save that which we love is, the actions of one person always influences the information base of another and on and on the impact grows.  Starting one thing will encourage and engage others and collectively we can improve the long-term destiny of our world with our own self-generated cascade of dynamic processes.

Palm oil is an unnecessary and offensive ecological disaster, the production of this one item is causing as much climatic damage as every single motorcycle, car, truck, train, boat, and airplane on earth.  Further tropical forests have been and are being burned recklessly and extensively to make way for ever-more palm oil monoculture.  The palm oil industry is boasting that our demand for palm oil is set to quadruple, vast and beautiful tropical Peat forests will be burnt to meet that demand, our demand, but only if we allow it.  All this mindless destruction is they say just the law of supply and demand in action.

Obviously, we are not consciously demanding millions of acres of tropical forests be burned on our behalf each year – if we could make the rules, we would, in fact, demand the very opposite.   But we do inadvertently incentivize and fund the destruction through our purchase of items made with palm oil – and we purchase lots of them.

Palm oil is in so many products it is really quite hard to avoid.  Manufacturers love to use palm oil because it is quite versatile and very cheap. But of course, Palm oil actually has, a hidden, but extraordinarily high eco-price, it is costing us the earth.

Palm oil is likely an ingredient in most of your favorite brands.  But if we commit to doing this thing, this one hard-ish thing, that will complicate shopping a bit and require persistence on our part – if we switch to palm oil-free products – we, together, will compel a positive and pertinent eco-impact that is equal to shutting down all transportation globally. Without leaving home we collectively can send a crystal-clear message to manufacturers. They respond to dips in their sales and market share with an alacrity and intensity we wish they reserved for measuring and reducing the eco-impact of their ingredients.

We, the people, can create new laws of supply and demand – any company that supplies products containing palm oil will see demand diminish, and their bright cheerful logo can come to symbolize the dark badge of corporate greed.   It is only our patronage and goodwill that gives power to brands, and it is our purchases that gift fortune to the companies behind them – they prosper only as they serve our needs and wants.  Change those wants and we change a great deal besides.

Watch out for claims of sustainable palm oil.  The truth is there is no such thing as sustainable tropical forest destruction.  Call BS on that sort of virtue signaling nonsense.

Not buying palm oil products will demonstrate even the biggest global issues are not beyond our reach or influence.  As we get strategic about palm oil, corals, glaciers, sea levels and even Borneo’s (oxymoron named) pigmy elephants will directly benefit.  Those koalas, polar bears and orangutans we care about will get to breathe easier also, as will we all.

We may have our backs against the climatic wall (so to speak) but neither the scope of the ecological problems, nor our ineffective leaders loitering in their parallel world, should cause us to ignore the problems that we, and possibly only we, can effectively attend.  We may not be able to address everything – but believe me, we can address this one big thing.

Historically the extraordinary courage of ordinary people manifests clearest in crises when we are rising to defend neighbors, neighborhoods, and homes – like now.  The intensity of stubborn determination and ingenuity we common folk can collectively bring to this fight is one of humanity’s super-powers.

Besides, we have to make our infinite number of parallel selves feel good about us, even that fortunate us living in the world populated by cute purple pygmy elephants.

The post Palming Off first appeared on milkadamia.

The post Palming Off appeared first on milkadamia.