A little miffed at the strictness of a BB in Food Prep

I don't get why the whole plastic and metal thing.

My most favorite bread pan is metal and it makes the most delicious crust. I had to dig out a stoneware baking pan that I rarely use because of how difficult it is to get clean to the BB and I'm going to fail anyway. I don't have a single glass or ceramic mixing bowl. They are all industrial grade metal.

My lasagna pan? Metal because you get those crispy edges.

My measuring cups are all plastic. Some well over 20+ old that work like a champ. I just don't get it.

Go out and buy new stuff to prove something to people in Montana or just use what I have and feel satisfied in my own stellar abilities to feed my family on what I make with my two hands and clearly substandard materials?

For some BB, I get that there needs to be parameters but I think in the case of food prep, can we lighten that a bit? Its not like I'm microwaving frozen dinners every night.

I'm very salty tonight.

Are we talking about this?
https://permies.com/wiki/102544/pep-food-prep-preservation/PEP-Badge-Food-Prep-Preservation

The following are strictly forbidden:

- Aluminum cookware
- Teflon and similar materials
- Microwave ovens
- Plastic touching the food, including cooking utensils and zip lock bags

Seems like stainless steel would work fine.

Aluminum and Teflon are pretty toxic anyway, so I imagine it's not something the SKIP team would want to encourage.

yes and when I looked at the first two pages of people who made pizza and got a BB for it?

Lots of baking on metal pans, mixing in metal bowls, plastic bowls. Dough rising with plastic covering it. They all received BBs.

I'm DEFINITELY NOT saying take theirs away, I'm saying get rid of that requirement.

I own not a single glass mixing bowl, too likely to break. Same with ceramic. Metal doesn't break.

Where are you seeing it says don't use metal?

Holly Magnani wrote: My most favorite bread pan is metal and it makes the most delicious crust.  

What sort of "metal"?

Lead, I *really* don't recommend it.
Cast Iron - I don't have one, but it's in my dreams...
Stainless - I've used stainless pots for lots of BB's and not had a problem.
Aluminium - There's controversy here, and I'd already been removing it from my kitchen before I started doing BB's. It's one of those, "better safe than sorry" things to my thinking.
Teflon - it's not only nasty to use, it is *totally* nasty in the manufacturing process, and is "planned obsolescence" at it's worst. Permaculture is "permanent" and teflon cook ware is anything but.  

Maybe take a few deep breaths and figure out how you want to cook? If you want to cook permie-style, it may take some adjustments. My girlfriend used to us a mug as her "measuring cup" and it worked just fine for her. Teaspoon in old cookbooks meant exactly that.

You can choose to make some new choices or you can choose to be miffed.

Aluminum is in the requirements. I have no idea what metal my bowls are made from.

"Maybe take a few deep breaths and figure out how you want to cook?" from my garden, with my hands and my heart with what I have on hand.

A glass or ceramic measuring cup isn't going to make that meal any more special. Nor should it to anyone else.

I cook from scratch almost every day. I have zero teflon cookware. It's all cast iron or stainless steel....

Holly, I think perhaps taking a step back and give yourself the gift of time might help.

The wording of SKIP is chosen very carefully, and the passage you cite took I don't know how many 2 hour meetings.  I only attended four of them because the care taken at choosing the words almost made my head explode.  Part of doing SKIP and PEP is showing the ability to read the instructions and follow them.  I think the first half is the challenge here, not the second.

From what you say here, I'm worried this salty miffedness is making it hard to read the words as written.  There seems to be a different meaning in the words you write here to what SKIP describes.

My suggestion is to take the night off and ask yourself why do you want to do PEP?   A bit of distance might be what's needed to fix this.  

Making life harder for the volunteer moderators who run permies (different than the volunteers who work on the SKIP stuff) is not helping.  

Industrial grade metal in the kitchen is rarely aluminum, in the USA, so if your mixing bowls are metal, it's highly doubtful they're aluminum. I've only ever owned 1 aluminum bowl, and it was mid-1900s production.

Plastic is toxic and bad for the environment. Period.

Carla Burke wrote:Industrial grade metal in the kitchen is rarely aluminum, in the USA, so if your mixing bowls are metal, it's highly doubtful they're aluminum.

Agreed! If you tap your bowls or pots with an implement and they "sing" a little bit, like a bell or tuning fork, they're steel. Aluminum pots/pans (I have some) have a flat, dull sound; they never resonate.

If it’s any consolation, getting a rejection is hard. I feel your pain. Early on I had a bb rejected that caused me to throw in the towel for about a year. Now I don’t even recall which bb that was.

It’s also hard to look at the first food posts with plastic in them with grandfathered in approvals. No doubt, feelings of unfairness arise. This program and its standards have also gone through a maturing process. Standards are important and it would now be unfair for the standards to become lax.

Somehow you’ve just gotta reframe it in a way that serves you. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. Skip caused me to rethink the things that I thought were benign and I’ve since overhauled a good deal of kitchen items and I’m slowly working on replacing the remaining plastic bits.

Hopefully you can keep up the good fight and hang in the program! Good luck!

Holly Magnani wrote:I have no idea what metal my bowls are made from.
[...]
I have zero teflon cookware. It's all cast iron or stainless steel....

So the cast iron and stainless should be a-okay!!

Identifying your metal bowls might be tricky, but I wrote up a post which might help you!
https://permies.com/t/271086/Identifying-Types-Cookware

I hadn't heard this suggestion, but it sounds like it would work:

Douglas Alpenstock wrote: If you tap your bowls or pots with an implement and they "sing" a little bit, like a bell or tuning fork, they're steel. Aluminum pots/pans (I have some) have a flat, dull sound; they never resonate.

I'd love if you could add that one to my thread, Douglas, I don't have personal experience yet, and don't want to bang on pots and pans this late :)

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

Carla Burke wrote:Industrial grade metal in the kitchen is rarely aluminum, in the USA, so if your mixing bowls are metal, it's highly doubtful they're aluminum.

Agreed! If you tap your bowls or pots with an implement and they "sing" a little bit, like a bell or tuning fork, they're steel. Aluminum pots/pans (I have some) have a flat, dull sound; they never resonate.

They do sing and I find that kind of annoying. Glad to know they aren't aluminum. I guess I'll head to the thrift store and see if I can find a glass measuring cup or two.

Having taken the night off, a good night's sleep, and a four-day headache that finally abated, I think I can answer the question of why I want to do SKIP.

I told my daughter that it's like grown-up scout badges.  There are days that I feel like working on them is all I want to do, then other days when I am petulant and say "forget it!" The odds of me inheriting property are small so I do them to feel like I am progressing and learning. I think at this point, I am trying to get "Life Credits".

There's some sort of thing, I don't know what it's called... where someone was told they are an amazing photographer, they must have a great camera. And, he said, at dinner, "This is an amazing meal, you must have a great stove." And I feel that.

I have a tiny kitchen, a crappy stove whose oven is never the right temperature, and a collection of modern and vintage cook-stuff from which I make wonderful meals....but it's not the stuff, it's the hands that make it.

As for plastic, I get it. I live on a budget and can't replace every piece of plastic in my house at the moment. I do what I can with what I've got and somedays, I just want freakin' credit for that.

Daaang, thank you, thank you, I've gotten such a good chuckle from this post.  Most Excellent

I ordered your book today!!!

At my local thrift store, tea cups, like fancy china ones, are cheaper than measuring cups.  Many of them are one cup by volume.  I learned this from my grandparents who didn't have measuring cups.  

Here's my favourite with 2/3rds cup measure of pasta.  The fractions come with practice and double checking when I was phasing out plastic from the home.

One of the advantages of PEP is also it's disadvantage.  Permaculture Expierence according to Paul.  

Paul is the first person to come up with this idea and put years worth of work into it.  With massive help from Mike and countless other volunteers, he made it a reality and something else comes from this too (I'll get to that).  Quite often, it's the person that puts the work in that gets to decide how things get done.  The fact that something like SKIP and PEP exist at all is pretty darn awesome.  Finally an alternative to the bloated systems of education out there.  Something accessible.  

Mostly accessible.  

And that's where people stepped up and said "you know what Paul, I love that idea, but I don't ... objection of their choice goes here."  

Maybe they are on a different stage of their journey up the eco-scale or live in a totally different climate.  Or reside in the concrete jungle.  

Of all the people saying "but I..." a few of them stepped up and said "I care enough, I will do the work" and Permaculture Experience for Apartment dwellers (PEA) was born.  

This brings us to the other thing that came out of Paul making PEP - it opened the door for people to say "but I...However, I care enough to do the work and fix it so it works in my climate."  And slowly at first, more options are coming into this world.  

I hear there is another version almost ready to publish in a few months.  This mystery person has been putting in a shittonne of work to make it.  It looks amazing!  It might be more your style.  


learn more about PEA here

I think if you're doing PEP, it absolutely HAS to be to the standard Paul would want in his kitchen. And he doesn't want his food coming into contact with plastic.

I do have a set of stainless measuring cups, but I had a quick rummage around the place to see what what alternatives I could find for measuring out food.



It turns out that my little cabbage cup holds exactly 1/3 cup, which is perfect for morning muesli.

The big cabbage cup holds a bit more than a 'proper' measuring cup, so I'd either have to use it not completely full or if I was cooking something like a batch of rice where the actual amount is less critical than the proportion of rice to water then I'd just use one cabbage-cup of rice to two cabbage-cups of water.

It turns out that my cute (and delicate...) little chinese dragon cup holds exactly one cup. I wouldn't like to use it for regular measuring, but it would get me through a BB if the only alternative was a plastic measuring cup.

I also have a tall glass with various measures printed on the side. Not including cups, as it happens, because they're not really a thing in Europe. I found it in the euro section in a supermarket years ago and haven't managed to break it yet.

And then if all else fails, I have a digital scale, which is mostly used when I need to weigh out caustic soda for making soap, which has a pretty critical requirement for accuracy.

If anybody appreciates the values in these standards, please click on the thumbs up for this post.  

(pie and apples would be nice also)