Guilt free chocolate, how about it.  I totally enjoy my almost daily raw chocolate almond smoothie sweetened with honey.  It is the most delicious thing and it is so good for you.  For all of you who think chocolate is bad, well it isn’t if you eat it in its original form, perhaps it is all the gross stuff that is added that makes us feel bad.  Check out what leading expert and chocolate lover David Wolfe has to say about the worlds most eaten foods.

David Wolfe on Raw Cacao

Gosh we have really had a full on view of environmental pollution in the mainstream media as of late.  What is the point I ask myself, we all watch and go “oh no” that is awful, but can there be a answer before it really is too late.  Well on many levels I think we have reached too late.  It can be noted that as our people as a nation get sicker, our medical bill rises, our children get larger and it has become normal to wake up feeling terrible, there does not seem an end in site.  I applaud the makers of this documentary “http://www.thegrafboys.org/  Are we even able to think for ourselves anymore as the threat of not having food on the table and the rent/mortgage paid looms over our capacity to stand up and shout.  Lets make life interesting, lets shout, lets make noise, noise in our own homes about how we live and consume.  We are at the foresfront of a new society that will lead us and our children’s children into the future.  An extremely exciting time.  However when we have people openly choosing destruction and poison as a way of life then the consequences of this are devastating.  Lets hope for future generations sake that more and more people open their mouths and shout for positive change.

Mansfield’s all-time champion fruit grower was Jacob Deane of Fruit Street. As I’m sure you’ve already figured out, the street took its name from his extensive orchards. Until the mid-1800s, Fruit Street was called, for reasons clear only to our forebears, the Medfield High Road.

Jacob started out by teaching school in Taunton. That town’s wealthiest citizen, whose teenage son attended his classes, took a dislike to the young Mansfield man and decided he had to go. He ordered the son, who was a big kid, to beat up the teacher. Male schoolmasters in those days had to be skilled pugilists and wrestlers. Jacob flattened the boy. The father pressed charges. A judge ruled in Dean’s favor, greatly enhancing his local popularity, because nobody liked the old man or the son.

Perhaps irresistably drawn by the lure of his ancestral lands, Jacob, after teaching in Taunton, Easton, Stoughton and Mansfield, gave up his career as an educator and became a horticulturist.

Jennie Copeland tells us, “He sold his Greek and Latin books, in which he had been delving for the roots of languages, and turned his attention to the roots in the soil of the old homestead.”

From his father, John Dean, Jacob had inherited the house and 135 acres of farmland on what was called Eight Mile Plain. Overlaid on a modern map of Mansfield, his estate would swallow our municipal airport plus adjoining land on both sides of Fruit Street. On this tract Deane planted 100 varieties of apple trees, as well as cherry, peach, pear, plum and mulberry trees. The presence of the latter suggests that he may have been one of the many farmers to experiment with raising silkworms, which feed on mulberry leaves.

Some of his fruit trees he imported from England. Maybe in this connection, he wrote Queen Victoria about trees, though there’s no evidence that Her Majesty, who had matters of Empire on her mind, deigned to reply. Jacob also opened a nursery where he sold ornamental and fruit trees. To increase his farm’s diversity, he hired East Mansfield’s universal man, Isaac Stearns, to graft trees for him.

In 1835, when Jacob Deane was 55, the Taunton Branch Rail Road decided they wanted to run a track through his land. The railroad would connect the Boston & Providence rails at Mansfield depot with Taunton and eventually with the rich whaling port of New Bedford.

“No way!” was Jacob’s response. He was convinced that smoke from the wood-burning locomotives would blight the orchards to which he’d devoted so much of his life. He hadn’t yet learned what all Florida citrus growers know – that smoke helps protect fruit trees from frost.

The corporation realized that Jacob had them over a barrel. His estate was too big to detour around. If he persisted in stonewalling them, they might as well take their trains and go home. Rather than get embroiled in a long costly court dispute, they sweetened the deal.

They told Jacob they’d build him an 8 by 12-foot private station where he, his family and relatives, simply by displaying a flag, could stop any train and get aboard. It may have been the only private passenger depot on a U.S. public railway. Not only that, the company presented him with a handsomely engraved lifetime pass, good for himself and his family, bearing railroad president Thomas B. Wales’ ornately scrolled signature.

Jacob caved. In 1836, trains began running regularly through his property. They did no harm to his fruit trees. The station and the free pass served him until he died in 1871 at age 91.

In 1917, the historic Deane house burned. The foundation hole and the walled lane by which Jacob Deane reached his private depot are now obscured by a housing development.

I was talking to my children as we walked to school this morning on how people were ridiculed for thinking that the world was round.  That sometimes even though many people don’t believe in something that it does not necessarily equate to not being true.  It lead me to think that in another 500 years that the future generations will look back at this time on earth and think we were crazy for not planting more fruit trees and eating as nature intended.  My 9 year old daughter turned to me and commented that it is perfectly obvious the world is not flat “mummy all they would have to do would be to look at the moon or look at the horizon, where would all the water go!”

Ok so moral of the story, perhaps eating healthy food and empowering our bodies with nutritious food enables our brains to function better and we are able to think more clearly.  

Would love to hear your comments.