>I am a city dweller - and those were living off food grown elsewhere about always ;-) And no, sadly enough I don't have my latifundium or at least villa rustica to move to in such emergencies - currently wondering if diversifying into some forest area might make economical sense, but agricultural land coupled with leasing is difficult over here, if not uneconomic at current payment level here vs. transport cost say from poland.

I'm just happy to be back here where food can still be found - out of five or seven butchers within 2km from me, there is one who still doesn't put any E450 in his stuff; we can still find tomatoes (not the fast-grown red balls which are too sinewy and taste like a postcard with a picture of a tomato - same crap as in the US), and most of the meat and other stuff is _fresh_, not refrozen, not treated with who knows what. Now bread is irretrievably lost, they all sell the same junk, totally devoid of anything but starch (even what they label as rye bread doesn't contain more than 11% of rye flour), even the baker I used to swear by has just folded and started making the same empty thing. Yes, we bake our own. And we have a garden. It will be a few weeks until we get our tomatoes, but then the real thing is worth waiting. And this weekend I made first brandy this year, apples.

>With this I agree totally: 1 shower/bath per day plus after sports/bodily work is enough. Regularly taking out garbage and cleaning before food prep is enough. Heavy usage of cleaning material will enhance your chances for hay fever and asthma - having some germs around is good for you. And if a lonely spider tries to live off insects, who am I to decide roach spray is better, even if some are somewhat frightened by them, as long as I give the spider a workout recreating all-to-visible nets ? Trying to live according to the habits of previous high-culture (think japanese, chinese, roman) cultures in some aspects is probably better than our over-cleaned (TV-marketed) norm.

I wouldn't know of anything that comes through TV, it's now more than four years since we completely stopped watching it - and now even don't have a set at all. Between the choice of advertising and/or propaganda we chose the slash (neither "and" nor "or"). Which is also the part of the other hygiene, the mental.