Preserving the Good Life

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Ana also thinks this fermented, probiotic food is medicinal. “Some of my reading has convinced me that fermented foods are really superfoods,” she says. “You increase the nutritional value of food when you ferment it.” The Antakis think that “the most important thing is to have a functional digestive system. That seems to be the gateway to health,” Roy says. “Fermentation is basically what you could call pre-digestion.”

With vegetables available all year, fresh or fermented, the Antakis rarely shop for food. “The only things we buy at the supermarket are canning jar lids!” Ana quips. They also buy grains, beans and olive oil in bulk.

“The products we now sell came about just through our desire to find alternative ways of preserving food so it’s crisp and doesn’t consume energy,” Ana says. Their customers seem to appreciate their efforts, as the Antakis’ ever-busy booth at the Belfast farmers market attests.

Preserving Knowledge and Health

Roy says he’s come full circle from his youth, when his mother and grandmother preserved foods. He also points out that, with the rising cost of energy, “We need to preserve that knowledge of low-tech food storage, because it’s going to be useful again.”

They may also be preserving health. Roy says he was a born vegetarian. “When I was a kid, I didn’t want to eat meat,” he says. Ana gave up meat after learning about the inhumane treatment of animals in some conventional livestock operations. Now she believes that the diet she and Roy follow is healthful as well as humane.

Ana is interested in the relationship between protein intake and cancer. She mentions work by T. Colin Campbell, of Cornell University, who found that children in the Philippines with more animal protein in their diets (children from affluent homes) had a higher incidence of liver cancer than poorer children who ate less protein.

Campbell then discovered a study from India on rats that were injected with cancer-causing aflatoxin. One group of rats was fed a 5 percent protein diet, the other got 20 percent protein. All the rats in the high protein group got cancer, while none in the lower protein group did. So Campbell conducted “The China Study” to test his theories by observing a very large, fairly homogenous human population in rural China, and found the same results: People who ate the most animal-based foods had the most chronic diseases. The Antakis’ decision to eat vegan was influenced by such findings.

Leaving a Legacy

The Antakis are satisfied with their move from corporate life to their Montville farm. “Money isn’t everything,” Roy says. “Money is actually a hindrance. When you try to make money just for the sake of making money, you always want more.”

With the pressures of the rat race far behind them, Roy and Ana now concentrate on ways to preserve their land. They look at their beautiful property and ask, “What can we do with it? Eventually somebody has to take over this place, and we’d like to keep it wild.” So they have an ongoing conversation about how to protect this piece of land and keep Zippy’s memorial thriving.

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