The Printed Website: Volume III & The Comments
The printed archives of Low-tech Magazine now amount to four volumes with a total of 2,398 pages and 709 images.
Food
Interesting possibilities arise when you combine old technology with new knowledge and new materials, or when you apply old concepts and traditional knowledge to modern technology.
Technology has become the idol of our society, but technological progress is—more often than not—aimed at solving problems caused by earlier technical inventions.
There is a lot of potential in past and often forgotten knowledge and technologies when it comes to designing a sustainable society.
Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities
In the mid 20th century, whole cities’ sewage systems safely and successfully used fish to treat and purify their water. Waste-fed fish ponds are a low-tech, cheap, and sustainable alternative to deal with our own shit — and to obtain high protein food in the process.
Vertical Farming Does not Save Space
If the electricity for a vertical farm is supplied by solar panels, the energy production takes up at least as much space as the vertical farm saves.
Fruit Trenches: Cultivating Subtropical Plants in Freezing Temperatures
During the first half of the twentieth century, Soviet citrologists grew (sub)tropical plants in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius – outdoors, and without the use of glass or any fossil fuel-powered assistance.
The Messy World of Fermentation
When modernity meets its end-point and creates a world where everything is sterile, controlled, and known, there will be little space for fermentation.
Vietnam’s Low-tech Food System Takes Advantage of Decay
Vietnam’s decentralised food system has low energy inputs and reduced food waste, giving us a glimpse of what an alternative food system might look like
Pigeon Towers: A Low-tech Alternative to Synthetic Fertilizers
Pigeon towers helped Persian farmers cultivate all kinds of crops on previously arid, thin-soil land.
Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s
From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.
Reinventing the Greenhouse
Contrary to its fully glazed counterpart, a passive solar greenhouse is designed to retain as much warmth as possible.
Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce for the Ancient Roman Masses
Fish fermentation allowed the ancient Romans to store their fish surplus for long periods, in a time when there were no freezers and fishing was bound to fish migratory patterns.
Water Johads: A Low-Tech Alternative to Mega-Dams in India
Before the British arrived, people on the subcontinent used traditional low-cost, low-tech engineering to collect rainwater for thousands of years.
If We Insulate Our Houses, Why Not Our Cooking Pots?
A fireless cooker doubles the efficiency of any type of cooking device because it shortens the time on the fire and limits heat transfer losses
Well-Tended Fires Outperform Modern Cooking Stoves
Despite technological advancements since the Industrial Revolution, cooking remains a spectacularly inefficient process.
How to Keep Beverages Cool Outside the Refrigerator
The Spanish botijo is a water bottle that cools itself, without electricity.
Recycling Animal and Human Dung is the Key to Sustainable Farming
Flushing the water closet wreaks ecological havoc, deprives agricultural soils of essential nutrients and makes food production dependent on fossil fuels.
Bring Back the Horses
Replacing tractors with real horse power could be the revolution that agriculture needs.