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By Root 888 0

its cost to an inspired medicine-maker. We use these machines in the California School of Herbal Studies lab, where they have served many productive, but not always gentle, herb students over the past 20 years. The new model juicers that Vita-Mix now manufactures have “space—age material” plastic containers (which I’m told will also fit the older 3600 model motor base); I don’t know, however, how well these will hold up to the beating of grinding herbs. The all-stainless steel machines used to come with a five-year warranty. (Actually, way back, they used to have a lifetime warranty.) But this most recent model comes with only a one-year warranty. I guess the space-age material is still in its experimental stage.

YOGURT MAKER

This is well designed for macerating small quantities of oil infusions at a low heat.

CROCK POT

This would be a superb warming (digestion) vessel for making oil infusions if it would maintain a heat of 100° F. But in my experience these cooking devices do not go lower than 150° F., which in my opinion (others will disagree) is too high a temperature for making good oil infusions. Perhaps one could employ a clever electrician to somehow derange a crock pot’s rheostat, so it will consent to remain around 100° F.; this would then be a superb tool for this purpose.

FOOD PROCESSOR

This is not a priority, but if you have one or can easily acquire one, it is an excellent tool for mincing fresh garlic and other non-woody, fresh plant parts in preparation for extraction.

One can imagine how the first sparks of our vast herbal heritage were ignited. The inaugural attempts at the extraction of herbal properties were probably made soon after our deep ancestors discovered that certain plant materials were useful as food for nourishment, agents for altering consciousness, and medicines to alleviate physical and mental discomfort. Herbs collected for these purposes soon dried out, and it is logical to assume that our ancestral foreherbalists made attempts to restore the succulent qualities of these plants by steeping them in water. From this act, it was a simple step to discover that soaking plants in certain liquids dissolved the therapeutic powers of the plants and allowed their use in a more convenient, less cumbersome, and often more palatable form.

Applying heat was probably the subsequent step in the evolution of more specialized methods of soaking (macerating) with water. Therein the fundamental extraction processes of warm infusion, decoction, and digestion were devised. Later, the superior preservative properties and in some circumstances the superior solvent properties of vinegar and wine were recognized. Thus followed in natural progression the rudimental development of herbal extraction and medicine-making by human beings on this planet. It all germinated and evolved within the domestic arena of our common ancestors.

Concentrated ethyl alcohol was not available to the ancient herbalists as a solvent/preservative for maceration until after the twelfth century, when it was derived by the distillation of wine. It is not clear exactly when this happened, but by the sixteenth century alcohol-based tinctures and “quintessences” were attaining widespread use.

With the inflation of western reductionist science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, paralleled by the pursuit of “rational” drug therapy in the allopathic medical arena, the processes of extraction and the isolation of plants’ so-called “active ingredients” commanded the focus of a burgeoning pharmaceutical industry. The herbalist’s inclination to summon and commune with the spiritual essence of a plant conjoined with a ceremony of appreciating the full array of the plant’s physical and non-physical nature receded, along with the sightings of faeries and unicorns, into myth, magic, and “folkloric fancy.”

Concurrently, the common practice of medicine-making in the home and the layman’s practice of self-medicating with simple plant preparations declined to near extinction. As commercialized pharmaceutical technology evolved through