The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon March 25th, 2008

This week I’m going to spend a lot of time on specific needs, and how to adapt your food storage to meet those needs.  Among the most common special circumstances is a childbearing woman, infant or young children.  Even if you personally are male or past childbearing, you may end up being the place of respite for family who have these issues in a crisis, and it is, IMHO, important to think about them.  I have encountered many people over the years who never expected to see their children suddenly arrive back home, to end up raising their nephews or grandchildren, or never expected to get pregnant (or pregnant again) and did.  Do not think that this information could never be relevant to most of us.  Remember, plans are good – but plans go awry regularly.

The first, and probably most essential component here is water.  I know a lot of people respond to my discussions of storing water as “ok, we’ve moved into total whack-job territory.”  And yet, I’m going to say that this is particularly important if your household includes or might include pregnant women, infants or very young children who are especially vulnerable to disease, parasites and chemical contaminations.  They also all have very little toleration for dehydration or water stress.

 So if you have or might have young children, pregnant women or infants, store water, and have a way of filtering water in the long term.  If you have a limited supply of filtered or known safe water, and are worried about contamination, the last people to touch potentially contaminated water should be children or pregnant women – lifelong consequences are possible. 

Pregnant women need more water and more of some nutrients.  Storing a pregnancy multivitamin if you could potentially become pregnant is not a bad idea.  Regular multivitamins will mostly suffice, though, if a varied diet is possible.  Folate (found in eggs and greens) and protein are particularly important - make sure pregnant women get more of these foods.

One issue for pregnant women may be nausea – on a food storage diet it is particularly difficult to deal with food issues.  To the extent you can, women in early pregnancy suffering from nausea should be accomodated in any way possible - the reality is that hunger makes the nausea worse and can result in a “death spiral” of being unable to eat or keep anything down long enough to deal with hunger induced increases in nausea.  This can cause dehydration, occasionally even death.  So if you are relying on food storage and have a sick pregnant woman, do the best you can to find something she can eat, if you know you plan to be pregnant and have specific triggers you might consider storing them, also if you plan to be pregnant, sea bands or ginger might work (nothing worked for me ;-) but I mention it). 

Otherwise, pregnancy doesn’t require special foods.  But infants do.  Infants under 4 months (6 months is considered ideal) should be exclusively breast-fed whenever possible.  Breastfeeding is essential – and in a crisis, it can actually save lives.  Formula often becomes unavailable in a crisis, and a nursing mother can not only keep her own infant hydrated (even if she is suffering from dehydration she will continue to make some milk) but potentially other infants as well who can drink expressed milk in a bottle or cup or be taught to nurse (sometimes).  While not every woman can nurse, far more can than do, and for longer than most American women do. There’s more on the value of this here:

http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/12/52-weeks-down-week-30-nurse-and.html

But what about women who can’t nurse, or those who adopt? And, for that matter, I’m going to say something that most mothers don’t like to hear.  We aren’t immortal or invulnerable – trust me, I know how it feels to believe that you have to be ok, because your children depend so much on you.  But things happen sometimes to mothers.  And the survival of our babies and children shouldn’t depend on the ability of any one adult to be present and to feed them.  So having some kind of backup situation makes sense. 

That backup situation could be another lactating woman in close proximity, it could be a goat (not a cow), or it could be a store of infant formula.  I know that we should whenever possible, store what we use and vote with our dollars.  But every time I had a baby, before I gave birth, my husband and I bought a six month supply of generic, cheap infant formula.  It lasts about 2 years in storage (and unopened can be safely used for another year or two, but will lose nutritional value and may not adequate, so do this only in a dire emergency to keep a baby alive – a wet nurse or goat would be better) and before it expired, we would give it to our local food pantry that always desperately needed formula. 

I am a passionate advocate of breastfeeding – but I care much more that babies live even if their Moms aren’t around, or can’t nurse them, and someone be able to take care of the babies around them. Only you know if your circumstance merits doing this, but it is something to think seriously about – I think of it as a charitable donation, one I hope never to need myself.

Once an infant is 4 months old (again, six is considered optimal, but by 5 months my kids were always grabbing food out of my mouth at the table, so thought they were ready), you can gradually begin transitioning them to mashed up solids.  (Actually, when I was an infant, solids were begun as early as 6 weeks – this is not recommended now, but if formula or breastmilk were in short supply, it could be considered – again, do it only if you have to.)  Waiting longer is considered better, particularly if you have a family history of food allergies.

Babies don’t need “baby food” per se, although it is good to start them on mashed up very simple, low allergen foods like white rice, greens, potatoes or orange vegetables.   But again, they should be primarily getting their food from mother’s milk, goat’s milk or formula until nearly a year – babies need a high fat, high protein, high quality diet.  If you think they may come into your orbit, store for them.

Young children, under 2, need more fat than most people, so storing some extra high fat food is a good idea.  Fish oil is a particularly useful thing if you can keep it cool, because it enhances brain development. Otherwise, they simply need a balanced, healthy diet.  But this can be tough with young children, since toddlers often are extremely picky eaters.  This means that storing familiar foods and getting kids familiar with whole foods used in storage is especially important. 

Toddler pickiness has some evolutionary advantages – as they get more mobile, they get more choosy about what they eat, which is protective.  It is helpful to recognize that this is a passing stage, and just concentrate on finding foods they like.  Remember also that toddlers often have to encounter an unfamiliar food over and over again before they will try it – keep trying.   Generally speaking, if they aren’t making a radical dietary transition – that is a complete break from familiar foods – which they shouldn’t be, since we’re all trying to eat what we store – kids won’t generally do themselves any harm.

For healthy older children, I think a low-tolerance policy towards picky eating is important – I’ve written more about getting over picky eating here.  And again, kids make it extra-urgent that you begin eating out of your food storage regularly.

I’ll post some kid friendly food storage recipes in one of my next posts – more coming soon!

Sharon

• Food Storage , food , women
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Sharon March 25th, 2008

A while back a reader who depends for her life on daily medication emailed me asking what her options were in the case of a major disruption of supplies.  I’ve had occasion to think about these things before – for example, as I was writing the chapter on health care in _Depletion and Abundance_ and when thinking about family members, some of whom are equally dependent.  But it was helpful to sort out and organize things.

To start with, everyone who depends on a medication should keep a 2 week supply, plus duplicate copies of their prescriptions.  This is an absolute minimum, again, the FEMA/Red Cross minimum, and it reflects the reality that in a bad crisis, it is not unlikely that you may be unable to get a refill for several weeks.

 This does mean that you have to pay close attention to rotation – some medications (insulin for example) have a comparatively short lifespan.  Most have a mid-range one, and gradually lose potency, but there are a few that actually become toxic if they’ve been stored too long.  If you don’t know what the storage life and issues are with your medication, you should call the drug company that makes it and find out.  Ask them how they figure out storage lives and what the potential consequences of taking out of date drugs are.  Write the information down for all prescriptions you depend on.  And if you do take a short lifespan drug, you’ll need to be super-careful about using up the oldest first and keeping your supply updated.

Most over the counter medications can be safely used past their expiration date, but again, this is something you’ll want to research.  There are simply too many such drugs, and their compositions vary from brand to brand and country to country for me to provide a reliable list of OTC and Herbal preparations their storage lives.

I would also recommend that you keep up-to-date copies of your prescriptions (including, if you use them your glasses prescription) and your medical records somewhere easily accessible along with important papers so you can grab it if you are forced to evacuate.  It can be very difficult to find someone to write you a prescription in a crisis, and you don’t want to be without them.  The medical records are absolutely *imperative* if any of the medications you depend on are controlled narcotics (which odds are you won’t be able to get an extra prescription for) - because convincing a strange doctor in a strange place to give you a controlled substance is likely to be difficult.

Most medications are best stored in a cool, dark, dry place.  You might want to double zip-lock them or otherwise store them in as airtight way as possible to slow degradation if you are holding them for a longer period.  It should go without saying that all medications must be stored away from where children can get them, in childproof containers.   

What about drugs that require refrigeration?  What do you do if the power goes out?  In most parts of the country, water comes up from the ground fairly cool, and storing drugs in buckets of water, or dug holes in the ground will keep them cool enough for a short time.  If you have a creek or other water source that is cool, you often can seal the drugs in a container and submerge the container (don’t let it get washed away, obviously) in the creek.  In a short term emergency, with no way to keep needed medications cool, having a functional person go for help is probably the best solution.

What about longer term social disruptions, or major supply problems?  What if two weeks is not enough?  Well, it certainly would not be unwise to store larger quantities of most medications if you can – 3 months would probably be prudent, and if you can afford to buy it up front, it protects you as well from price fluctuations.  The difficulty is that many people cannot afford 3 months advance medication, and their insurance will not pay for it.  And those taking scheduled narcotics usually cannot get any more than an immediate supply.  Add to that the fact that eventually, in a serious crisis, stores will run out and what do you do?

My own feeling is that you should take a “belt and braces” approach – that is the more ways you have to hold up your pants or ensure your supply of medication, the better.  After all, your life is worth it.  So you do what you can, with what you’ve got.  You might want to make use of several of these strategies.

I should add that I personally think that the most likely scenarios are less about total disruption in supply than about increasing numbers of people unable to afford their drugs.  That, of course, is the reality in many places in the world where a diagnosis of an expensive disease simply means death.  But there are good and compelling reasons to avoid becoming one of those places – this is the subject for another post, but in _Depletion and Abundance_ I outline how we might create a low cost, localized “shadow” health care system that could meet a lot of needs both during a crisis and right now, for the millions of uninsured.  I believe passionately that Peak Oil and Climate Change advocates need to focus in on sustainable health care and add it to their agendas – because we have evidence that it is possible to have long lifespans and reasonably good health along with very low expenditures on health care.  But that, of course, is a discussion for another day.

But anyway, while it is technically possible imagine drug manufacturing simply stopping, it seems more likely to imagine sketchy supplies, not being able to get preferred drugs, and not being able to afford needed medication.  And I do want to caution people not to panic here – yes, plan.  But don’t assume that any crisis is inevitable.

Ok, so the first solution would be to store a larger supply.  If you are taking a narcotic, or using a short lived drug this is particularly difficult, but a friend of mine says that sometimes she is able to skip a dose, and when she does, she puts it aside - by refilling immediately and occasionally enduring quite a bit of pain, she has managed to put a small reserve aside.  Only you know if that is possible for you – but it might be worth trying.

If your current drugs are short-lived, it might be worth researching whether there are alternatives you could shift over to.  In fact, this is probably worth looking into for everyone – that is, if your drug is available in multiple forms, know what they are – one may be in short supply when another is available.  There are risks, of course, in any such substitutions, but being able to get ahold of a functional substitute is probably less risky than going entirely without.

What happens if there is a long term crisis and no way of getting your drugs at all?  Well, there are a couple of options.

1. First, is there a non-pharmaceutical company alternative.  In many cases, there will not be – but sometimes there are.  For example, those on heavy pain medication may be able to rely on homegrown opiates, marajuana (legal for medical purposes in some states and legal for anything in some countries), or alcohol for pain relief (note, this blog might get in trouble if I suggested you do illegal things, so FYI only). 

Some prescription medications can be substituted with herbal preparations – some quite successfully, some not very.  But it is worth noting that many drugs are herbs – or were in origin.  It is not worth dismissing herbal medication out of hand.  Talk in advance to a naturopath or other practitioner and to your doctor. 

Sometimes you can reduce your need for a medication partly or entirely by lifestyle changes.  Many of those with high blood pressure, for example, could manage it with diet and exercise alone if they really had to.  Giving up a western diet and eating very low on the food chain, and exercising a *lot* will suck badly if you are already unhealthy – but it might be better than the alternative.  A friend of mine with type 1 diabetes tells me he can halve his insulin requirements by careful dietary control and extensive exercise.

2. Have a plan for ensuring supplies.  If you can imagine a crisis in which drugs continue to be manufactured in some places, but just aren’t getting to you (what most crises have looked like in most of the world recently), it might be worth getting a group of concerned citizens together and contacting pharmaceutical companies about ensuring supplies during periods of disruption (you might mention climate change, Katrina, avian flu – just in case peak oil doesn’t cut it ).  That is, while one person is not a very powerful entity with a company, a city or state or regional group made up of people with medical dependencies might be able to work out supply delivery plans and direct purchasing for an extended emergency.  They might not – I have not tried this.  But advocacy groups are powerful.

 My own suggestion would be to start at the municipal or county level, and consider organizing from there, perhaps linking community groups together to contact major pharmaceutical companies directly.

3. Go Local.  Now this is not going to be possible for a majority of drugs, but some very simple chemical combinations can be made in college or even a good high school chemistry lab. I am not a chemist and I am not an expert here – but several chemistry professors and high school chemistry teachers did tell me that they could manufacture a number of drugs that had comparatively simply formulae.  Antibiotics, thyroid medications and heart medications were among those mentioned as particular accessible – if they had the relevant materials. 

Some of those chemical materials are cheap and fairly shelf stable.  It is not impossible that some drugs could be synthesized locally – and make a rather good business for a chemist.  My own recommendation would be to do some research into your drug (generally, it will be possible to find the formula if it is no longer proprietary information of a single company, so if you have a choice of medications, you want the oldest form in many cases)  and to talk to graduate students or professors at your local university or even a high school chem professor about your fears about the future and your desire to find a local solution.  It will not be possible in every case – maybe even most cases, but it is better than just accepting death.

This is not an easy issue once you get outside the short term.  But it is worth thinking about – and thinking hard.

 Sharon

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Sharon March 24th, 2008

 While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door.
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh! hard times, come again no more.

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor.
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears,
Oh! Hard times, come again no more.

Chorus.
Hard times, come again no more.
‘Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door.
Oh Hard times, come again no more – Stephen Foster (I particularly like the Nancy Griffith Version)

Wow – while I took a few days off, the FED magically fixed everything and now Bear Stearns is trading at $10 a share.  Which means, of course, that the economy is fixed, there are no worries about recessions, depressions, slumps or collapses.  I hope you are all feeling better now.  Isn’t to just fabulous?  Oil prices are down too – I’m told they’ll hit $30 a barrel anytime now.  Heck, I’m going to pick up a Hummer and some Bear Stearns shares next time I go out!

If, however, you still have a few teensy, eensy, weensy doubts about whether the magic of nationalized debt will fix everything for you, I thought it might be instructive for all of us to sit back and listen just a little to people who have already been through a really bad economic crisis.  I’m not talking about wussy little downturns like the dot.com bust, but real hard times.  After all, it seems just possible that the geniuses who created this mess haven’t quite thought of everything.

And it isn’t like folks who have been through tough times are in short supply – in fact, you don’t have to read accounts from long ago.  Chances are you can find a neighbor or someone in your town who, in spite of the prosperity we’ve enjoyed can tell you what it is like to suck it up and do without, not with an Ipod, but medical treatment, heat or dinner a few times a week.  There are plenty of such folks like my neighbors Dennie and Gwen (names and some details have been changed to protect their privacy),  who have a daughter in college and his child support payments, their inadequate income and a big worry about the fact that they think his cancer may have recurred – but they don’t really have the money, insurance or time off work to go find out - so they just aren’t thinking about it.

But there is a qualitative difference between the rich world poverty we know right now and mass collective poverty – rich world poverty is heavily mitigated by the wealth around the poor.  For example, if Dennie could get his step-daughter in college to teach him to use the internet (or would let me do it for him – trust me, I’ve offered), he could find a program willing to cover his diagnosis and treatment.  If his wife was willing to go on food stamps and to the food pantry and accept the loss of their house they could probably almost survive the loss of his income when the small construction company that employs him dumps him off their payroll.  If they were willing to see her daughter give up college, they all could get along decently.  There are options out there – painful ones, but they exist. 

But in many cases, those backup resources depend on a body of wealth out there – on able to pay consumers who can absorb costs others can’t cover, on the generosity of those who are comparatively well off to fund food pantries and charitable programs, and a tax base able to support other resources.  Being poor in the rich world sucks badly – but it does come with some cushions against some blows.  It does mean that the first time Dennie had cancer, he got treated.  It does mean that while Gwen can’t get the asthma treatments she really needs, she can get a few things through Walmart and drug company programs. They can clothe the kids at goodwill and their daughter is bright and gets scholarships.  Instead of the first bad blow being a death sentence, they get nibbled by ducks for a good long time – and that is better.  Not good, just better.

But what happens if the body of comfortably off taxpayers starts to disappear?  What happens if charitable giving declines because there aren’t that many people left in a position to give?  What happens if you live in a place where most people are struggling to get by, and there’s not much in the way of safety net?  And what happens when the comfortably off are no longer so comfortable or even are truly poor – among thousands and millions of truly poor neighbors?

For all that I make mock of the present situation, it may well be that some combination of actions can avert that kind of crisis.  But I don’t (and let us all express our gratitude to the divinity or absence thereof of our choice that this is the case) govern the FED.  Instead, my work is to look for a way for us all to go on even if salvation doesn’t come and real hard times visit us instead. 

And I think one of the most valuable things we can do is to look – to truly look – at what our lives may be like.  I think knowing how people in other places and times have survived great hardship is essential to understanding that we *CAN* go forward even in hard times and find a future for ourselves.  The tools of getting by are essential – and the best way to learn them is through the people who endured.

One source for American experiences is the Great Depression – and there are some amazing oral histories out there where people speak their own experience, or where such accounts make up a large portion of the available material.  Some internet resources: 

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/wpaintro/intro01.html - wonderful WPA interviews, including some in audio!

Tons of great resources: http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/greatdepression/chamberlin.html

Books: Studs Terkel’s _Hard Times: An Oral History of the Depression_ gives us an enormous range of views, from the victims to those who did well.  One of my favorite lines in the book comes from a man named Clyde T. Ellis, who said, “A group of us there decided if we were going to hell, we might as well get active in it.”  Now there’s a slogan for us!

Scoop Landford, who spent a term in prison during the Depression talked about how bad as it was in the prison (and it was bad) the prisoners were in some respects better off than those who guarded them.

“They {the guards} were as bad for it as we were.  A lot of them was eating in there on the sly.  I’ve even actually given to them a piece of corn bread to take out.  Nearly all of ‘em were family men…We eat least had a place to eat sleep.”

in David Shannon’s _The Great Depression_, we get primary source accounts of events written as they were happening.  For example, a 1932 account by the director of a relief agency in Philadelphia describes what things were really like.
“Another family did not have food for two days.  Then the husband went out and gathered dandelions and the family lived on them.

Still another family thinking to get as much as possible with their last food order bought potatoes and for 11 days lived only on them…

I should also like to say that when we talk to people who ask about unemployment they say, “Well, people manage to get along somehow or other, don’t they?  You do not have very many people who really drop dead of starvation?”  That is perfectly true.  Actually, death from starvation is not a frequent occurrence.  You do not often hear about casualties of that sort.  This is because people live in just the way that I have described.  They live on inadequacies, and because they live on inadequeacies, they die of disease not precisely hunger.  The thing doe snot become dramatic and we do not hear about it.  Yet the cost in human suffering is just as great as if they starved to death overnight.”

In _Making Do: How Women Survived the 30s_ Jeane Westin interviews women and reports their recipes, strategies and histories.  The Betty Crocker Company offered a week’s nutritious menu using only foods available to those on the relief lines. 

My favorite story there is by Nice Rodriguez who worked as a housekeeper and in the fields to support her family because her husband was a Mexican citizen and not eligible for most work.  She talks about working long days cleaning for a dollar a day, but of having the ovaries to turn to an employer who demanded too much and say,

 “I mean she wasn’t mean or anything but I didn’t like the way she act.  She says ‘Well, Nico, I want you to clean the whole house, irona dn wash and do the windows and clean the cupboards and put in new paper…’  I just look at her and I say, ‘You a woman…I a woman.  Do you think you could do all that in eight hours?’

She had five kids and a dependent husband.  How many of us could do the same?

Another interviewee talks about making Christmas presents for her three children – from her own only sweater, about the work of picking out the yarn, making new mittens and what it was like to go out to do chores without even a sweater every morning.

In _Women of Valor_ edited by Sternsher and Sealander, Lillian Wald’s account of the time leading up to the famous stock market crash is earily prescient to today.  Somehow, I had alwasy envisioned the crash as unanticipated.  But it was not.

“Increasingly in the winter of 1928-1929, months before the stock-market crash, were were made aware of the foreboding among our neighbors.  In the kindergarten on morening, when the little ones were sitting around the table drinking their milk, I said, ‘What do you think you are going to be when you grow up?’ There was no active response and to prod them I said, ‘when I was a little girl I thought I should like to be carpenter….’  Whereupon a four-year-old who sat there, his head in his hand, a sober expression on his little face answered, ‘Miss Wald, the carpenter that lives in our house ain’t got any work.’

The nurses’ daily records are delicate barometers of conditions.  This was brought home to me once as I watched our statistician sticking her pins in the map that shows the current cases of pneumonia…I was told that the children of the kimono workers then on strike were probably getting less milk and good nourishment and hence their resistance was lowered.

Signs of the growing storm multiplied.  Within a brief period a success of individuals came to ask for work, and that stimulated us to further inquiry.  In January 1928, we discussed this with our intimate circle.  In February 1929, eight months before the “boom” collapsed, we summond our colleagues to a meeting, just as, on the first declaration of war in August 1914, we called a group to come together in solemn conference.”

In Timothy Egan’s superb book _The Worst Hard Time_ we are reminded that environmental disasters integrate with and exacerbate economic crises – in fact, the two cannot be seperated, because in every respect, the loss of our natural resources costs us the basic elements of prosperity, and the price cannot be deferred forever.

Egan tells the story of conservation agricultural expert Hugh Bennet speaking to senators in Washington DC on the day that the dust storms from the plains states made it all the way to the Capitol.  When the sky went black and dirt poured down on Washington during Bennet’s presentation, he turned to the senators and said, “This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about…There goes Oklahoma.”  

We could look at other places, other times – Britain during and after World War II, Okinawa after the war, Argentina a few years ago, Russia, Cuba, Zimbabwe.  In each case the cause was different, but the hard times came.  In fact that may be the one great truth of history – that eventually, hard times always come back.  Check out Dmitry Orlov’s wonderful book _Reinventing Collapse_ to read about another place that couldn’t possibly fall apart.  Orlov contends we are presently at the first stage of such a collapse, and we had damned well better work to arrest our free fall.

What do we do?  Do we just get scared and depressed?  Well, it is ok to be scared, but in embedded in these stories are ways to go forward.  They show the value of courage, and toughness, honor and love.  They tell stories of women giving birth in a hospital with no place to take a baby home – and the woman next to her who brought her back to her tenement.  Of organizations of black tenants who took evicted people and put them back in their houses, of penny auctions and journalists who fought their editors to tell the truth.  They tell the stories of gardens and working long hours gleaning potatoes and wheat to keep bellies full.  They tell stories of moments of joy and love in the midst of terrible sadness, and most of all, of making do, and thus ensuring that things were better than they could have been.

Hard times will undoubtably come again, if not now, then sooner than any of us would like.  Best we face the future eyes up, with all the courage and all the tricks learned from those who preceeded us that we can muster!

 Shalom,

 Sharon

• economy , poverty
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Sharon March 19th, 2008

Up until now, we’ve been focusing on doing things right, on what you should do.  It is time to shift our focus on to my personal failings (always one of my favorite topics ) and discuss what you should *not* do when storing and preserving food.  I would feel remiss if I did not offer you this useful advice.  Of course, being a food storage goddess, I’ve never actually done any of these things, but a very dear friend did .

 1. When you store many heavy jars of home-canned food on metal shop shelves, do not glance into the storage area and notice that the shelves are bowing and have an odd tilt to them, and then think “that’s interesting” because you have another urgent project in your head, and close the door and not do anything about it.  Not that I would know, but if you do so, you may experience a giant crashing noise, tiny pieces of pickle-scented glass in everything, a godawful mess and an extended period of cussing.

 2. When you make daikon kimchi, do not put the jar lids on very tightly and then forget that you have it fermenting, unless you enjoy a kimchi scented kitchen and the sight of bright red korean pepper liquid dying your ceiling.

3. Do not every convince yourself that you will get around to labelling the buckets…eventually.  Do it now, or accept that you will never figure out what’s in them without unpacking them.

4. Do not leave the lid off the oatmeal bucket and your two year old unattended while you talk on the phone.  Do get used to picking little things out of the oatmeal bucket before you eat them for a while afterwards.  Do not think too hard about what the things are.

 5. Unless you are sure your family is the sort of family that eats pickled figs, do not pickle figs – there are better uses for them.

 6. Do not lose the little magnet thingie that allows you take the metal jar lids out of the boiling water without a big hassle.  When you do lose it, make sure the tongs you are using to get the lids (with giant hassle) are long enough that you don’t dip your fingers in the boiling water while chasing the lids around.  Keep bandaids in kitchen.

7. Do not pick the tomatoes with no clear plan about when you are going to get to them.  Do not convince yourself that during a spate of 95 degree weather, a bucket of tomatoes will keep on the counter for just one more day.  Do not think the fruit flies will go away easily.

8. Do not expect your spouse or partner to believe you when they ask where all the dried sweet peppers and blueberries went to and you shrug and blame the children.  Do not even try to look innocent.

9. Do not expect to hang up herbs to dry like the pretty pictures without tiny bits of dried herb ending up all over the place.

10. Do not think that the children will buy the “black currant is just as good as strawberry” argument.

 11. When reading the recipe for ginger-pear chutney, do not think “that doesn’t sound like enough ginger – I’ll just triple it and see how it goes.”  Do expect to be the only one eating ginger-pear chutney for a decade or so. 

12. Do not think you are done preserving just because you’ve had a hard frost.  You forgot about the green tomatoes,  greens, cabbages and roots!

13. Do not think that just because you did something right last year, you can’t screw it up this year.  Hubris is always punished.

 14. Do not accept “well, maybe this is how it is supposed to smell/look as an answer.  Throw it out! 

15. Do not think that anyone will ever let you get away with buying commercial pickles or jams again – once you start, you are stuck for life.

 Ok, I’m off to Boston for a wedding – more next week!

 Sharon

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Sharon March 19th, 2008

I’m hearing some interesting stories coming in about grain and seed availability.  What’s most interesting is that we aren’t just seeing problems in the Global South, but here in the US as well.

-Idaho Locavore reports that WaltonFeed seems to be out of most Organic Wheats. 

-Murray, a farmer and reader who produces organic seed for several small seed companies says he has had repeated calls from both existing customers and other seed companies seeking more seed – and he’s out of last year’s production.  Several companies that don’t normally buy from him are sold out of their normal varieties and desperately seeking substitutes.

-Perhaps most disturbing, a member of my food storage class from the Northeast reports that when she bought flour at Costco yesterday, there were set 50lb limits, and that the check-out person actually verified on her membership card that she had not previously bought flour at any other Costco.

 -Aaron tells me that there are no set limits at his local warehouse store, but that when he asked to buy 200 lbs, he was told that was “as much as we can sell you.”

- Littlebyte reports that her coop is experiencing “significant delays” in deliveries of several items, including whole wheat and whole wheat flour.  Their supplier told them that availability was tight throughout the system.

- As I reported yesterday, Fedco and Johnny’s seeds are out of some varieties and are experiencing much greater demand than usual.  A friend who runs an herb business tells me that her wholesale provider is also out of many seed varieties and says demand is way up.

As Aaron put it, we may be seeing the beginning of a real “threshold moment.”  Anyone else seeing delays? 

Note, it is not my claim that we are about to see massive food shortages – but I think we may see systemic problems with a few commodities, including wheat.  And there’s something about the psychological weight of not being able to buy bread that I think will connect the dots for folks about how serious this is.

 Besides all the usual culprits: biofuels, global warming  which seems to be proceeding apace, there’s also the danger of major wheat diseases, which the UN FAO suggests could cause famine. 

Since we’re already seeing violence over bread in places like Egypt, which is calling out the army to help stabilize the wheat crisis there.

 So, keep watching everyone!

 Sharon

• agriculture , future , global warming , poverty
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