Eat What You Grow, Grow What You Eat?
Sharon July 6th, 2009
A thought experiment:
Due to a combination of crises – maybe a volcano explosion, the penetration of Ug99 into the main of the world wheat crop, drought in many of the world’s grain growing regions, zombie invasion etc… the world experiences a catastrophic failure of its staple crops. All of a sudden grain supplies drop like a stone, and there are none to be had in the market. No bread, no rice, no soybeans or corn – none of those products are available in the markets.
At first, there is panic. The government institutes a ban on the feeding of anything but grass and hay to livestock, necessitating a massive butchering of most national stock, which raises cholesterol levels but keeps people from starving initially.
Then we begin a rapid inventory of what crops survived, and what foods are available to feed the hungry. For caloric density, there is little that can match grains, but we do what we can. The national potato crop was poor, but what there is of that provides some familiar food. But it was a banner year for the American beet-growers, and rather than converting them as is often the case, to sugar, they are sent to market whole to feed the hungry. Similarly, sweet sorghum survived fairly well, and rather than being pressed into syrup, is sent out to market. Southerly nations, responding to a worldwide crisis commit some of their taro and cassava crop to feed the hungry. Many farmers when the rain finally came, planted turnips and buckwheat, and a modest harvest comes out of the midwest. And of course, US nut growers, aware theirs is the most protein dense crop available commit their harvest (at stunning prices) to the cause. Meanwhile corps of poor Americans are set to harvesting urban and rural oak trees for acorn meal. We learn that there is enough food to go around and prevent starvation, even if it is unfamiliar.
Now imagine yourself, an ordinary shopper at the market, setting out to make dinner. Here is a whole cassava root, with leaves attached. Government propaganda has told you that the root is filling and starchy, but low in protein, but that this can be made up for by processing the leaves to remove the cyanide and then eating those – remember, they are perfectly safe, but you don’t want to get a paralytic neurological disease by inadequate processing. Here is an enormous pile of beets, ready to be eaten in breakfast bakes, luncheon salads and dinner entrees. Here is ground chestnut meal, to be mixed with sorghum and made into flatbreads. Remember, there’s plenty of food – you just have to cook and eat it.
I do not anticipate this particular scenario happening any time soon, but I do think it is a useful illustration of the degree to which we depend not only on food, but on the familiarity of our food. In this case, with much muttering and unhappiness, some appetite fatigue and malnutrition, we probably would begin getting comfortable with acorn pancakes and turnip stew with taro dumplings. This would be extremely difficult however – remember only a tiny percentage of Americans would actually even know what to do with the foods that they do eat all the time – confronted with a bowl of wheat berries or whole corn, or a soybean in its natural state, most Americans (and I suspect most people in much of the developed world) would see not “food” but something else. Wheat comes in the form of bread, or maybe, for some, flour, corn in the form, at best, of cornmeal or tortillas, and more often in processed foods. Soybeans are conveniently made into tofu or soyburgers.
But now let’s envision the scenario slightly differently, rather, say, like today. Nothing happened to the world’s wheat crop, other than an increasingly large number of people who want to eat it. Nothing happened to the corn or soybean crop that isn’t happening every day – sure, nitrogen is poisoning water ways, chemicals are causing cancer in farm kids, topsoil is washing away and the dead zone in the Gulf is getting bigger, but nothing much happened. Nothing happened (thank G-d) to the rice crops on which almost half the world subsists.
And yet, someone noticed that even though nothing in particular happened, most of those foods aregrown destructively – that is, something is happening, something disastrous. The wheat is being grown often on dry prairie soils that should never be plowed at all. The corn and soybeans are being grown continuously in the midwest, ripping off topsoil. The dead zone, the aquifer pumping, the contamination of groundwater, the poisoning of frogs and fish in rice paddies – these things are happening. And someone said “ok, we need to eat foods that don’t grow like this. So, what can we grow without destroying the planet?”
Well let’s say that what they came up with was much the same menu – the tastier white acorns, chestnuts, hazels and pecans to replace oil and protein crops, roots like beets, cassava, taro, sweet potatoes, potatoes and turnips that are easily grown either perennially or in combination with perennial agriculture in vegecultures. Obscure grains suited to particular conditions – amaranth and old varieties of corn in hot dry climates, buckwheat in short summer climates, quinoa in high places, so that folks in Denver have pretty much only quinoa and maybe some barley, while in Pheonix, amaranth is it and in my neighborhood, you can have all the buckwheat you want – but not much else.
What do you think the odds are of Americans, or Europeans voluntarily shifting their diets? Imagine the new ad campaigns “Now, with more cassava!” Health food claims could probably do some – remember oat bran? If you can get Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse to do acorns, who knows…the sky is the limit?
However, it won’t happen fast. Food cultures can and do change dramatically – when I was 10, I went out for sushi for the first time with my father – at the time there were two Japanese restaurants in Boston, and not a single person I knew, including my extremely adventurous Dad, had ever eaten it. I did it rather on a bet, and was accounted a huge radical eating raw fish in 1982. Now my local supermarket sells sushi, and everyone eats it. But the transition from “bait” to “universal” took at least 25 years from the first introduction of the concept in the US. It is hard to imagine now that there were times when literally it was impossible to get basil or broccoli in the US – nobody grew them outside a few ethnic gardeners. In every case, however, it was a process.
And what happens is generally an addition of food – for example, Americans are eating a lot more tofu than they used to. Back in the 1970s, when my mother and step-mother were experimenting with healthy foods, there were a lot of recipes for tofu loaves – and probably more was done to bring tofu into the mainstream culture by the death of the tofu loaf than anything else – but the idea was that tofu would substitute for meat. Well, for some portion of people it did – but meat consumption also rose, until we were actually eating more meat along with our tofu, than ever before. While jello for jello salad may have peaked back in the 1950s, a surprising number of jello salads grace tables across the country – tables that also may have sliced tomatoes and basil with mozzarella now, or marinated broccoli salad. That is, we’ve no replaced the jello but added on to it.
Why is all of this so important? Well, it comes down the question of why I include “eat the food” in my Independence Days project. It seems like so minor a thing - ”Of course we’re eating the food, we’re growing it, right?” But I think all of us have yet to fully grasp the magnitude of the food question from a eater’s perspective. Right now, the vast majority of our calories are coming from grain production, mostly not very sustainable grain production. Those of us most aware of the issue are at least buying our grains direct from sustainable farmers – this is excellent. A few people are eating mostly what is available in their regions. All of us are eating more out of our gardens. But it remains the fact that only 5% of US cropland is growing vegetables, nuts and unusual small grains – the vast majority of our agricultural land is growing either meat, dairy, grains or soybeans.
And most of even the most committed people I know are (and here I cannot fully except even myself) eating a lot of things that don’t really grow all that sustainably in our regions because we like them, because our families are accustomed to them, because we feel that a meal without bread or rice or tortillas is not a meal. Because we have picky eaters in our family. Because we have no idea what to do with a big pile of acorn meal or a cassava root, and no real desire to learn – or if we do want to learn, no quick easy way to overcome the cultural weight of it not being “our” food. Food is not merely food, it is culture, it is our identity in some ways – we think of ourselves, implicitly, as being part of a community of eaters, and if our community does not eat what we eat, we are dubious.
This is an issue that comes up across the PO/Climate change community spectrum, and one I think all of these communities rarely struggle enough with. It is an issue for backyard chicken raisers who are rightly proud that they are raising eggs and meat in their yards – and who also are raising them almost entirely on purchased bagged feed. It is an issue for permaculturists, enthusiastically replacing their yards with forest gardens, who have no idea what they are going to do with groundnuts and jerusalem artichokes, so who mostly do nothing with them. It is an issue for growers like me, who very much want to grow local staple crops for market – but who simply can’t make a living growing potatoes, beets and turnips, because people don’t eat those things in quantities sufficient, or pay enough for them. It is an issue for me, because my family loves rice and bread, but does not grow much wheat or any rice. It is not that we must eat wholly as we intend to eat, but it does matter that we begin the dietary and agricultural shift we inevitably face ahead of time.
Most of our gardens bring in our greens and our flavoring crops, our berries and our other things that make life pleasant. Most of us are not growing our staple foods. My family is in some measure – we grow hundreds of pounds of potatoes, sweet potatoes and other root crops each year. But we still haven’t fully dealt with our grain habit – in some ways we can’t – I consider food storage essential, but I can’t store potatoes or Jerusalem artichokes for as long as beans and grains.
It is possible to grow corn or soybeans, rice or wheat in ways that are sustainable. But I’m not sure if we’re anywhere even remotely near that transition – one of the things found in both the former Soviet Union and Cuba is this – while small farms adapted very well to low input, sustainable food culture, larger farms simply didn’t, and yields never came back up to prior ones, until lots of fossil fuels were re-input into the system. That is, there’s some compelling evidence that without a lot of energy, we can still grow grains – but not on large scale. The traditional limits of, say, Amish farmers were generally no more than 100 acres. The cultural shift required to imagine breaking up our grain farms into 100 acre increments, with the corresponding reality that some of that acreage must be used to feed animals, is a bit hard to imagine.
Now it is possible we will simply reallocate our remaining fossil fuels to agriculture – this would be possible in the US, although tougher in countries that don’t have any. But sooner or later (later probably) the supplies will be inadequate for even that – and remember, as I discussed recently in another post, Cuba lost only 20% of its oil inputs – a number that is much scarier than the 50 or 80% often quoted. That is, when 20% of its oil disappeared, people began to go hungry, in large part because of the problems of competing priorities. The 1970s oil shocks that caused a massive recession and energy crisis resulted from only a 5% reduction in US oil availability. It is conceivable that agriculture will get all the oil – but police protection, education, military use, medical technology, transport, etc… will also be making demands. We’d have to imagine a scenario in which we all agreed about something. Good luck with that.
If it is going to be a difficult (not impossible, but difficult on a different scale than adapting our diets) process to adapt grain production as we have it now in the US, then we have to imagine that we may need to shift to other crops that produce more on smaller scales to substitute. And therein lies the problem. Root crops produce more calories and nutrition per acre under hand cultivation than many grains do – hand cultivated potatoes outyielded green revolution grains into the early 1970s, and the odds are they will again. Some roots have the advantage of being perennial as well, and potatoes and sweet potatoes can grow on ground too steep, rocky or poor to grow grains at all, expanding crop land, and without tillage, reducing erosion. While Americans eat a tolerable number of potatoes, they do so mostly as processed fries and hashbrowns. Only in the south are sweet potatoes a major source of food. Turnips, beets, parsnips and perennial roots are a tiny portion of our diets – and none at all for the American mainstream public.
High protein nut crops, including acorns, are probably the densest vegetarian source of calories, proteins and fats available to us. They are also a tiny portion of our diet. Animals can be fed on both nut mast and on root crops – mangels and turnips kept animals alive through the winter in Europe, and chestnuts were the “Tree grain” of the East, while acorns were in much of the West, but people do not eat these crops on any scale – we need not “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” once a year, but large scale consumption.
Grains are going to be regionalized - irrigated grain production simply will not be happening in many parts of the country. Growing rice in California is obviously an act of first-level stupidity, but in the dryer parts of the American prairie, grain production may cease altogether due to climate change. Southwesterners may be able to get along with dryland corns and amaranths that evolved for the desert, plus mesquite flours and other crops - although the heating and drying of that region may make even that hard. When fertilizer prices rose, many people stopped planting corn altogether, and were forced to think about other crops – if they rise again, which they certainly will eventually, we will have to think about less demanding sources of food than corn.
And this is going to require massive retraining and work on people’s palates and food cultures – and it is hugely important work. There are two ways this can happen – we can find ourselves in crisis, eating what we do know and probably do not like. The cost of this for ordinary people is grumbling and unhappiness. For children, the medically fragile and the elderly, it is appetite fatigue, which can cause them to stop eating, and suffer malnutrition, illness or occasionally even death. The price for farmers – and the people who rely on them (ie, all of us) is the danger of an abrupt shift into crops that are unfamiliar, and the possibility of poor harvests when they are most needed.
Or, we can start the work now – we can learn to eat the food. That means pushing our comfort levels back a good bit, and beginning to replace the grains in our diet with other foods, even if it is hard, even if we think we can’t like them, or we can’t do it. It means that if we are growing forest gardens full of figs and hazelnuts, they are not merely a snack, but a supplement to our diet, and we eat figs and hazelnuts, jerusalem artichokes and groundnuts. It means pushing our gardens a little more towards the foods we should be eating - and then actually eating them. Not that it isn’t valuable to make your own hot sauce – hot sauce matters. But then comes the process of learning to put it into a salsa served with homegrown beet chips, or on those acorn pancakes. It is in this homely way that we begin to save the world – with beet chips 
.
Sharon
Scratch acorns–the oaks are dying.
I guess I’m lucky I have a somewhat adventurous palate, more so than average anyway. I had jerusalem artichokes for the first time last year, they were weird, but okay. I could get used to them. I made pickled beets for the first time recently. And I love turnips. Not sure what grows best (as in sustainably) in NE Kansas though.
Chestnuts were a huge staple when the American chestnut was still thriving. I don’t know that there are anywhere enough trees around of other varieties to serve as even a transitional staple for neighborhood folk let alone a tree grain for mass consumption unless people start planting whole groves. Most roasting chestnuts sold on the East Coast and Midwest are european imports, there are some California producers.
And as hummingbird says, the oaks around here are all coming down one by one due to disease.
Beet chips and salsa.. shudder.
Stem rust is around but its spread seems slow at this point so we should be good for a while, however other blights are around which could actually fulfill your original premiss in the near future. Just today I found this article talking about the same potato blight that caused the Irish tater Famine is spreading in the U.S. now!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090701163647.htm
(note, Local food also means local seedlings which won’t spread blights country wide, start your own or buy from a local green house.)
I expanded my gardening this year from my megre back yard plot by joining the local community garden and what I see is exactly what you are talking about in this posting. While I have a mixure of things including carrots, parsnips, potato, beans and peas to go with my greens and tomatoes , some of the plots have nothing but tomatoes and hot peppers and they are intent on living the all salsa diet, root crops are all but nonexistent.
Each week they do a pick up from the garden for donated food that goes to the local food bank and I’ve been told that a vast number of people at the food banks won’t even take “normal’ fresh produce let alone a bundle of turnips or parsnips. Its not just the unfamilar foods like the jerusalem artichokes that put many people off but staples like carrots and radishes.
The number of people I know that can’t prepare anything from scratch also is troublesome it’s not that they don’t know how to cook amaranth they just don’t know how to cook something not pre packaged in a tin foil tray.
There is so much hype recently about plug ins coming to the car market why is no one trying to make more efficient farm equipment that will run on batteries or go farther on their oil? Food production should be #1 on the efficiency agenda.
Electric motors are very high torque making them ideal for tractors which don’t need high speeds.
Susan, I’m sort of exaggerating for effect, although Chinese Chestnuts do produce good and edible nuts, and while there aren’t huge plantations, I’m postulating that some woody agriculture actually is in effect. All the oaks in our region are not dying, although there diseases affecting several varieties – the swamp white, which produces the best acorns in my climate does seem to be resistant.
Sharon
Every year I try to grow something that I’ve never grown before, and I try to incorporate something that has been grown in my area for at least several hundred years. Yesterday I planted Cocopah sweet corn in the raised bed my carrots just came out of — five pounds of chicken poop, some powdered organic fertilizer, and some soil fluffing preceded their planting. This is the time to plant this particular land race variety, with the summer rains. I am also growing tomatillos, which actually can get by very well on much less water than they get (they’re in the same beds with my romas). Potatoes were an experiment this year, as is sweet potatoes. I have amaranth but need to get out the rototiller and make another bed for it, and buckwheat as well.
I planted jerusalem artichokes last year, but never ate them — the one taste I had made me bloat so badly I decided it just wasn’t worth it — but the chickens absolutely go crazy for them so I planted more with the idea that I can dig them up through the winter for a special treat.
The chicken feed issue is something I’ve been increasingly thinking about, and is why I bought the reissue of Gene Logsdon’s book on grain raising. My wheels are turning but I haven’t done anything other than to plant corn this year.
Figs are on my list of much wanted perennials as well as the pomegranates waiting to go into the ground (as soon as we decide where to put them that is); mesquites grow everywhere but I haven’t tried harvesting any of them yet. I’ve talked with my friend about harvesting them for her livestock — I’d help — because they’re excellent cattle fodder. We have scrub oaks but the acorns are tiny — about 1/4″ in diameter. It would take a lot of them to make flour. Juniper berries also are abundant here.
I have been giving a lot of thought to the water issue and what crops have traditionally been grown here. People tend to think that the diet is very limiting; I am not so sure. You can do a lot with squash, beans, and drought tolerant corn. Especially given the variety of wild berries and fruits around here (elderberries, rasberries, grapes come to mind). The one thing that we eat a LOT of is rice; I do plan to do some research and hopefully purchase some dry land rice to grow next year.
So far artichokes are out as a crop as are probably cardoon — too much water and too much time vs. the output. But that’s why I grow them, and experiment each year, to see what’s worth it and what’s not.
I find it interesting that many of my Permaculture clients are initially focused on vegetable and fruit production. Partly I think this is due to the influence of the USDA’s (erroneous IMHO) “food pyramid” eating guide. Once they understand the need for fat and protein, nut trees become central to their designs. The addition of even one hazel to the garden changes a subsistence farmer into a reasonably healthy farmer. Doubly true if children and pregnant adults are in the equation.
Helping people incorporate nuts into their diet takes some doing…we North Americans seem to use nuts only as a pre-cocktail snack or in brownies! As Green Assasin pointed out, many people no longer know how to even the basics. Maybe PDC classes should start with a week-long cooking intensive!
Oh, I almost forgot…humanure and corn cultivation work really well together! Not to mention mushrooms(talk about high-protein)…after a small crop of portabellos off the humanure compost, now I’ve got a huge flush of shaggy parasols (Lepiota rachodes). Yum.
Thanks for pushing us out of the comfort zone. This is something we’ve been thinking about a lot recently, and I ordered the Gene Logsden book as well. I’m sure that I haven’t planted nearly enough potatoes to get us by in a famine, and the suggestion to get local spuds to plant is a good one. My garden, which looked so big when I planted it, seems very tiny now.
Yahhah!!! It’s beet planting time in Cascadia! Now is the window to plant the parsnips, beets, leeks, giant radishes and turnips for winter harvest.
Shira in Bellingham, WA
As a small-scale suburban gardener, I’ve stuck with crops that provide a lot of flavor-bang for the space: peas, green beans, peppers, tomatoes, squash, herbs. The idea of using my precious, limited space for, say, drying beans has seemed foolish to date; it would take a lot of space to grown enough beans for one good pot of soup. But the point that few of us raise bulk or protein crops is well taken.
Must look into doing so next year, if only on an experimental basis. That way I’d at least have an idea what to expect when the time comes to dig up the yard altogether in favor of veggie gardens. (Well, I think that time’s already come, but my husband disagrees, and right now, peace in the family’s pretty important!)
Being part of my local CSA has already pushed me in this direction. I used to think about what I wanted to eat and then go shopping for the ingredients – a recipe-driven diet. Now I have an ingredient-driven diet – whatever comes in the CSA is predominantly what we eat.
We don’t get enough starchy food through it to rely only on it, although the farmers now gives us dried beans, wheat, oats, and corn (both sweet and field) regularly. We also get potatoes and sweet potatoes. When we had a glut of potatoes, I noticed that I had to really push myself to make more potato dishes rather than relying on the standby grains for our daily meals, though.
Back when the CSA first started, the coordinator lived for 6 months on only what he got in his share, plus olive oil (which can now be purchased within 100 miles) and seasonings. Back then, the farm was not supplying many starches at all and he lost 30 pounds in those 6 months! But, he did it so we know it’s possible. I’ve considered doing this but I have so many other foods in storage that either are not entirely local or are combinations (like jelly with local fruit but not local sugar) that it would be difficult. I don’t want the stored food to go bad. That’s my excuse for now, but I’m fully aware that I may not have this choice at some future point in time.
Keeper potatoes are $10 per 50 lb bag locally in the fall. Carrots are 3 or 4 dollars per 20 lb bag. We have the Connecticut River Valley in CT and MA nearby where thousands of acres are still planted to truck gardens.
I cannot guess at how soon crops like potatoes might not be viable here due to climate change. Try to buy some altitude in your survival plans. Average temperature drops 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit for every thousand feet of altitude. That could be the difference between French fries and a saw dust diet.
I think it is far more important to know how and what to grow in your own garden than trying to become self sufficient in these items. There will be plenty of time for that later. Master the arts of seed starting, small green houses and cold frame season extenders. Put away seed starting supplies (and seeds.) Most folks take for granted that local nurseries will be available in the future.
Down select to those vegetable varieties which thrive for you. I’m growing some Red Norland potatoes because my wife doesn’t want to wait for the commercial harvest. Buck wheat makes the most satisfying waffles.
We imported wheat from the mid west into western Mass as soon as the Erie Canal opened. Wheat doesn’t grow well here. We shipped woolen products back in trade and I suspect it will still work that way into any future I can envision. Sugar and rum were traded from the Caribbean for beef and vegetables in the earliest Colonial days. Sugar cane doesn’t do well here (yet) and the sugar maples are doomed.
I grew up on a cotton and soybean farm in Louisiana in the 1970s, but the only time I ever ate soybeans was in third grade when one of my classmates brought some parched soybeans to school as a novelty. All of us farm kids thought we were exceedingly brave to try them! We might look out our front doors at hundreds of acres of them, but they weren’t something anybody ATE! I remember asking my father what they were used for….
But we ate LOTS of potatoes, turnips, sweet potatoes, and corn, all of which my parents grew for our own table. Rice was a treat, as we only ate rice from about February (when the stored potatoes ran out) until late April (when the new potatoes were ready). I still love rice, but potatoes are comfort food, because I grew up eating them day in, day out. I began my potato harvest Saturday. And, yes, my 12-year-old can identify a potato plant. But I’d bet good money that none of her classmates can.
Laney
We have a phrase at our house—“it’s what’s for food”, meaning, we grew it, we’re going to eat it whether or not we feel like it. And you know, we’ve come to really enjoy things like Jerusalem artichoke, lovage, swiss chard, and chicory. To the poster who found the Jerusalem artichoke gave her gas, I’d suggest you try again. It goes away, at least it did for us. The starch in them is inulin, which doesn’t cause blood sugar spikes, or so I’m told. Very handy starchy root for those of us with blood sugar control issues.
For the heck of it (and because it reportedly has pretty blue flowers) I sprinkled Flax seed (admittedly, bought at the grocery store in the “bulk” aisle) in my flower bed. So far, it seems to be growing well, but we’ll see if those flowers actually show, or if it reproduces well enough to set seed. I figure, at the very least, it’s a lovely flower, at most I may be able to reharvest some flax seed for next year’s (larger?) crop.
Turnips do pretty decently dehydrated and added to stews. I like them now & again “baked” with potatoes and mashed up with butter, salt and pepper along with the potatoes. I’ve got 3 potato “barrels” in my back yard this year, hoping on replacing 2 of them, and adding a 4th, next year, along with a good lot more soil/compost so I can keep up with the growth of the potato stalk. *wry smile* I’m working on getting my hubby and kiddo to eat more potatoes, more regularly. We found we like Colcannon and Rumbledthumps, just….. don’t use dandilion greens in this!!! Cabbage and onions work best. *wry smile* (Hubby and kiddo took a couple bites of the Colcannon with dandilion greens and couldn’t eat any more, even I didn’t care for it very much.) I’m also making use of the lambsquarter that grows weedy in my back yard by harvesting greens through the summer for salads, as well as dehydrating them for pot-herbs in my soups & stews through the winter. It can’t be used TOO heavily (hubby can taste the difference), but I’m working on it. One of these days, I’d like to try the seeds which are reportedly very close to quinoa, genetically.
..and another very important and timely post methinks…..
I have seen the stuff about the threat to our wheat supplies and it does scare me personally….
I do see that we all need to vary our diets and try new things….and have been busily trying my way through a huge variety of things over the last few years personally – “other” types of fruit and vegetables and milk substitutes and currently planning on growing my sugar/honey substitute. BUT….even for those of us of a very adventurous appetite…..there isnt anything that “fits the bill” quite like grains though. I have yet to find any adequate substitutes personally in my diet for my bread/pasta/rice…..I’m busily telling myself…”oh well….pasta and rice, for instance, have only been around for a few hundred years in British culture”…..errr….but I’m not convinced for one….and I do think we need to recognise that a substantial part of the human race is simply not going to consider a meal to BE a meal unless it contains at least one of those things…..
….further thoughts needed on this front methinks…..I do think RisaB (on one of her blogs) has raised a very valid point when she raises this concern…and I, for one, was glad of her input on this….as I find the thought of facing a very different world distinctly daunting without the guarantee of a full stomach of food as I know it inside me….
Perhaps it’s a good thing that processed flours make me feel like I’ve just eaten a candy bar. Seriously. A sandwich with no condiments but a bit of lettuce, meat and cheese and I’m flying high for a bit and then it’s nappy time. Crackers, corn chips, oatmeal, bread all cause the same reaction. Figured this out a while back and have been sparing with processed grains and, to a lesser extent, whole grains. And, oh yeah, white rice is like mainlining white sugar. Yeek.
But even sticking with whole grains is dicey. Wheat and corn won’t grow in Alaska, neither reliably nor on the scale necessary to support the population. This year we’re trialing malting barley, amaranth and hulless oats (plus culinary flax and bush beans) in two community garden plots. I’m also on year two of the great Painted Mountan corn experiment (short season flour corn developed for high altitude locations – this year’s crop came from last year’s seed). Cooperative Extension says some types of oats and barley will grow here and possibly quinoa and amaranth. Forget rice.
Grains are not the answer. But, surprise, surprise, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, beets, turnips and kohlrabi all grow fabulously. And the best news is that not only do I like all of those roots, I know how to prepare them in lots of different ways. And for the person who shuddered at the thought of beet chips, if you haven’t seen them, give Terra Chips a try. They’re chips made from a variety of roots and tubers. Pretty tasty!
However, I also think that besides learning to eat and enjoy grains and roots outside our own culinary tradition, I also think that it will help to look at what aboriginal peoples lived on in your area. In Alaska, depending on location, foods were what could be gathered in season (berries, some roots and tubers, seaweeds, various bird eggs, spring shoots of various plants) but the main source of calories came from fish, some birds and animals, both land and sea.
I think that looking at what grows in a similar ecosystem to yours has a lot of merit as well. Goats thrive in this area on the abundance of brush available. A friend of mine is raising Cashmere goats but has only room for so many. We’ve talked about what to do with the excess male kids in the future and I fully expect some of them will end up spending the winter in the freezer if you get my drift. I’ve never eaten much goat and that’s something that we’ll be working on in the coming days.
Up here, becoming familiar with those foods now will be useful in the case of food shortages when the barges don’t run – something that could happen at any time for any number of reasons.
I agree with Berkshire about trading. I figure I could trade canned or dried salmon for beans or grains if things really went bad. So I think everyone should see what will grow well and what can be locally hunted or fished, add in some wild gathering and trade for the rest using what you have extra of. But start NOW.
Kerri in AK
i am in an experimental phase in the garden, we keep chooks, but buy in feed because the thought of doing it all at once – having chooks AND growing all their own food etc is too much to contemplate- so we start small with caring for chooks, and growing some amaranth and greens for them. and maybe down the track we can grow more feed for them.
i was very proud of my first crop of white sweet potato. – served it for dinner and not even I could eat it (undercooked, or too long in the ground – I dont know). but next time it may be better. Ive planted more, so i hope so
are the beets harvested for sugar different to the red beetroot eaten as a vegetable?
As I head to the grocery store now, I’ve been trying to pick up more items that I haven’t tried before, so I have a greater repertoire of things that I know how to cook. Admittedly, I need to get better about growing them myself (sigh), but having the knowledge that there are plenty of things that I can cook with and even enjoy, if necessary, is somewhat reassuring.
ps. have you heard of ooooby.ning.com (Out Of Our Own Back Yards) a group for locavores and local gardeners
Turnip pickles colored with beet – an easy Middle Eastern specialty. Most Arab cooks make them for short-term preserving, like two or three weeks. Claudia Roden gives recipes in The Book of Middle Eastern Food.
OK, Sharon has finally scared me.
Maybe its because my radishes and beets had a dismal spring? I live for beets… and if that’s supposed to be my fallback food, and suddenly I can’t grow any, well, yeesh!
I read the post and went to the kitchen and sat down and finished off the heel of a loaf of bread, with butter, on the spot — whatcha could call a panic reaction!
But the potatoes are having a great year (this year), the sunchokes are in great shape, and I just made mashed turnips for tomorrow’s lunch. So, uh, methinks it could be worse. Right? Right?
Think I’ll go see how the beans are coming along.
Sharon,
You raise an issue I’ve been dealing with, and it’s pretty frustrating. My family (husband, 2 grown children, 5 grandchildren) is also known (by me) as the “picky family.” If they haven’t seen it on the supermarket shelves, it’s “weird.” I am adventurous and willing to try new things–they’re not. My husband–who is old enough to intellectually know better–thinks garlic scapes are “weird.” He likes them well enough when he doesn’t know he’s eating them.–Therein lies the trick!
My family thinks I’m weird because I make things that are cheaply available in the store (e.g., ketchup, jam), and they don’t understand why I persist in doing that. They are all up in arms now because I’m making plans to get 6 chickens later this month.
But persist I do. Someday I think a light will go on, and they’ll have my example to follow.
Lynda
I think you make a very good point, and it’s one that my husband tried to impress on me a few years ago when I was convinced that I needed to learn to grow EVERYTHING we would eat on my quarter acre. While I believe I could grow substantially more than I do (and I’m working on it
, I also understand that a quarter acre is a pretty small space to feed five people, two dogs, four ducks, ten rabbits and 20+ chickens.
But what my husband was saying was not that I should just give up my self-sufficiency dream, but that we can, and should, learn to forage wild foods, more – AND incorporate them into our diet. Acorns = good. But also, cattail (which is described as Nature’s Grocery Store by many wild foods enthusiasts), Japanese knotweed (which is a prolific invasive in my part of the country), dandelion greens, ostrich fern, trout lily, and a whole slew of other foods that grow just wherever – often in waste areas. Thing is, I devote 16 sq feet to lettuce and spinach, but I could, instead, grow more potatoes and forage for greens.
The hardest part, as you mentioned, though, is learning how to use the unfamiliar plants and incorporate them into our daily diet. It’s a slow process, but like you said, well worth the time and effort to start now, before it’s too late.
Oaks grow well here, and every city park has a few trees, and no squirrels to compete for the acorns
Last year I collected a couple of bags of acorns and fed them to the chickens as treats over winter. They loved them. The only thing that stopped me from doing it on a wider scale is that the acorns needed to be crushed so that the chickens could eat them, and I haven’t come up with a convenient way of doing it (right now I just stomp on a handful). I’ve found that tends to be the issue with a lot of the the protein I can produce myself – I don’t have a problem with eating the stuff, it’s the time required to make it edible. I’ve got two season’s worth of hazelnuts from my trees sitting around awaiting cracking because of this
What about those of us who are super tasters, for whom many of the “common” foods are actually unpalatable? I notice you mentioned picky eaters, which I guess is one way to describe us. When bland is the best we can hope for from our foods, when we’ve spent a lifetime learning to tolerate say tomato, when we’d rather just live on spuds to avoid all the horrid tastes and smells, when cooking is an exercise in frustration and disappointment because nothing tastes as the books tell us they will (ie they’re awful instead of delicious), how are we going to cope? I have a limited enough diet as it is.
Sharon,
What is the possibility of establishing a set-aside program for farms? What I am thinking is large farmers like Frank W. James, that could identify parcels of 5-20 acres, and turn them over to an identified organization similar to a CSA, who would take on farming (perhaps hiring the work done, perhaps even from the landowner) for sustainable crop and garden use.
The land would stay indisputably the possession of the farmer into the future. But the set-aside would earn tax credits against the whole operation at local, county, and federal levels. Perhaps an increased rate of credit for setting aside parcels for longer than one or two years.
The purpose would be to provide fertile ground for use for local grain and other food production, except trees (since trees would interfere with the property owner’s use of the ground in following years) or artichokes or other plants tough to eradicate for use in following seasons.
A program that would make land available as people become organized to take advantage, at the group or individual level, should be a way to show that improving local sources can coexist with traditional agriculture (for now). Determining what alternative food sources work in various areas would be delightful if done soonest and at a large enough scope for the results to be respected.
If this doesn’t appear to solve the big problems in time, it could help. In time, the hobby-level production would also begin to generate interest and markets. It should be easier for markets to expand to meet demand, than to start the market in the first place.
And we *have* to fight our current national crisis as older small acreage tractor and horse machinery keeps getting scrapped and sold to China. We are frittering away yesterday’s technology that still works, or could work, our heritage, and what might well be our future.
I went to a workshop on how to make acorn flour, and I made all-local acorn cookies out of just acorn flour, butter, eggs and maple syrup. They were absolutely delicious. As in the best cookies I’ve ever had.
About storing Jerusalem artichokes, I leave them in the ground and dig them when the ground thaws in spring. It’s such a treat to have something out of the garden at that time of year.
Just something to bring up, since you were talking about beets. Consider your family’s health issues. In my efforts to eat what we grow, I unwittingly aggravated my husband’s kidney stones. Too many meals with spinach, beet greens, and a little rhubarb thrown in. All 3 are high in oxalic acid, and his kidney stones acted up! By the way, beet roots aren’t a problem, just the greens. I imagine diabetics might have issues with the starchy vegetables.
Hi Sharon,
Is it something to do with eating really good food? We have gazillions of babies too (OK, five). And, many years after we last worked together (on articles for Permaculture Magazine in the UK – he did the cartoons, I did the words) Rob Hopkins and I hooked up again to find we’d produced nine children between us (OK, with a little help from the Distaff side. The breasts were handy too. Routers didn’t find much of a role until dolls’ houses were required
.
I’ve just picked up your response to my cheeky comment about having your babies. Deliberate namedrop here: the late Anita Roddick said to me on the day after my fourth child was born: ‘Rob, you needn’t feel too guilty, I believe you really are helping to create a generation of eco-warrioresses and warriors.’ So you can pass that on to your detractors.
And anyway, as I say, maybe it’s that farmers’ market food…
Here’s a couple of things we’re up to in Deare Olde Englande that you might like:
http://www.agrarianrenaissance.co.uk
http://www.churchfarmardeley.co.uk
Enjoy
Rob
Before Europeans arrived corn was grown throughout most of the northeast (maybe not Maine?) but the colonists preferred their own grains, especially wheat, which were hard to grow here. Corn should still be a suitable staple for the area if varieties can be found for local conditions and if people learn to prepare it with an alkali such as lime or wood ash. Somehow all of the native people who relied on corn learned to treat it this way, making the niacin available. Without this a corn based diet can cause pellagra. Corn has no gluten so it can’t be used for raised breads which would seem a deprivation to many of us but tortillas and jonny cakes (Rhode Island spelling) can substitute. Corn and beans are probably an adequate base for a diet (complete protein) and I wouldn’t mind subsisting on them. But please, no buckwheat! I used to dread the thankfully occasional pot of kashe. (Can’t eat fresh coriander either. I think it’s another one of those weird genetic taste bud things.)
This is a great post, and it both stops me in my tracks and gives me something for which to be grateful.
I want to have ducks for eggs, pest control, and fertilizer, as well as fun. From late spring to early fall, they should be able to find most of their food by foraging (in New England). But for the six months of winter (slight exaggeration), I have been advised to provide wheat berries mixed with a few other grains, and some vegetables. I have been wondering what to do, since I anticipate the interruption of and eventual end of availability of wheat up here.
I have been trying to find out if buckwheat will work for them. I grow it as a cover crop on my garlic. The next problem is that I need much more space to grow enough buckwheat for half a dozen ducks for six months.
Meanwhile, on the up side, I love sunroot (Jerusalem artichoke), raw or cooked. I enjoy foraging for lamb’s quarters and other wild edibles. I bought several groundnut tubers this year and plan on reestablishing this once-abundant staple food in my little woodland.
While I still eat way too many grain-based foods, I am sorting out what changes I will make in that area. Your post just prompted me to step it up.
Perhaps this will be a good mast year for the white oak just north of the house . . .
Having read John Jeavon’s book years ago and permaculture books more recently, I’ve been trying to learn to grow, and eat more of, both grains themselves and the high-calorie roots and nuts that might serve to supplement and/or replace them.
In Missouri, we have an abundance of nut shrubs and trees to choose from. I’m growing hazelnut shrubs and trees; hickory, pecan, and black walnut trees; and three ‘Dunstan’ American chestnuts which are reputed to be blight-resistant as an experiment. So far only the hazels are at producing age. But the squirrels get almost all the nuts. How am I supposed to compete with them? I’ve tried netting the shrubs, but if there is a squirrel-proof method of tying the netting to the shrub, I haven’t found it. Either I eat the squirrels or I’m going to have to hope I can grow more nuts than they can eat. (BTW, the squirrels ate all of one raspberry variety and my July peaches too. Nasty things.)
We grow and eat Jerusalem artichokes. Yes, they cause gas. You need to start by eating only a small amount at a time till your system learns how to process them and produce less gas. I’ve tried digging them up after the tops die in fall and storing them in a cool area and also covering the beds with several inches of leaves and then digging a few when we want them. The former is more work. I think they taste better when left in the garden, but at some point during the late winter the voles find them and eat them into bitty pieces. On top of that, they aren’t a favorite taste of mine so we need to keep working with them. I think we could survive on them all winter if we had to … but I’d rather not.
I’ve got 100 square feet of potatoes growing and about 50 square feet of sweet potatoes. We like both of these – but sooner or later we need to learn to use them more and grain less. I need to learn when to plant what potato variety so it matures in the fall, when I could store it in my root cellar approximation. Sweet potatoes are easier. We kept ours all winter and spring in the kitchen, and I grew this year’s slips from tubers I harvested last fall. If the crunch came, I think we’d stick with sweet potatoes for a major carb source.
Corn grows well here (of course). I prefer growing popcorn. We can make a dinner out of popcorn, no problem, and I like it well enough to do it for days. But I worry about the niacin availability issue.
Gene Logsdon’s book shot down my idea of growing upland rice. Not that rice won’t grow here (lots of rice is grown commercially in southern Missouri), but the processing of the grain sounds like it is too difficult for home-scale production. Bummer. We eats lots of rice.
I worry too about how we’re going to raise grain in a low energy future … especially because I have no idea how we could possibly subdivide the megafields out here into the 100 acre or less fields that might be horse-farmable. We’d need houses built, more roads, more small villages and revitalized ones that now exist … with what will we get those?
Berkshire, I’m east of you in Hampshire County – and according to the local sources, we used to grow wheat here up until WW II. After that, with the advent of industrial ag, we stopped growing wheat here. There are folks all over WMass trying to grow wheat here again. As you say, the climate is a bit problematic for wheat, but so far, folks are having some success. I have designs on growing both some wheat and some oats next summer. Meanwhile, I am expanding what I do plant here. In addition to tomatoes, broccoli, summer/winter squash and green beans, I’m growing drying beans, potatoes, and carrots. My CSA does winter shares, which is great, and I’ll be working with more beets and neeps this fall. I wish I liked cabbage, but…. I am also growing more greens for my rabbits – Queen Anne’s Lace, plantain, dandelions, clover, crabgrass (I laugh, but they do eat it!). I have pheromone lures for Japanese beetles to feed to my pullets, and they are making short work of ticks and ants in the yard. I do wish they’d get up to speed on the mosquitoes, though – we get eaten alive in late afternoon. And my apple, peach, blueberry, and raspberry plants are coming along quite nicely. I have greens, summer veggies, winter storage veggies, fruits, eggs, and rabbit… and taking Sharon’s fall/winter garden class to keep fresh greens coming until next spring. Now to get those two goats ~
I know we are in a different climate here from you but don’t give up on growing grains in a smaller garden environment. I use them in my garden rotations.
I pick traditional and non-hybrid varieties, often buying them from whole food stores. I grow wheat, rye and barley. I have experimented in winnowing, grinding and cooking with my home grown wheat.
I can envisage seed saving and eating them if need be and in the meantime, I can feed them to poultry and reduce inputs.
If it goes to the poultry, I throw it in whole or put a moveable pen on the bed for them to do the work. If I thresh the grain off the straw, a good proportion of the dry straw is twisted and knotted for firelighters in winter.
I find in the small situation, it needs very little additional water, no more than any other vegetable. Keep trying and see how you all go.
Susan- So far as you and fellow super tasters go- I think you’ll just have to do the best you can. No other choice, right? I sympathize- while I’m not a super taster per se, when I bite into a few choice foods (namely, bell peppers and dates), I’ve got a taste of what you go through. No matter how much I try, I can do nothing but cringe when it comes to dates (luckily, dates are not a staple food where I live, in Vermont). On the other hand, I have found myself developing more of a taste for bell peppers as time goes on. Could continually trying small amounts of foods that give you issues possibly work for you, kind of like increasing allergy resistance does for allergy sufferers?
I do think there’s a difference between super tasters and “picky eaters”. Picky eaters could very well have been born with standard taste buds- they’re just surrounded by people who encourage limited eating, because limited eating is just that easy nowadays. Limited eating is encouraged by advertising, who sing the praises of special kids’ food, who act like feeding kids the same spiced foods adults eat is borderline abusive. I think there’s a real need for people to NOT encourage such limited eating. Have confidence in your kid’s potential to eat “adult” food! I know, of my sister’s four kids, there are varying levels of pickiness, although she’s fed them all the same- definitely, genetics play a role in food tastes. All of them, though, are pickier than your average kid. Her 2-year-old loves kimchi (it was an early word for him), and her just turned 10-year-old gave me the remains of his birthday dinner- sashimi.
I’m growing hazelnuts, hybrid chestnuts, sweet acorn hybrid oaks, several different hybrids of walnuts. They do take a long time to mature, so I started 20 years ago. Finding the right varieties for your specific location can be a challenge. Its very encouraging to look at young trees making good growth, though.
Let me put in a plug for Gary Nabhan and Deborah Madison’s book Renewing America’s Food Traditions. It divides the country into “nations” characterized by the name of a culturally important traditional food from each region (here in St. Louis, I live in Cornbread Nation) and for each presents some now-uncommon plants and/or animals from the region. If I recall there is a recipe for each one, except the endangered animals, and sources for seeds of cultivated plants, breeders of domestic animals, etc. There’s also a RAFT organization whose website might have similar source information.
For those worried about the failure of wheat, Spelt works just fine for crackers, flat breads, and some backing and is resisent to stem rust. It’s low gluton makes it a good choice for those with intestinal issues or gluton allergies.
It is however a flop for making nice fluffy breads
Maybe we’re headed for a post-grain world, and perhaps that’s not so bad (in the long run – I agree that the transition might well be nasty.)
It is possible to live very well without corn, wheat, or rice – as long as you have vegetables, nuts, root vegetables, dairy (for milk, butter, and cheese), and some meat. While some people can eat a lot of grain starch and do fine physically, others find that eating grain leads to overweight, and sometimes even celiac disease & malnutrition.
Excellent post; very thought-provoking.
Claire in MO: Sorry to double post, but I had to comment on your remarks re: squirrels. They have been devastating now & again in my garden too. People *did* use to shoot and eat them. Also, a fenced in garden and a loose dog or two might keep them at bay (I have neither, and we can’t shoot them in the suburbs.) But predation is probably the only answer.
Dewey, thanks for the reminder about that wonderful book – I really love it. Gary Nabhan is one of my heroes – I was thrilled I got to meet him in Tucson this year. He doesn’t get as much attention as he deserves.
Kate, I have a child with sensory issues around food, so I can sympathize. All I can say is be grateful that you at least have language with which to describe it, and will understand why you are being asked to suck it up and eat something not appetizing to you. One thing I will say is that a lot of blandish foods – white beans, potatoes, etc… are probably not too hard to grow in many climates.
Let’s be clear – I’m not saying we won’t grow any grains – in fact, small scale grain raising has more potential than a lot of us think – almost half of India’s rice is grown on plots of less than 5 acres, and it isn’t the only grain typically produced in small culture. But for many climates, I think root culture is going to replace some grain culture, just because of ease of culture. For example, John Jeavons treats most grain as compost crops – their primary value isn’t their food, but their soil building qualities (ie, the return of the straw to soil). Most of the calories in intensive cultivation come from roots.
Stefanie, I think that would be viable, but in a calorie constrained world, there will simply be a lot less livestock – it is possible to feed, say, dairy animals entirely without grains, but that means milk production is 100% seasonal, and there’d be a lot less to go around. Same with grass-fed animals. There will be some. But not in the sense that most people who eat grain-free or low grain diets mean.
Honestly, I don’t think it is the grains themselves that “cause” the problem – if that was true than most of our grain intolerances would have arisen in the last 800 years, when almost all of our ancestors were eating mostly grains and almost nothing else. Instead, the rise in grain intolerance has mirrored industrialization – I don’t think the cause is the grains.
Sharon
I’m feeling the victory garden thing today! I just discovered a fluffy little peeping chick beneath one of my hens this morning. I keep six hens and a rooster on nothing but kitchen scraps and garden waste. I have actually managed to turn vegetable scraps into meat! I am sooo excited.
Wonderful article chock-full of good ideas, and the comments are great too.
A few little notes:
There is a lot of wheat grown in Colorado, much of it winter wheat (dryland wheat). It is planted in the fall. It sits more or less dormant through the winter, then comes on with the late winter snows and spring rains. You can get a great crop without irrigation even in our semi-arid region.
Unfortunately, having celiac disease, I can’t eat it. But we also grow millet here. Millet has about the shortest season of any grain. I have come to love it. You can cook it as itself, make polenta from it, or use the flour for pancakes and breads.
Barley is also grown in Colorado, but mostly used for brewing beer.
Quinoa is such a fussy grain that it can’t be grown on the plains: it needs the mountain valleys so that it does not get too hot. But there are a few growers.
POTATOES:
On the potato blight, all our potato stocks have the blight. Blight will tend to build up year after year when you replant your own stock. Some years would be worse due to weather conditions.
Breeding blight-resistant potatoes is a DANDY project for those with some time and acreage on their hands. Potatoes these days are NOT bred to be blight-resistant since commercial and home growers generally start with fresh purchased starts every year.
But it can be done. Raoul Robinson has written a paper on practical techniques. You can find it at:
http://www.sharebooks.ca/eBooks/SpudsManual.pdf
Do I even want to ask what a “jello salad” is?
Moringa — sometimes called the tree of life — is part of the solution. Some say this is the most nutritious tree in the world.
http://www.utopiasprings.com/moringa.htm
You talk more CRAP then a North Korean radio station…Get a life…
[...] Reader Paul P. offered a link to a thought-provoking piece on self-sufficiency in Sharon Astyk’s blog: Eat What You Grow, Grow What You Eat? [...]
As another Alaskan, the choices of what will grow are, yes, somewhat limited. I use as much of my yard as possible for staple foods and am now expanding into more marginal areas. For instance, shady or out-of-sun areas are good for mint, for comfrey, edible ferns (mind you, they are usually supressive of other plants) and for aegopodium podagraria (in russian, ’sneet’, an edible green but also an invasive weed in sunny areas). If one grows a large bed of mint it won’t feed your family, but it is a pleasant drink and mild stomach medicinal, and can be gifted or traded to neighbors. My strategy is to grow and gift or trade as much food as possible to my friends and neighbors, exchanging for fish, game, help, etc. We don’t have to do it all ourselves!
i planted orange, grapefruit and lemon seeds in used coffee grounds for years and got hundreds of seedlings and some survived the 10 year and produce fruits in my tiny desert yard and i thing agriculture experiements should be required gramma school classes with time allococated to the expansions and productions and needs required for that as a futures hedge and a method of getting something personally in my “greedy” little state from the huge school taxes I pay