Casaubon’s Book

Sharon July 20th, 2008

The Gents over at The Oil Drum are having a discussion of what human labor is worth in energy equivalents.  Luis de Sousa rather unfortunately titled the post “What Is a Human Being Worth?” - obviously, he was being tongue in cheek, but also obviously, he wasn’t fully prepared for the kind of response that question generates. If you want to gently joke about human value, and implicitly raise issues like slavery and Nazism as part of your joke, well, you can pretty much expect what you get.  Some folks will mind, some won’t, but I think any whinging about how it was just a joke and that we don’t really have to talk about moral and ethical stuff, we were trying to be *empirical* about it doesn’t get any of my sympathy. 

Now I adore The Oil Drum, and I owe the guys having this conversation a lot - I’ve learned a lot from them.  But this article does kind of make Crunchy Chicken’s point about gender and the peak oil movement come up to the forefront - this post felt like a circle jerk at the boys club.  It must have been fun while they were doing it - “Hey, can we figure out what a human being is worth?  And express it in kilowatt hours? Cool!” Oy vey.  And I realize I’m a mere humanities scholar, and totally graph free, but if you were comparing something to barrels of oil, a source of energy wouldn’t you want to compare the source of my energy with the machine’s energy, rather than the source of energy with me? 

The most interesting part of the article (I’m tempted to say the only interesting part, but I’m trying to play nice) is the comments.  Like Bart Anderson and Kiashu, I think that the question is being asked badly - hmmm…who can run faster, me or a barrel of oil? Now I’m by no means a serious runner, but I still think that I could outdistance the barrel pretty good.   Well, but if you give the barrel of oil a human manufactured and maintained motorcycle, it can outrun me, you say.  True, but do I get a person to maintain me, maybe a personal trainer?  Without me on it to steer, the oil in the motorbike can presumably go faster, but will fall over pretty quick, won’t it?  I, on the other hand, won’t hit a tree for at least umm…two minutes? 

Then there’s the quality of the work - what about helping Grandma to the bathroom?  Now a robot designed to help a big nursing home full of Grandmas to the potty might well be able to do more assisting than I do - on the other hand, Grandma probably doesn’t like the robot and its probes nearly as much as she likes me (well, for most versions of “Grandma”), and then comes the problem of the occasional beheading caused by robot error - well within the statistical margin, but those that like Grandma get pretty annoyed and start bemoaning the loss of the good old days when Grandma never got beheaded in the nursing home (they probably can’t remember the days when she didn’t even have to go there).

The best computer programs in existence with a lot of human guidance to design parameters could probably produce more words than me on a barrel of oil.  But would they be better, more on-topic, more engaging, more titillating than my words?  I’m not sure I want y’all to answer that ;-), but the old “an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters writing for an infinite amount of time would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare” bit does apply.  And while my works may well be more on the order of 5 monkeys working for 15 minutes, I still will bet that I can mock the TOD Dudes attempting to do the math on human worth better than the best humor generating programs (except for the one now using the cyborg brain of George Carlin, of course).

But there is a reason I’m pointing this out - because underlying a lot of people’s thinking about peak oil is a “OMG…we use X number of terajoules of energy to do Y, and now we’ve got to replace it with backbreaking human labor - and doing even the most essential things - digging ditches or growing food, pays for shit -  we’re all gonna be slaves!” 

Now there are several problems with this analysis, but I want to focus on one important one - the fact that cheap energy has had the function devaluing human labor.  This is fairly obvious - if a gallon of gas can do the equivalent of four men’s work digging outhouses in one day, and the gallon of gas (plus the machine to use it, the man to operate it and the (almost certainly subsidized)  infrastructure to support it) is cheaper, the value of the men’s labor as outhouse diggers drops to…zero.  Because no one in their right mind will hire them, instead of the machine and its dude.  Or maybe not quite zero - perhaps some people with money to spare will see the value of hand-dug outhouses, and tell their friends, and a small niche market will arise - but most people won’t.  And most of the outhouse diggers will have to go do something else to make money.  The best money, obviously, will be in doing things machines don’t do well (yet), like helping Grandma to the potty, writing blogs about the injustices of society and breastfeeding (oh, wait, the money for all of those things sucks… damn, the fact that I’m not an economist kicks me in the ass again.)   

You’d think that doing stuff machines and oil can’t do would pay pretty well, but in fact, the fossil fuels essentially devalue all human labor - the highest paid jobs become not the ones that machines can’t do that benefit society, but the ones that enable more fossil fuel usage, because functionally, cheap energy is (this seems obvious, but I make it explicit because its amazing what people miss) a way of printing money - getting a lot of work done for virtually nothing is a great way to make a profit - that’s why people used to like slavery, and then they liked fossil fuels. In fact, they devalue human work so much you can’t do the work even if you want to - you can’t breastfeed your baby because you have to go back to work at Walmart 3 weeks after the birth (because you are needed to help the growth economy), and you can’t manufacture things things, because the things are too expensive if they pay you a living wage - the only way they can use human labor is to find labor that is literally cheaper than oil - by creating economic structures that ensure that the wealth doesn’t get spread around and that there always are people who are cheaper than oil.  So it isn’t so much work that machines don’t do well that is valued but work that enables the expansion of energy use, and thus, more exchange of cash - for example, being a real estate developer paid (until the energy prices started to rise) really, really well - because they make new markets, and make new uses for fossil fuels - all those houses need faucets and insulation, all those suburbanites need grocery stores and gas stations, all those new toilets need toilet paper. 

Now the economy and culture that rise up don’t just value things that enable things that involve burning stuff more than things that don’t, they explicitly *DEVALUE* things that don’t - that is, it isn’t just that now the guys who used to build outhouses can’t do that work any more, it is that the very fact that they used to do that is now treated as appalling, strange and bad.  People marvel that anyone could ever have done it at all, and describe the work as “drudgery” and “backbreaking” - which may be true - the guys digging the outhouses may well have hated it, and may well have preferred their new jobs, unloading pallets at Walmart to digging outhouses.  Probably on rainy days, the certainly did - although maybe when their boss was timing their bathroom breaks they missed their old job and the convenient woods, and when they were working a 12 hour shift under the flourescent lights on a beautiful, breezy fall day, who knows?  Certainly, their backs probably hurt either way. 

The women who used to nurse their babies aren’t just doing something different, or contributing to a different segment of the economy (ummm…healthy intelligent workers - those aren’t useful, are they?)  what they are doing is arcane and immodest, maybe a little dirty,  showing off their boobs like that.   Certainly, it is anti-intellectual and a waste of what education they had -  staying at home rotting their brains, rather than going to do some useful work where someone else can care for the baby while your boss times you as you attempt to pump breastmilk on the toilet of the Walmart bathroom.  Of course, you give up, but that’s good, because that creates jobs for formula manufacturers and Baby Stalin Video developers.

And not only do they devalue that work, but they devalue the men and women themselves  who weren’t “smart” enough to get in on the ground floor of the fossil fuel pyramid scheme - we make a lot of redneck jokes, and talk about how important our work is and how we’re too important or smart to clean toilets or wipe bums ( And yes, these are actual things I’ve heard expressed quite explicitly)  Doing work that can be done by machines and oil (unless you manage a niche market like the perfect outhouses, coming soon to a Martha Stewart show near you), like weeding, breastfeeding or digging means you must be dumb - because didn’t you know we can do that with fossil fuels now?  Or better yet,  or with a combination of fossil fuels and people whose main characteristic is that they are cheaper than oil.  

 And it isn’t just these folks - anything that can be profitably done with cheap fossil fuels is obviously devalued -  but also, oil produces a lot of energy.  I know, I know…duh.  But bear with me.  This is its virtue, but also its cost.  At first you can take the obviously demanding jobs and replace them with machines and oil, and make slow things go faster.  Now maybe that’s ok and maybe it isn’t - we don’t do a lot of intellectual case by case thinking about this stuff -  but after a while, all the outhouse diggers are out of business.  But we still have all this energy coming in - and now we have to grow into to work that isn’t so well done with fossil fuels - work that doesn’t get done with powered machines, but that can only be replaced either with diminishing quality (ie, Grandma gets probed by a potty-machine instead of having her need for help and kindness met simultaneously), or by convincing people that what isn’t as good really is.  So, for example, despite the manifest case that industrial food production produces food that tastes like shit, has fewer nutrients and is more toxic, we have to be told that this is progress, that Campbell’s Soup is better than homemade and that Grandma is pissed not because she doesn’t like where the probe goes, but also because the frozen lasagna is better than hers ever was. 

And that’s the other way that fossil fuels devalue human labor - they convince us that the world we get with fossil fuels is  equivalent in every respect to the human powered one, that we can do analyses like the one being done at The Oil Drum, and that there’s no danger, nothing inherently demeaning there in sitting around and discussing how many barrels of oil a human being is worth.  Not only do fossil fuels devalue human labor directly, but because they produce so much energy, they must create uses for that energy - they are the primary agency of growth - a 30-1 EROEI for oil means that even if we only need to use 10 barrels of oil for everyone we extract, we have to create a need for the other 20.  Thus, you start out replacing the outhouse diggers, and replacing hand loomed cloth with machine loomed cloth, making huge differences in productivity - but gradually you start making bread machines and salad shooters and clothes dryers that don’t really do the job any better than human beings with ambient energies.  But we can’t tell anyone that’s not true - so you start selling the idea that you need a bread machine to make bread, and a backhoe to dig a hole and formula to feed a baby and that these things are better, or at a minimum just the same.  

When you have children, you can do enormous harm to them by following them around and telling them “no, don’t try that, it is too hard, too dangerous” - the result is children without self-confidence, without courage, and without competence.  What they are “worth” (and I used that term ironically here) as human beings is shaped by the ways they are valued and supported by the surrounding infrastructure (ie, the people who love and care for them).  The same is true of human beings at large, and of ordinary adults.  In this case, it is fossil fuels that stand in for overprotective parents, telling us, implicitly by the very existence of the machines and explicitly through advertising that we are not competent, that our own energies are insufficient to the job.  The very existence of the rototiller says “The shovel is insufficient” - and most people who purchase one probably do so, not after extensive trials with the shovel and with mulch, but because they “know” that the rototiller is necessary. The formula that comes in the little bag they give you in the hospital when you have a baby says “Your breasts probably won’t work as advertised - we can’t trust in them, or in you.”  In the same sense, we “know” that most of the work we do that doesn’t require fossil fuels isn’t really valuable, because, after all, it could be done much more cheaply with fossil fuels, or with one of the people “liberated” from their old jobs digging ditches or growing foods who can now do the cheap labor of caring for our children or cooking our dinners.   In the net, a whole host of people from anthropologists to Juliet Schor have shown that industrial society needs more of our time and energy than either agrarian or other subsistence societies - that is, the push to burn the oil also means a push to get us pushing the buttons that burn the oil, and making money to buy the salad shooter - it means besides telling us we can’t do things, it embeds us in a system that absorbs the time we might have had to get stuff done.

What happens in a lower energy world, or one where energy isn’t cheap anymore?  Do we have to put all those human beings on treadmills to run the machines that make the wii systems, and then have someone running behind your kid generating power while he’s pretending to run on his wii?  Hmmm… just maybe there’s a simpler way.  Like maybe a large percentage of the activities that seem so necessary when we have all these fossil fuels we have to burn won’t seem so necessary. Maybe the question isn’t “is it more efficient for Steve to fly or walk from Alabama to Michigan for his business meeting” but “will it be necessary for Steve to work for a company that sells B to B software and has business meetings in Michigan?”  Might it be possible, in a world where energy isn’t cheap anymore to shift our valuation of things, to valuing human labor highly enough to support someone doing something more useful, and perhaps closer?

Might it even be possible to ask a different question - how much human time and energy is required to support the infrastructure for a fairly simple, reasonably humane, low energy, mostly human powered society, that gets to keep some of the best elements of the fossil fueled world, while jettisoning the rest?  And then, how much human time and energy is required to support a heavily industrialized, toxic society that devalues human beings?  There’s a very good chance that the answer to the first question is *less human work* than the answer to the second one.  Juliet Schor’s explorations, and Helena Norberg Hodge’s research in Ladakh, as well as investigations into Hunter-Gatherer societies and the work of historians generally all pretty much agree - most people worked rather less than we do in most agrarian socieities - they worked long hours during planting and harvest, and very short ones in the winter or the rainy season.  The averages range from 2-4 hours of daily work to support all the need of a !Kung to a daily average of about 6 hours per day in medieval agrarian societies.

I am grateful for fossil fuels in my life, and I use them, if advisedly and with care.  My point is not “fossil fuels are evil” - they aren’t.  But they have consequences, practical, economic, moral as well as phsyical ones that go unexplored in this kind of very narrow analysis.   To a degree, it is only possible for us to be sitting here asking what human beings are worth in relationship to a barrel of oil because fossil fuels enable us to devalue human labor, and humans themselves so thoroughly.  One Oil Drum commenter suggests that it would be useful to think about how many slaves fossil fuels have replaced - but in fact, as I’ve written about here, and as recent studies have suggested, there are more slaves in the world now than there ever were pre-fossil fuels.  The fact is that slavery is an expression of how we value other human lives - the idea that we can honestly transform people into energy and dollars.  This is not dependent on fossil fuels - but it can be enabled by them (and by other things as pre-modern slave societies show) - it is enabled by any model that represents human beings primarily as a source of energy.  I understand that the people doing this analysis meant to be contributing something useful to the world - but what they succeeded in doing was rather different - their article is as much a defense of this kind of ethics free reductionism as it is an exercise in mathematics.

So what’s a human being worth? Not nearly as much as you’d hope, it seems. 

 Sharon

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Sharon July 17th, 2008

I’ve had a number of participants in both my classes with food issues that meant that some grains weren’t an option for them.  A fairly large percentage of the population has sensitivities to wheat or corn (there’s some argument in the medical literature whether it is actually biologically possible to be allergic to rice - at a minimum, true rice allergies are extremely uncommon).  Another portion may not be aware that they cannot tolerate large quantities of wheat or corn until they try - I know at least two people with much stored wheat who have discovered they can’t eat it. 

So it behooves all of us to have some familiarity with, and perhaps some storage of, a range of grains beyond the big three - wheat, rice and corn.  Moreover, often minor grains haven’t had the major price rises that major ones have - as far as I know, as yet, no one is making ethanol with amaranth (I’m sure someone is or will be, though). 

Generally speaking, whole grains store for quite a while.  Bleached white grains, with all their nutritional goodness taken off also store a long while but are bad for you.  What stores very badly are any cracked, crushed, ground or processed grains the germ attached - whole grain flours, cracked grains or brown rice (more on this below) have a storage life measured in months, not years.  This is no problem if you don’t buy more than you eat in six months, and you rotate well - but just in case you might not be as careful as you should be on this one, generally speaking, you want to store whole grains - or the processed alternatives, which generally have inferior nutritional value, but some people might want to store them anyway.

The other issue that applies is whether a grain has a hard outer coating or a soft one.  If the grain has a hard one, it stores longer than the softer ones.  The hard grains (which include “soft” wheat - a designation that refers to its baking qualities, not its structure)  generally store for at least a decade, often 20+ years.  The soft grains store, in a cool, oxygen free environment for 6-9 years, depending on which reference you look at.

Because you are storing whole grains, many people will want a grain grinder. I did a post on this subject last time I did the class, and I won’t repeat myself.  A grain grinder is very nice, particularly if you would like to eat foods in familiar forms - ie, bready or pasty kinds of things.  But you can get along without one - for much of human history, grains were pounded or ground by hand or eaten whole.  You could just not eat breads or other ground foods and mostly eat bulghur, hominy and whole rice, quinoa, amaranth, etc…  A grain grinder is a nicety - a very, very useful nicety - but not necessary to life, and you can store grains without one. 

Wheat is a great storage food - but most of us probably shouldn’t eat just wheat.   Any food storage should include a balance of grains - especially if you have young kids.  No more than 50% of your food storage should be wheat based with children unless your family comes universally from genetic “wheat people” and daily eat huge quantities of wheat.  It should be noted that wheat is a wonderful food - and for those who can tolerate it, a great base for a diet, particularly if you are “from” bread.  Just don’t make it the only thing.  The good thing about wheat is that, properly packed into buckets with oxygen absorbers, dry ice, etc…  it will keep for decades.  If kept at temps below 70 degrees, it stays good for 20-30 years.  I am not recommending that you keep it that long - better to eat and enjoy it.  But it will last. 

Corn is also an allergenic food, although also a good one.  For corn, the major issue is that lacks  protein unless it is nixtamelized - that is, unless an alkaline substance is added to it.  The native peoples of the Americas routinely added wood ashes to their food, which resolved the issue.  European colonists in the new world adopted corn, but not the technique of making its full nutritional value accessible, and thus suffered from pellagra.  Kwashiorkor is a related disease, caused by weaning children from breastmilk to non-nixtamelized corn. 

So if corn is one of your primary staple foods, you should learn to make hominy, which is hulled (nixtamelized) corn.  Or you can simply grind or cook corn and add 2 tablespoons of clean (ie, you haven’t burned anything else with it) hardwood ash to each cup of  your corn. 

Take 3 cups of dried corn and 10 cups of water.  Soak the corn overnight in a bowl of teh water.  The next day, put the corn and water (use an enameled or ceramic pot if using the ash - unenameled metal will react with the ash) in a pot.  Cover and bring to a rapid boil.  When the corn comes to a boil, add either 1 cup of culinary ash or 2 tablespoons of baking soda.  You’ll see a dramatic color change in the kernels - they will get brighter looking.

Lower the heat and cover.  Simmer over low for 5 1/2 hours (the corn can be brought to a boil on the stove and then simmered in a sun oven) until the hulls start to com loose and the corn changes back to its original color.  stir occasionally, and add water if necessary.  When all the corn is softened, put the corn under cold water, and rubt it to remove the hulls.  Discard th hulls (compost, give to chickens), and drain the hulled corn.  You can serve the hominy with butter, or with milk straight, or you can dry it in the sun or a dehydrator (to check if it is dry enough, use a fingernail to break open a kernel - if there’s any moisture, keep drying).  It will keep 1-2 years in dry form. 

Dried hominy can be reconstituted, and is delicious in posole, a stew of dried chiles, meat (usually pork) and dried hominy.  Recipes here: http://www.recipezaar.com/151457

Or you can make masa, which is ground hulled corn.  For dry masa meal, you can dry the hominy and grind it, but traditional masa is ground in a metate from freshly hulled corn.  It is delicious, but a good bit of work, since most grinders can’t easily handle something that wet.  We’ve pulled off a rough parallel with a stick blender, though.

In _Little House in the Big Woods_ Laura Ingalls Wilder described her mother making hominy with lye but this is rough on the skin - I think baking soda or ash is easier (ashes contain lye, but the unprocessed substance is much easier to deal with).  The instructions there are pretty clear, though, if you really want to try it.  Be CAREFUL if you do - lye is very caustic.  Laura talks about eating hulled corn fried in pork fat, with maple syrip or like cereal, in milk.

 BTW, if you want to store whole grains but can’t convince family or friends you will eat this stuff, you might try storing lots of popcorn.  Now popcorn has the same issues as un-nixtamelized dry corn (nixtamelization is not necessary if you are only eating corn occasionally or as part of a wide range of grains - but because corn grows so well, so widely, I suspect some of us may come to rely on it more than we do now), and is not good for grinding into meal (too hard), but it is such an accessible food that occasionally food storage opponents will be ok with a 25 lb bucket of popcorn, and the mental image of endless movie nights that suggests.

Ok, on to Rice.  Here we come to one of the most common confusions in food storage.  Most of the foods we recommend storing are whole grains, which generally store better than grains that have been hulled or ground.  Brown rice looks, to most people, like a whole grain.  The problem is that it isn’t - rice actually has a hull on it, and once the hull is removed, the oils in rice go rancid very, very quickly.  Many people cannot taste rancid grains - they can’t tell if the oils have spoiled - and rancid grains are not good for you.  You shouldn’t eat them.  Brown rice oxidizes and spoils very quickly - the maximum storage life for brown rice out of a freezer is 6-12 months - and that’s a maximum - I’ve had it spoil faster.  Which is why most storage programs recommend white rice.  I’m actually going to do a post next week on finding *whole* unhulled rice and the possibilities of hulling it in the US - Kerri from AK who comments here kindly did a whole lot of research on this subject, and I want to pass it on, but it deserves its own post.  For most people, who do not want to build a rice huller, white rice, which is far less nutritious than brown, is the right choice for long term storage - generally speaking, you don’t want to buy more brown rice than you will use in 6-12 months, and less if you can’t taste (or aren’t sure if you can taste) rancid grains. 

Now 80% of the world’s population mostly eats these three grains.  This can be an advantage if you prefer to buy from smaller producers.  But there are a lot of other great grains out there.

Most of us know Rye best from bread - the big advantage of rye is that it will tolerate colder climates than wheat, and added to wheat flour, it makes delicious bread.  Rye grains, sprouted, also make a delicious porridge.  Rye is a soft grain, and keeps properly stored, for 5-6 years.

Amaranth is wonderful - it is also tremendously easy to grow in many climates, including mine. It can be popped like popcorn and it has a terrific flavor - we love it, and it is also one of the most beautiful and useful plants I grow.  It is great in flatbreads or granola.  I’ve seen several reliable sources with wildly differing estimates of how long amaranth keeps - from 3 years to 10 years and beyond.  I’m going to say we should treat it like a soft grain (with a soft hull) and call it 5 years, but if someone has a better figure, let me know.

Quinoa is hugely popular among people who can’t eat wheat, people keeping kosher for passover (it isn’t a true grain so we can eat it) and a host of new converts.  It is often used like rice or couscous, with food served over it.  It is a soft grain and keeps 6-9 years.  Quinoa has a coating that contains saponins, that are very bitter and soapy - you must rinse it until the water stops soaping before eating it.  The rinse water supposedly can be used to do laundry, though.

Barley is one of the oldest grains - one of the best things about barley is the sweetness it develops when sprouted - malted or sprouted barley adds a light, sweet flavor to breads.  Pearled barley is essentially the white rice of barley, and keeps forever - whole barley keeps forever, but has hulls which are not the sort of thing you want to eat - whole barley at the home level, without some way to hull it, is mostly good for beer making.  There are hulless barleys, but there’s no clear answer on how long they store - at a minimum, I would recommend treating them as a soft grain.  Hulled barley keeps 5-7 years.

Buckwheat is essential in pancakes at our house, and in soba noodles - easily grown, easily ground, it makes a crop quite quickly in late summer.  The greens are nutritious (as are amaranth’s) and a good salad green in hot climates where lettuce bolts, or anywhere you are using it as a cover crop.  It is a hard grain, and lasts for decades.

Millet is a hard grain as well - most of us know it as birdseed, but it is a common food grain in India and much of Northern Asia, and has a delicate taste - it is quite delicious.  We use it like rice or couscous - it is also very digestible.  It stores for decades.

Spelt, Kamut and Emmer I’ll deal with together, because they are all forms of wheat with special qualities.  All keep like wheat - more or less forever.  Emmer is a very old form of wheat that some people with wheat sensitivities can tolerate (although it is not good for celiacs) - it has a heavy hull.  It is also a good variety for those growing wheat on extremely poor soils.  Kamut is a commercial variety that some people with wheat allergies seem to be able to tolerate - those who produce it claim it is a very old variety, but there’s limited evidence on this.  The same is true of spelt, which is either a wheat or a close relative, depending on how you interpret the genetic evidence.  Again, it is not suitable for people with celiac.  All keep very well, all are lower gluten than conventional wheat and make a heavier bread, but all taste good.

Not a true grain (neither is amaranth or quinoa), Flaxseed in its whole form also keeps nearly forever - for a decade or more.  Given the importance of omega-3 fatty acids and the pleasant taste of flaxseed, this is an excellent thing to keep in storage - we love it.

 All of these are worth eating and experimenting with - and storing.  But please don’t just store them - eat them. 

A few recipe links: http://featured.chefmom.com/2008/05/25/kid-friendly-quinoa-recipes-apricot-quinoa-cereal-sesame-orange-quinoa-salad-and-quinoa-turkey-burgers-with-easy-guacamole/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/mostof_coeliac3.shtml

 http://recipes.recipeland.com/recipes/recipe/show/Amaranth_Baking_Powder_Bread_3012

More recipes in future posts!

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Sharon July 11th, 2008

I was talking to Aaron about various things recently, and we were discussing the remarkable amount of attention his wonderful article about The Four Day Work Week is getting - the idea is getting a lot of national play, and so is Aaron.   This is terrific - CNN is calling and various legislatures are considering it as a policy - I’m so delighted about it, and proud that Aaron is having a role in moving our nation’s policy to something we definitely need - more balance, more flexibility, more environmental awareness.

We were nattering away, as we do, and I being an opinionated sort opined that a partial key to pulling this off, and avoiding a scenario in which middle and upper middle class employees get this benefit, and the poor and working class are increasingly screwed would be bringing back a mandatory day free of commerce.   That is, I think it is quite possible that the four day work week will make it into the public discourse - and work very well for millions of middle class Americans whose work can be done at any time.  I am concerned, however, about how this may play out in service sector work - the ways in which, for example, shift workers who already struggle to get enough hours to receive benefits may find the new policy enabling them to be pushed out of access to health insurance, among other things, or the reality that poor workers, already struggling with gas costs may be left out of such adaptations (this should not be seen as an attack on Aaron’s idea, which I agree with very much - I’m simply concerned with the implementation).

While it is hardly a panacea, one thing I think would actively benefit both working families and businesses is a legally mandated day free of commerce.  Why legally mandated?  Because without across the board implementation, it won’t happen - workers in this market haven’t the power to demand a day off for themselves, and businesses can’t afford to be uncompetetive.  The only way that we can close down both energy use and free most people to have a day off is with a legal mandate.  This would reduce carbon emissions, but it would also reduce the enormous pressure on shift working families - who often have no idea if they will have any free time, who often struggle to provide child care every day of the week at odd hours, and it IMHO, makes it less possible for service businesses to argue that they can’t afford to employ enough people to go to a four day work week.  

Now I have a funny relationship with this whole idea.  I grew up in Massachusetts, a state whose laws were shaped in part by its long history of Protestantism, and when I was a kid, everything was closed on Sundays - period. Not only couldn’t you buy liquor, you couldn’t buy anything.

Around the time I hit adolescence, most of the blue laws that regulated Sunday commerce (except for the booze-related ones - these had minimal effect because I lived in Massachusetts, near the New Hampshire border, and the NH “packies” were an easy trip for teenagers with fake ids - not, of course, ( definitely not, Mom!) that I was one of them.

And I was extremely enthusiastic about this deregulation - at first just because I was a teenager and while I had no money, in principle I approved of being able to shop any time I wanted to, and later, on the principle of religious freedom.  I believed strongly that the state should not have any part in establishing a sabbath of any kind.  I still believe that the establishment of a religious Sabbath should be entirely out of the territory of the state.  But I’ve come to believe that the regulation of commerce should definitively include a day in which commerce is not permitted.  And given the makeup of the country, I think the chance of that day being anything but Sunday is exactly zero. 

Now as a Jew, this is a royal pain in my ass in some ways.  Since I don’t engage in commerce on Saturdays, that means the weekend is out for errand running.  Since I live a long way from most shopping, that means that the weekend was when I did my errand running, if any.  Guess what - I’ll deal.  And so would the rest of us.  While parts of the economy, especially some tourist-based economic activities might take a hit, the truth is that the compensatory savings on not heating, lighting or running the business would be worth it.  And one of the ways I think it would most be worth it is in family culture - at the moment, most American families have nothing like a sabbath - they have no time that is only theirs, no time not taken up with work and shopping and running errands.  In some ways, this will complicate things - but then again, there are millions of Christians, Jews and Muslims in the world who do in fact keep a Sabbath, and will gladly share strategies for getting organized and being able to stay home.

Now I suspect some people will disagree with me strongly, and some business owners will say this would kill them, and I’m sympathetic, although I think I’m still in favor of it.  Ultimately, transport emissions and building emissions are going to have to come down far further than by 1/7 - we don’t have a choice.  Ultimately the changes that are coming as energy prices rise and the climate changes are far more radical than this.  The real advantage of this idea is that it isn’t far away in our national memories - as we approach harder, scarier forms of conservation and adaptation, the first tools in our box should be the ones we’re not afraid of, that feel familiar to us in some way.  There are still many areas in the US that do close down on a Sunday - while it may seem a bit archaic, things that seem archaic - ideas like frugality, victory gardens, pulling together and making do, along with a day when all the stores are shuttered and families are at home together, have the virtue of a warm familiarity in a desert of newness.

Which brings me to the question of why I call it a Sabbath at all - commerce-free day would probably make more sense were I proposing legislation, given my concerns about the establishment of state faith - I have strong religous, cultural and moral reasons not to want to see the government implying the Christianity is a national religion.  And yet, I do think of it as a Sabbath. 

The reason I do is that Sabbaths are associated with freedom in the Torah - Jews are taught that as we kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath kept us.  The idea of the Sabbath that informed both Christianity and Judaism derives from a simple idea - one day each week, we will be free.  No master can tell us what to do.   No boss can demand we give up our energies, our time, our dignity.  In our own homes, however humble, we are free to do as we wish that one day.  Jews are taught to see that freedom from work and the money economy as a gift - and we do, mostly.  It is hard work sometimes to establish that oasis in time - but rewarding, oh, rewarding to have a day each week in which we are truly free. 

Abraham Heschel claimed that the reason that the Torah says that “On the seventh day God finished his work” instead of “He rested on the seventh day.” is that on the seventh day, God was still creating something without which the universe would still be incomplete.  What was it?  Heschel argues that it is “menhua” or ” tranquility, serenity, harmony.”  That is, all the work of creation was incomplete without the idea of time to repose and enjoy it.  And not only were people given the Sabbath, but the whole world was given that time - animals were not to be worked, but turned out on pasture to do as they will.  That is, the Sabbath itself was a time of freedom for the whole world - and a time when humans were obliged to lift the burdens of others - other people, the animals in their lives. 

One could argue that for those of us compelled by the idea of a religious Sabbath, there is an obligation to lift the burden upon the world, upon nature as much as we can one day a week - that is, the way we can free animals for their own sabbath is reduce the pollutants we pour into their environment, to slow the process of building and expanding into their habitats.  Perhaps we can free the world of some of some of the weight others bear for us. 

Now most people are not Jews, and most people do not keep a sabbath, and most people will perhaps not much be compelled by the writings of thousands of year old Jews on the subject of whether they should be shopping on one day or another.  And yet, I think the idea of the Sabbath as freedom - both freedom from work and freedom to lift the burden we place on the rest of the world might be worth considering.  One does not have to believe in a God that ordains these things to believe that it might be valuable to take one day and devote it to our homes, our families, the reconstitution of ourselves.  What we do on those days we depend on our faith, our family, our lives.  But our ability to devote our time to ourselves, our ability to negotiate with employers for less work, our ability to balance the environment and our lives depends, in part, I think, on our ability to silence some of the demands that the world places upon us.

 I know how very hard it is to keep a Sabbath in world that always calls to us.  I do it…mostly. It can be done.  And I know that many people will not see such a time as a gift right away - and some may never see it that way.  When I was a teenager, with a boundless energy, the idea of a day of rest, home with my family, seemed outrageous, pointless - who would want such a thing.  But the truth is that there are millions of peoplw who want precisely that, and lack the power to negotiate it, and the support community to enable it.  Overwhelmingly, Americans state they need more time - more time for family, more time to recover from the stresses on their lives.  And if we are to soften the rigidity of the five day work week, IMHO, a part of that would be the recognition that work itself has limits, and cannot extend into every moment of our lives - that other things, tranquility, rest, autonomy, freedom reside there too. 

Shalom,

 Sharon

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Sharon July 8th, 2008

Last time I ran the food storage class, I started off with a Food Storage 101 post that discussed the bare minimum for food storage - the 2 weeks recommended by both the US Department of Homeland Security and the American Red Cross.  I reviewed the fact that 2 week extended periods in which we are unable to shop or get supplies are actually not at all uncommon - that they have occurred many times in rich world nations including the US, and that all of us should, as simply commonsense preparedness, have a 2 week supply of food.  I then went along trying to get you all to store much more food than that, but I didn’t want to push too hard on that, because I know that for some people, the idea that you might not be able to get food at the store for more than a couple of weeks due to a short-term disaster is just plain crazy talk. 

But this time around, I’m going to push the issue, even if it makes you think I’m nuts (if you are just figuring this out, you may be new to the blog ;-)).  Because the truth is that 2 weeks is nowhere near enough - 3 months really should be the minimum.

 Why?  Five reasons, all of them, I think important.

1. Longer periods of large scale crisis/limited supplies are well within the realm of the possible - they fit with planning scenarios.  Government agencies and some nations are recommending larger quantities - often 3 months worth of food.

2. People planning for very short terms actually are at a disadvantage, both economically and in terms of how they think about their personal infrastructure - that is, in many ways, it is cheaper, easier and better to make plans for longer term disruptions, because the strategies commonly used for them are cheaper and better and make more sense.

3. Because it is mistake to view food storage and preservation as merely a hedge against a major, widespread national disaster.  Personal disasters occur all the time, and can be just as devastating as a national supply crisis.  Buying food now, and storing it in bulk means you can keep your family fed in a medical crisis, after a job loss, etc… 

4. Many crises mean you may be caring for more than just yourself. It is easy to look around at your family right now and say “ok, there’s me, Mom and my brother, we need that times 2 weeks” - but the truth is that a crisis in your region or your area may involve extended family who evacuate, your neighbors coming to you to admit their pantry is completely empty, and do you have anything at all for their hungry kids, someone coming and asking if you have anything at all to share with those who are worse off - and don’t doubt worse off can almost always happen.  

5. Those with the knowledge and ability to do so have the obligation not to drain resources needed for those who didn’t have the capacity to prepare.  So let’s say that the disaster does only last two weeks, and that there are people out there with soup waiting - is there enough soup for everyone?  You don’t know, and resources are almost always stretched thin in a disaster.  The mindset that says “I just have to make it until the safety net picks me up” is the wrong one.  I believe in safety nets - but they work best when people can be trusted not to use them unless they really need them.  Right now most of us (and yes, I know that there are some readers of this blog who simply can’t do anything or any more than they have already) have the ability and the knowledge of the coming crises to remove ourselves from the emergency lines when the time comes, and that’s both a privelege (we can protect ourselves and our loved ones) and a burden (we are now responsible for ourselves).

Let’s talk scenarios, and why 2 weeks food storage is not an adequate minimum.   The first reason is that a whole lot of people dealing with these issues think it is not unlikely that you might have to endure a much longer period of time without resupply than just two weeks.  For example, in the case of a flu pandemic, various government agencies estimate that a influenza wave might require quarantine periods of up to 12 weeks. The Australian Government suggests that average Australian stockpile food for 3 months.  So that’s just one possible scenario in which you’d want a much longer supply - in the case of a widespread epidemic, you don’t want to have to go the grocery store during periods where contagion is spreading. 

But more importantly, the scenario planning that government agencies are doing tends to focus on a short term, localized crisis - a tornado, a flood, wildfires.  The assumption of the two week theory is that there will be one big disaster, and the nation’s response will be mobilized to get to you there.  Even when that’s actually what happens, the two week limit hasn’t been adequate a number of times - in the ice storm that paralyzed much of the Northeast in the late 1990s, for example, there were areas of New York, Vermont and New Hampshire that didn’t have power back or road access for 16 days more.  In Kobe Japan, during the last major earthquake, it took more than 2 weeks for rescue workers to reach some of the hardest hit suburbs - and Kobe was one of the best prepared cities in the world for earthquakes. 

But let us imagine a non-localized crisis - either multiple natural disasters occurring simultaneously (not super likely, but not at all impossible), or a dramatic, sudden rise in energy prices that cut off many areas from food deliveries (again, not super likely immanently, but hardly impossible).  In that case, everyone has needs that have to be answered right now - and there’s simply no way for even the best organized response to cover everyone.

Finally, the most likely disaster to befall you is this.  You lose your job.  Your spouse losess their job.  You spend your savings on a medical crisis or two.  You are stretched trying to keep your house/pay your rent/buy gas to get to work, and you don’t have any money for food.  Your kids are hungry, and the food pantry is, as at least one US pantry was, down to stale Doritos because of the huge demand.  Maybe you get food stamps (assuming the program can still be funded after a radical drop in tax revenue), but they don’t stretch to the end of the month.  And two weeks worth of food won’t save you.  Neither will three months, but it gives you options.

I know that some of you can’t buy extra food because you can’t buy enough food.  For the rest, you need to do what you can, both to protect yourself, and to make sure that you don’t compete for food resources with those who have no ability to protect themselves, maybe ensure that you can drop a few cans at the food pantry, even when things get tough at home.  That means a minimum of three months of food.  Build it up gradually, write down what you eat, focus on meals based on staple foods like grains, dried beans, locally produced and home preserved vegetables.  I wrote during my last class about what a 3 month supply of food looks like.

I know this is hard - in March I was being soft, and helping people with baby steps.  I’m going to be blunt now - I don’t think we have that much time before it gets harder and harder for more and more of us to prepare and get ahead.  I don’t think it will be that long before many of us can’t afford those extra bags of rice anymore.  So I’m not going to suggest baby steps anymore - I think all of us should get very, very serious about this.  And I wish I didn’t think that.

 More soon,

 Sharon

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Sharon July 8th, 2008

I’m sure some of you are wondering if I can actually come up with a months worth of new topics on food preservation - I’m not sure, but I’m going to try.  I feel like for most of us, things are still going sort of ok - not great, but ok - and that we may well transition away from ok pretty rapidly.  So it is important to me to get the message that we need a reserve of food out to as many people as possible.  Thanks for bearing with me if some of these seems like territory we’ve already visited.

When I did the class last time, I produced over 300 pages of material in a month, and I covered a lot of basic ground.  So if you are new to my blog, new to food storage, and you are wondering why I haven’t explained where to get the buckets to store food in or mentioned bulk sources yet, I’d encourage you to read through all the posts written in March of this year (most of them are listed under “food storage” in the categories but a few escaped and I haven’t relisted everything yet) - and if you have time, the wonderful, wonderful comments that were so terribly helpful.  I’ll also link back to specific posts as I go along.   Thanks for bearing with me as I try not to duplicate my own prior work ;-).

Ok, here’s the schedule:

Tuesday, July 8 -  General basics – the basics of food storage, finding space, finding time, what’s ready/ripe/available when, and how to get a balanced diet from storage.

Thursday, July 10 - Dehydrating and Preservation in Salt

Tuesday, July 15 - Food storage in a changing world – what do you need, how do you get it ethically, local sourcing, dealing with rising costs, finding the best and fairest deals.

Thursday, July 17 - Water Bath Canning and Lactofermentation

Tuesday, July 22 - Cooking from food storage, and the way that living with a food storage diet is different than the contemporary diet.  We’ll also talk about special needs, children, infants, the elderly, foods to store for emergencies when you have to evacuate.

Thursday, July 24 – Pressure Canning, Preservation in Sugar and Alcohol

Tuesday, July 29 – Making use of stored food without conventional appliances, tools you might want,  managing your reserves, and anything people want to discuss we haven’t covered.

Thursday, July 31 – Season extension and Root Cellaring – keeping fresh food available year round

You’ll notice that each Thursday, there’s a couple of specific techniques we’ll be focusing in on.  You’ll also note that freezing is not on that list - generally speaking, I think rising electric costs may push freezing out of the comfort zone of many people, so I’m leaving it off.  At the end of each Thursday class, I’ll offer a few recipes and suggested projects for those who actually want to put the material to work.

On Tuesdays, we’ll talk about more general issues - bulk buying, how to find the money, the time, the place to store it, meta concerns, and most of all, how food storage changes your diet.  Because unless you are putting your food away in a cave and leaving it to rot unless the TEOTWAKI comes, bulk purchase of food, growing your own and home preservation changes the way you have to eat.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  So we’ll focus a lot on diet along with storage.

Ok, moving on!!!

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