Surviving the Hard Times

It’s been an interesting few weeks. We’ve seen unpresidented swings in the stock market. We’ve seen a bailout/rescue bill fail in the House of Representatives. We’ve seen the Senate take up the same bill and add favorite tax cuts and incentives to the bill. The Senate passed the bill…so did the House. So we’ve been bailed out. The stock market didn’t come bounding back after the bill was passed.

How does this affect me? How does this affect you? Does it affect us at all? I believe that it will impact our world. Whether your world is in rural America, suburbia or the inner city. There will be a ripple happen. Whether that ripple is a result of the original cause (the need for a bail out) or whether it is the result of the bail out itself, we may never know. I believe that we are in for a rough ride ahead. This bail out plan may not have the desired results. I’ve been reading about the Great Depression in America. It is believed that the bailout plans instituted then may have actually prolonged the depression. By trying to do good, the natural recovery of the economy was prolonged. I am not an economist. I have not studied these things in depth. I openly admit when I do not have all the answers.

What I do know, however, is that we must begin to change the way that we are living. We cannot continue to live in the credit bubble that has been providing the livestyle for many of us. I am not happy with my current credit state. I would like to have less credit and more money in the bank. My plan for the future is to pay off as many bills as possible and get back to saving. I plan to change the way I eat, the way I shop, and the way I cook.

Lately, I’ve been reading lots of food books. They are interesting and tend to involve travel and eating the local foods. Then I realized that many of these books were written by wealthy people; people who every year spend a month in Maine. I began to wonder why poor people didn’t write food books. Is it that we are boring? Surely the food of poor folks is just as interesting as that of the more affluent. I began to think back on the food of my youth. I grew up poor; one of six kids on a rocky flint and limestone farm in hillbilly country. What did we eat? So I sat one afternoon and started listed the foods that I grew up eating. There were always the brown beans. There were pots of brown beans with an oxtail. Not a ham hock, as mother attended a church with psuedo-Jewish traditions, so there was no pork eaten. The beans were always served with a vinegary relish called chow chow. We made chow chow every fall. It consisted of all the garden leftovers that would die with the first frost. Cabbage, green peppers, green tomatoes, sweet red peppers, cucumbers and onions all ground in the hand grinder then cooked with vinegar, sugar, and spices. It smelled heavenly when cooking and going into the jars. It tasted heavenly during the winter over plates of brown beans with thick homemade bread spread with butter. If the milk cow was giving milk, there would be homemade butter. Hard and tough to spread but which melted into the hot slices of freshly baked bread.

The beans might have been my first thought but as I wrote I realized that our diet was quite varied. There were the greens picked wild from the field and cooked down. These were lamb’s quarter or poke salad. From the garden there was swiss chard and mustard greens. Tossed into the big pot with water and salt and cooked down. They were often served beside the brown beans. There was a glass cruet filled with vinegar to pour over the greens once they were on your plate.

I find the regional differences in eating styles amusing. My husband seems to have little reference to vinegary foods. I’m not even sure that he eats relish on his hot dogs. Perhaps it’s my Southern upbringing or my German genes. I have a love of sauerkraut, pickled herring, beans with chow chow, a freezer coleslaw that has a vinegar base and greens with vinegar. In my more adult years, I gravitated to vinegar and salt potato chips. Vinegar seems to be a staple of life for me. I feel that it is a good thing. Vinegar is a good preservative.

One of my recent joys is fermentation. It’s not exactly recent to me. It’s more like a rediscovery of something that I haven’t done in many years. I used to help my mother prepare cabbage for sauerkraut. Many delicious things come from things that most people throw out. We’ve become so out of touch with how food is manufactured that we’re afraid of anything that doesn’t look surgically sterile. It never ceases to amuse me when people want to discard sour cream that has been sitting out for a few hours. I am certain that they are unaware of how to sour cream, cheese, and yogurt are made. It is that very process of letting the milk sit and sour that creates these wonderful concoctions. I often laugh about my kids making ricotta cheese in their lost sippy cups. But the truth is that it’s a pretty good start on a pretty good cheese.

I think we need to start getting back in touch with our food. It can save us in the future. Save us from wasting perfectly good food. Save our life from starvation because we fear eating perfectly good food. We need to get over these food phobias.

It's been a while since I've done any writing. I've been busily growing the veggies out front...picked the first cucumber this week! But mostly I've been collecting. I'm a packrat by nature but lately what I've been collecting is information. My library selections are very eclectic or maybe not to Jericho fans. Some of the topics are homesteading, gardening, solar power, wind power, self-sufficiency, underground houses, nutrition, hydroponics, cookbooks, especially those about camp cooking, vegetarian recipes, cultural cookbooks. I've been collecting little bits of information from all of these books and writing them in my notebooks. Writing helps me remember things and I'm not counting on having a working computer at all times in the future.

The future is uncertain. We're seeing rising gas prices (Ok, they dropped some this week but I'm not going to count on them staying down), rising food prices, a crisis in the mortgage and banking industry due to bad loans, the possibility that we've reached peak oil and the list goes on. So what do we do in uncertain times? We can worry. We can imagine. We can prepare. There are well respected segments of the religious community that teach members of their faith to be prepared. They recommend having a years supply of food stored. That has been taught for many years...before the oil embargo of the 70s, before the S&L debacle of the 80s, before our current uncertainty. I think it's a good idea. After all, I really don't expect food prices to drop anytime soon. So buying and properly storing some extra food can't hurt.

My summer gardening experiments in hydroponics have been interesting. I've determined that during the summer, there is no real advantage to growing my tomatoes and cucumbers in a hydroponics tub. The tomato might have slightly larger fruit that it's counterpart growing in soil. However, they are different varieties so it's a bit hard to determine the size difference. The New Zealand spinach in the dirt is certainly larger than that in the tub but again the spinach in the tub tends to get pinched off and eaten more since it's clean all the time with no grit. Cucumbers I can evaluate side by side. I have one in water and one in soil very near each other so they get almost the same sunlight. The one in soil is much larger and produced cucumbers faster.

I will admit to not being as precise as I should be with the hydroponics. I haven't been dumping my solution as often as recommended, etc. I'm trying to imagine using this setup in hard times. In hard times, I won't be able to afford the nutrients. Talk about sticker shock! I put a gallon of nutrients on the counter and was told it was $118. Excuse me? The sign said $24.95...turns out that was the price for a pint. The tags were in the wrong spots. Needless to say, I went looking for something less expensive. This calls for more reading to find a way to make a natural solution for growing plants. Something that I could make and feed the plants if commercial solutions weren't available. There's that self-sufficiency theme popping up again. Comfrey popped up in several places as a tea for feeding soil based plants. So it's on my research list.

There are several books that were quite informative. Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon was very good and set for some interesting points. This book provides good information on saving seed, growing food in dry conditions, organic fertilizer and irrigation. I hadn't really thought about it until I read this book but think about the lot size of older homes. Homes from the 40s and 50s and even through most of the 70s are on what are now considered HUGE lots. Those lots were the perfect size for a house and a garden spot. Victory gardens were grown during the war to provide food for families. Rationing was in effect. Men were away at war. Times were hard. People grew as much food as possible. Growing a garden then was not the 'hobby' that it's become now. It was something that almost anyone with land did. I'm beginning to itch for more land. Growing a few plants this summer makes me want to plant a big garden again. There are community gardens but the plots are tiny, if you can get one, and just the gas to drive there to water the plants would make it inefficient. Water is a very important factor. If you live in the city or a suburb, your water most likely comes from the faucet, from the water treatment plant. What if these services are unavailable in the future? It will be hard to get drinking water for yourself, let alone water for plants. From this book, I learned about spacing plants for growing in the dry season.

Another book surprised me. I expected a foodie book and instead found some wonderful tidbits of information inside. Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon. What would happen if you suddenly decided to eat only foods that were grown within 100 miles of your home? Easy? Maybe until you begin to think about things like salt, flour (wheat), apples, oranges. Imagine spending several weeks at a cabin with no running water, electricity, or nearby store. How would you feed yourself? If it's summer, you may be able to find food in the woods and fields nearby. You may be able to catch fish from a nearby stream. It occurred to me that there's lots of food around most of us. We walk on it. We throw frisbees and footballs across it. We may sniff it and admire it's color. The parks around our towns may hold food that we've never considered before. I shall soon be buying a native plants handbook for my area. I need to discover the food plants that may be growing nearby. Reading the detailed history (as opposed to the high school history book version) of expeditions such as Lewis and Clark may tell us what people in our region were eating at that time.

Our agriculture has changed over the years. Most of the small family farms are gone. The methods of the small farm have been replaced with growing on a mass scale with tractors and irrigation systems. We've come to think of certain regions of the US as areas where corn is grown, or wheat, soybeans, rice. We've been told that wheat only grows in a specific region. What I learned from Plenty is that this is not entirely true. Perhaps wheat grows best in Eastern Oregon or Montana but it can also grow in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia. Start visiting farmer's markets. Get to know the farmers. Ask where the food is grown. This information may become important in the future. Knowing someone locally who has grown wheat may give you a chance at loaf of bread in the future. It can also lead you to some food that tastes very different than that in the local supermarket.

Maybe it's being the child of a mechanic that makes me want to know how things work. I've been reading more science books and watching some interesting things on The History Channel. People don't often tinker as they once did. We've become a throw away society. If it stops working, buy a new one. I think that those who are mechanically inclined and able to fix things, will be valued if our country falls into hard times.

That is enough rambling for tonight. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write again before another month passes.