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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Food production, food preservation, food storage – A three legged stool
  • Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:24:59 -0600


Food production, food preservation, food storage – A three legged stool
by Sharon Astyk Published Apr 25 2011 by The Chatelaine's Keys, Archived Apr
25 2011
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-04-25/food-production-food-preservation-food-storage-%E2%80%93-three-legged-stool

Periodically someone will come up to me and denigrate one of the three things
discussed here, while praising the others. For example, someone will tell me
that food preservation is simply too much work, and not worth their time, but
assure me they do have a garden and store food for a crisis. Other times,
someone will tell me they don’t bother to garden because “other people will
just come and steal your garden” or “gardening doesn’t pay.” Sometimes food
storage is the target – after all, the commenters observe, eventually stored
food runs out, right?

While I’m always grateful to see people picking up on one or two of these
principles (after all, the average American practices none of them), I do
find myself troubled by the idea that one can grasp the need for and merits
of one, but not another. To me, they look like a three legged stool, on which
a very basic concept – food security – rest. And like most three legged
stools, you can’t sit on it with one of the legs missing.

If we are to make by necessity or desire, a shift to a lower input society,
it is necessary to take the lessons learned in other lower-input societies
and ask the question – what are the major food security issues likely to be?
We already see from the current recession that food issues are more acute
than they were anticipated to be – the newest set of numbers is likely to
show one in every seven Americans and one in every three children, for
example, requiring food stamps. Six million plus American households have no
income at all except food stamps. Food pantries and soup kitchens are
dramatically overdrawn – and need cannot be measured by output, because
demand so dramatically exceeds it. And yet, just a few years ago at the
beginning of the recession, we were told that food insecurity was unlikely to
be a major issue in the US as it was in the Great Depression. It turns out
that in reality, food insecurity has risen much faster than expected, and the
food crisis in the global south is playing out in parts of the developed
world as well, and stands only to get worse.

It is simply clear that food is going to be a central site on which this
crisis plays out – and because of this, it is necessary that we take lessons
from our own history and from other societies that use less energy in their
food system to begin to predict what will be needed. What we know, doing so,
is that we will not have a viable food future without all three legs of the
stool standing solid.

Food production is probably the easiest sell – gardening is trendy, it is
pleasurable, and we all know that food straight from the garden is both more
delicious and more nutritious than broccoli from the grocery store that is
five or six days old. Heck, the salad you pick outside your door even has it
over the good stuff from the farmer’s market. Still, there are plenty of
people who don’t grasp the importance of gardening, or who don’t think their
gardens can make a difference in food security.

Let’s look at the evidence, however. We know, for example, that in 1944, US
Victory Gardens together produced as much produce as all the truck and
produce farms in the entire US – fully half of the vegetables in the US came
from victory gardens. We know that urban gardening in cities in the Global
South (and historically in the Global North during times of crisis including
the Great Depression, Europe after WWII, Russia after the Soviet Collapse etc…
) has helped make the difference between nutritional inadequacy and adequacy.
Consider, for example, in Tanzania, where involvement with urban food
production means that poor children whose families garden and/or raise
livestock have nutritional status equal to middle class children.

The historical evidence is very, very clear – in difficult times (which,
realistically are likely forthcoming, and in many respects already here),
gardening is a basic way that people who are struggling put food in the
table. To those who observe that urban and suburban gardeners can’t grow all
their food – this is absolutely true. What small gardens do is make the
difference between an unremitting diet of staples and a nutritious, tasty
diet. They can grow chiles to spice their food, greens to keep their children
from getting sick from nutritional deficits, fruits to add sweetness and
flavor to bland diets. Add small livestock living on garden wastes and human
food wastes, and as long as you are able to buy a small amount of staple
grains in a market, you can live. All of us know that meat and veggies are
expensive – for poor people, affording these things is a much bigger issue
than getting ahold of some staple foods.

For larger households, gardens can provide staples as well – although we are
accustomed to seeing grains as our primary staple, root crops have operated,
particularly in cold climates, as staple foods – “vegetables” doesn’t mean
“lettuce” – it can also mean staple foods like potatoes, sweet potatoes,
turnips, beets and other filling root crops that supported the people of
Northern Europe for decades.

At both the household level and the regional level, a sweeping view of
gardening is best – in much of the global south gardens cover rooftops,
balconies, marginal space along roads and railroad tracks, and it includes
marginal weeds on which local livestock pasture, fallen tree branches that
provide fire wood or brush for staking and building, and perennial crops that
belong to the whole community – bamboos whose shoots are taken home from the
park, fruiting street trees, and wild edibles. Consider the difference that
planting food-producing street trees alone could make. Perennial edibles
represent a kind of garden bank account on which the community can draw on
for pleasure and upon need.

Ok, we’ve established the not-very-difficult case for why we need to garden.
Why is food preservation a fundamental pillar? The reason is pretty simple –
in just about every place on earth, there is a season in which not much grows
that well. It could be the dry season, the hot season or the cold snowy one,
but gardens slow down or stop, and not much fresh is coming out them. Even in
places where there is year round production, there are also bumper years and
bad years – years in which everything does well, and years in which
everything – or some important things do badly. The ability to preserve what
you grow for periods in which such things are not available is central to the
project of food security – because most of us can count on some periods where
we either will not be able to garden or where not much is available.

Moreover, one of the examples to look at is that of the global south, where
food is wasted in more or less the same quantities as it is here. The
difference between the Global North and the Global South is pretty dramatic,
however – overwhelmingly almost half the food produced in the Global South is
lost because it cannot be preserved. Lack of refrigeration or adequate
storage, lack of techniques for food storage, problems with transportation.
In the Global North, more than half of all food wastage is lost after it is
transported from the field, in stores and in our kitchens. This gives us a
sense of our future – we may find ourselves with a great deal of food loss
due to problems of preservation, unless we can support and build the
infrastructure for preserving food in a lower-energy input society.

That infrastructure doesn’t have to be industrial – it might be simple as
large solar food dryers and better storage to keep grains away from rodents.
It would include networks for delivery and distribution by bicycle, water,
rail or other ways, so that food doesn’t rot in the fields. It might include
strategies used in the pre-oil era, in which families took their “vacation”
to help harvest and preserve crops like hops or fruit, acting as migrant
laborers in exchange for fresh air, accomodations and good food. It may also
include something like the rural dachas of Russia, where urban dwellers grow
their gardens and preserve homegrown and wild foods for the long winter to
come.

I wrote _Independence Days_ in large part in response to a question a woman
once asked me. I was speaking at a conference, and the woman, an urban
dweller, asked me what she was supposed to eat once her 22 week CSA
subscription ran out, and what people had eaten in the past. I observed that
they ate preserved and stored food and she asked me who did that – beyond
Clarence Birdseye, the answer that was that there are some small producers
out there that to produce high value (and usually high cost) preserved foods,
but for the most part, this was a do-it-yourself job – the next logical step
in eating out of your garden was to take what is abundant and make it last.

You can, of course, purchase preserved foods, and store them that way, but
this is much more expensive proposition, and it isn’t a terrifically
strenuous one. Despite the rhetoric of standing over a hot canning kettle,
the actual work load of slicing some fruit and sticking it in a solar
dehydrator or an electric one, or canning up some chicken broth is not
terrifically demanding. Many people hear the word “food preservation” and
think “canning” – but while canning is one strategy for preserving food, it
isn’t the only or best one. Indeed, if one couldn’t survive without canned
food, the human race would not exist, since it was invented only in the 19th
century. It is a lovely addition to people’s tool box, but root cellaring, in
garden-storage in clamps and with mulches, dehydrating, lactofermentation,
and the rest of the toolbox will get you everywhere you need to go if you
prefer.

What about food storage? What does that have to do with anything? Most of us
have fond memories of grandma and her homemade pickles or whatever else – we
may think it is too hard or too much work, but we can see the point. Food
storage, however, having pantry that can sustain an extended period without a
trip to the store, well, that seems weird. Our society does a great deal to
make it seem weird, pushing us to view stored food as the territory of
survivalists with bunkers and guns.

This is very strange, because of course, storing food is one of the most
basic things humans do – first they preserve it, then they put it by for
years of shortfall. Consider the Biblical Story of Joseph, who tells Pharoah
to put up food for the days when “there will be no food in all the land.” It
was considered a simply responsible and necessary thing to do – in fact, food
preservation and the storage of food for the cold season is an older human
activity even than agriculture – we have been reserving our bounty for times
of hunger for as long as we have been human, or nearly.

Why might we need stored food? It could be as basic as a period when we are
ill or out of work, and unable to shop. It could be a supply interruption or
a natural or non-natural disaster (think Japan) that contaminates or prevents
food from reaching us. It could be a medical crisis that require isolation
and reduced contact and makes shopping risky. It could be a short term power
outage or a several month supply interruption. Indeed, most of us experience
periods in our lives when stored food is or would be valuable. This is so
normal that the US government, the US and International Red Cross and most
governments recommend that people store food.

It is something that must be done in anticipation of a crisis – in a crisis,
storing up food when shortages are already present is viewed as hoarding and
can be discouraged, penalized with social consequences, or outright illegal.
In order to ethically ensure a reliable food supply during a period of
constraint, you need to have a reliable supply of food all the time.
Moreover, all the evidence suggests that we waste the least amount of stored
food when we base our storage on what we eat already, and include it in our
daily diets and rotations.

The line between preservation and storage is very fine – once you have done
the work of preserving food, you need to know how to store it. Some people’s
food storage consists entirely of things they have grown themselves, other
people rely heavily on food produced elsewhere. Since most of us rely on dry
staples, often these will be grains produced in other places, but this varies
from situation to situation.

Preserving food is not like preserving works of art, or insects in amber – it
doesn’t last forever. So preserved food must be properly stored, in order to
maximize both its lifespan and its nutritional value. With grains, this may
be a matter of putting them in air-tight containers in a place without wild
temperature fluctuations or too much moisture for years. For lactofermented
food, it may be finding a cool basement spot or underground spot to allow it
to last a few months. Without the knowledge to both store food correctly and
integrate in your diet, all your money or labor in preservation and purchase
is wasted – instead of reducing waste by preserving a bountiful harvest, you
are simply throwing money and food out the window. And none of us can afford
that.

Nor can any of us afford to believe that natural or human-caused disasters,
economic crises and other hard realities will never affect us. None of us can
rely entirely on stores and good fortune in a world where climate-linked
disasters are on the rise and where instability of all kinds is the normal.

Without all three legs of the stool, you place yourself, your family, your
community at risk. With all three legs integrated, we have the beginnings of
a model of collective food security on which we can build. If there is a leg
that is weak, wobbly or absent on your stool, time to make it strong and
build it up.





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