Now, on from the theory (which is, after all, the easy part), to the practice. Here are some strategies of mine, complete with thestupid things I've done to learn them
-1. Attitude adjustment is probably the first alteration any of us can make. We can choose how we think about domestic labor, how we respond to the activity, at least in a purely mental and emotional sense, and often in a physical one as well. I can think of 2 kinds of attitude adjustment that apply to domestic work. First, there's lowering or altering your standards. Most of us can do this (in my case, further lowering might not be such a good idea), and it can be a considerable time-saver. For example, if you ordinarily wash sheets and towels every week, try stretching it to two weeks or three, and see if there is a significant reduction in quality of life. Clothes can be worn more often before washing, floors can go longer between washings as well. While some jobs (laundry for example) get bigger and less manageable by ignoring them, many things can be put aside for a while.
You might also adjust to less white whites, or a less tidy house. Only you can say where your quality of life is unacceptably diminished. This should not be used, however, for any household work that involves basic hygiene, health issues and safety. So while you could choose to let your floors get grubby in many cases, if you have an infant eating crud off of them, that may not be wise.
Second attitude adjustment can be choosing to enjoy or find satisfaction in work you have previously not enjoyed. People can change their preferences, and can choose to find pleasure in most activities. You might consider taking a chore you particularly dislike and attempting to find a way to enjoy it, either by trying to take pleasure in the process, altering the process to make it more pleasurable, or by deriving satisfaction from the accomplishment. Obviously, there may be some chores that simply can't be readjusted to, either because the activity is in some way stressful or painful, or because no matter how hard you try, you can't come to like it. Some people with physical limitations will have fewer options in this department. But it is worth trying.
I strongly disliked organizing clothing for my four sons. With four kids who grow rapidly, I have boxes of clothing for every size from preemie to boys 12, plus cloth diapers and covers in many sizes, andtracking the clothes, sorting outgrown things, switching them around as the seasons change, mending them, keeping track of what I have and what I need, etc… was time consuming, and, I felt, extremely boring. But I've managed to convince myself, if not to like it, to take a good deal of satisfaction from doing it, simply by, instead of begrudging the time it takes and seeing it as an annoyance, recognizing it for what it is - a useful and necessary job that saves us money and time in the longer term. I still like other things more, but I don't find the job as difficult and intimidating.
A third way of adjusting your own attitude is to think seriously about the requirements of your life, and distinguish carefullybetween wants and needs. The classic example of this is the parent who works full time, but when commute, wardrobe, meals, daycare,etc… are calculated in has a household net loss, or only a tiny gain. (Please note, this is not to say that parents should stay home - this is merely an example, so don't get your kidneys in an uproar, as DH's grandmother liked to say). For example, if you dislike dusting, perhaps you could choose to have fewer dustable objects, or to keep them in closed boxes, even if there was some slight inconvenience.
2. After attitude adjustment, the next lowest input thing to do about household work is to find ways to either do chores with others, or to get others to help with difficult or distasteful projects. The most obvious such method, if you have kids, is to train them to help out. The difficulty with this is that teaching children to do things is, in the short term, inevitably much more time consuming (although it can be fun) than just doing it yourself. After a while this ceases to be so, but many parents find it difficult to build time into their daily lives to teach their kids the necessary skills. Planning for this, accepting the short-term reduction in efficiency, and adapting to it is usually worth the hassle. Even very small kids can help out if you give them time to learn how.
The same is true of getting a spouse or other family member to take on an job they have traditionally not done. It is worth noting, however, that it helps not to be over-committed to a single technique. Many people who would willingly take over X job are turned off by someone insisting that it be done exactly X way and to X's standards. Women are, I think, particularly guilty of the sin of over management.
For large scale chores, involving other members of your community, or friends and extended family might improve the experience. For example, my extended family on one side has at times had an annual "work-weekend" where once per year, the entire family descended upon one of the members who owns a home and devotes a long weekend to making repairs or completing major projects. The whole thing is considered enjoyable by everyone - the homeowner provides accommodations, food and materials, and everyone enjoys being together. Everyone eventually gets a turn. We're working on build a neighborhood coop, which functions in the same way, volunteering once per month to help each family get a big work project done.
Also, the simple act of working together can provide a tremendous degree of satisfaction. Cooking can be an unpleasant job if it takes you away from your family and isolates the cook in the kitchen. The same job is quite enjoyable when done with a partner, a friend, or even a child helping. Simple proximity to one another makes big jobs much more manageable in many cases. Finding ways to bring people into the kitchen when you have guests, or to make whatever job you are doing part of the life of your household can make an enormous difference. One neighbor I know has her children read aloud to her while she cleans - they get practice reading, the family hears a story together, and everyone has a good time.
3. The next most significant way to reduce labor sustainably is to experiment with time and energy costs. Most of us have a built in set of assumptions about what constitutes labor, and what constitutes labor savings, what is efficient, what is easy and what is difficult, andwhat the best uses of one's time and energy are. But these assumptions may not be correct, and can only be verified by experimentation. It is not at all uncommon to assume that that one thing is faster than another, only to realize that it is quite the opposite - our own perceptions are shaped by what we expect to find. Want to know how much time it takes you to do a load of laundry by hand, compared to the washing machine? Try it. But not just once - try it three or four different times, in as many ways as you can think of. Think about ways in which you can make the process more efficient. The next time you chop an onion, do it a different way than you usually do. Don't take for granted that labor-saving devices actually are. Some are. Some aren't. For example, my husband and I were given an electric citrus juicer as a wedding gift, and we rather unthinkingly used it for a while, until one day my husband got frustrated and said, "I could do this faster with a lemon reamer." Well, what do you know - he could. The same is true for me of the dryer - I can just as easily hang laundry as transfer it over, clean the lint filter and earn the money to pay for the electricity.
When you calculate labor-savings, make sure that all labor required to buy, maintain, use, clean, repair, store and tend to the item is included. For example, my husband and I don't drink coffee, but keep a coffee maker around for guests. Because the coffee maker is stored in an inconvenient place (which makes sense since the convenient ones are for things we actually use regularly), the time spent climbing upon the step-ladder and pulling the box down, cleaning the parts which get dusty between uses, etc.... make it a surprisingly time-consuming project. I suspect a press-style glass coffee maker which could also be used for tea (which we drink a lot of) would be more efficient (although I've not done anything about it), even if making coffee that way were slightly more work.
4. Design your infrastructure to accommodate *your* needs. If you are going to spend money and energy on your domestic life, try and reduce labor by adapting your home and work space to the way you actually live, rather than based on the assumptions builders and the consumer culture make about how people ought to live. A one-time investment of non-renewable energy that makes things easier, or quicker, or enables you to consume less is always probably worth while. Looking carefully at how you actually use things can make things more efficient - for example, if you use one set of bowls for mixing bread, it might make sense to also keep other bread-related materials right next to them. If you can't stand for very long, setting up your kitchen so that you can sit while working there simply makes sense.
Most kitchens are designed for women, whose average height is about5'5. At 6' and with a 6'2 husband, and children who promise to be quite tall (6 year old oldest is already 4'5), one of my dreams is a kitchen with counters properly designed for tall people. In the meantime, we've put a couple of blocks of wood on top of the existing counters so that we don't have to bend uncomfortably while chopping things. For a shorter than average person, lower counters, or alower work area (a simple butcher block, for example) might makesense.
My children get dressed downstairs, under the supervision of their father every morning, but for quite a while I was washing their clothes downstairs, hanging them outside, then carrying the clothing upstairs to be put away, because upstairs was where we had room for the dressers. But that meant that laundry had to be carried upstairs to be stored, and then down again to be worn. We put up a long set ofopen shelves in our largest downstairs closet, and now all the children's clothing is out on those open shelves, and I no longer carry their clothes up and down stairs (I haven't yet adapted this system to my husband and I, but I'm thinking about it, since we can perfectly well get dressed downstairs too. This is, frankly, one of the best things I've done - it is an enormous time saver, and it cuts the mess, since I often had laundry baskets sitting at the bottom of the stairs waiting to go up.
5. Get the right tool for the job, and learn how to do the job well. Learn how to use and maintain the tools well. Before using non-renewables, try developing skill at using renewable techniques and human-powered tools. Do what you need to develop the physical skills needed to do things well and easily. Everyone find unfamiliar work time consuming and stressful - it takes time to become quick and comfortable with any kind of work. Anyone who has ever seen a professional chef chop a clove of garlic and someone without the same skills laboriously peel and slice the same clove knows that there are a lot of bad ways to do domestic chores. But there are few domestic skills that truly require talent - they mostly need practice. So practice, practice, practice. Learn to handle a knife, to do laundry by hand efficiently (ie, to get most of the cleaning done by soaking, rather than scrubbing), how to use a hammer well, or wash dishes quickly. Watch other people do these chores. Think about ways to increase your own comfort and efficiency. And do them the hard way enough times that you find yourself looking for ways to make things easier.
If you are going to invest in a tool for whatever job you want to do, get a good one. Cheap shovels are not worth the cost. In many cases, a non-electric tool of high quality will be much cheaper than a powered one of low quality, and the difference may not be as great as you think. In fact, the non-electric tool is often better. If the powered tool is superior, get as much use out of it as possible, while using it as efficiently as possible - for example, wash your clothes whenever possible in cold water. You can't really do this with a wringer washer, and it is one of the virtues of the electric washing machine - clothes will get clean without water heating. On the other hand, the wringer might make sense for able bodied people who do only a few laundry loads a week, or during the winter if you can heat water as part of radiant floor or wood heat.
My one experience with a wringer washer was pretty dreadful - I actually preferred using a soak and rinse method of hand washing. But I've since heard from several people that swingle-handledwringer washers are quite easy on the body and low in effort. I'm looking forward to trying one, and seeing if the tool makes a difference.
6. Integrate the waste products. It doesn't take a lot of effort to re-route your pipes so that your grey water (ie, water used in showers and sinks, but not toilets) goes for irrigation or toilet flushing, and yet it makes a dramatic difference in water usage. If you have food scraps, feed something with them (garden,worms, chickens, rabbits, goats, whatever). Even apartment dwellers can have worms or a pet rabbit. Compost your humanure if possible - it doesn't take a fancy composting toilet in most places, just a commode, two buckets and a place to do it. It really isn't gross at all, and the product doesn't smell. Read John Jenkins's _The Humanure Handbook_ before you run away. Or, if you grow things, at least pee in a bucket during the growing season and dilute it 10-1 to feed your plants. Seriously - people pay a lot of money for dehydrated pee for their gardens in the form of urea - you make it for free! Why waste it?
Most parts of food plants commonly wasted have potential uses - as dyes, animal feeds, fiber, extra food for your plate, etc… Use them up. Make your own non-toxic cleaners if you don't already, as well as beauty products. I know that sounds overwhelming, but it is as simple as putting vinegar in a jar in many cases. Only put into your system (your body, your household system, your town, your nation, your world) the things you want to take out of them.
7. If you don't love it or need it, there is no reason to own it. We're all storing things for the future, and it can be hard to distinguish between necessity and junk. But every possession takes energy to manage - it has to be cleaned, dusted, stored, serviced,attended to. You pay rent or a mortgage or taxes on a house big enough for the stuff. Things demand energy we don't have. So unless you are sure you'll need it, or you care about it, get rid of it. That goes double for things like wall to wall carpeting that not only need maintenance, but need *powered* maintenance.
I have a problem here - I often dither about whether something is truly needed or not. But it is worth making these distinctions to haveless to do. I'm trying to reduce our possessions by ¼ over the next year, and I'm finding it an interesting exercise.
8. Hire people rather than buy stuff. If you can, hire help rather than buying a tool. The money for local help goes into the local economy. Or barter for labor you can't or won't do yourself. Whenever possible, give your resources to someone local, or someone who needs it. So if you need more time to get work or family things done, perhaps you could hire help with the chores, or a mother's helper to play with the kids, or trade labor with a neighbor - you do her most hated job and she'll do yours. Only buy a device or tool if you really need it.
The corollary of this is that most neighborhoods do not need one of everything. You may need a washing machine, and so may your neighbor, but you might not need two between you. Try sharing whenever possible. It took us a while after we moved here to get into the sharing mode with neighbors - sharing is scary, because it involves asking people for things, and trusting them to say "no" or "yes" and building relationships. Now we barter or share quite a few things (at times we've had a shared car with our neighbors, among other things), and we try always to offer more than we take. It is worth the risk, but it does take time and practice and a kind of courage, I think.
9. Keep records! Keep lots of records. Organize. You save time by tracking what you use and what you need, by noting the best way to do things (if you are the forgetful type like me). By sorting and organizing and writing down what is stored where. It always seems like keeping notes adds in time, but the time spent *not* trying to figure something out for the 7th time is well worth it. One trick that works well for me is to have multiple calendars. I buy them cheap at our dollar store, or after we're a few days into the new year. We have one for religious events and family stuff (birthdays, etc…), another is for the garden - what to start, what to harvest, what the temperature was, the first time we saw a blackbird, how many eggs we got. Another calender is for every little daily event - playdates, when the compost guy is coming, travels, etc.. the usual stuff. Then there are the lists in my notebooks - lists of books to find cheaply, things we need to look for at grocery stores, things to do, articles to write, how much of each food we've got in storage - I save a considerable bit of time and money by knowing what I have and what I need.
Related to this, find ways to store and sort so that you don't have to waste time hunting for things. Figure out a system and make yourself stick to it. I'm not always good about this, but when it works, it is glorious. Think about the last time you needed to do a project and couldn't find the right tool or materials. You know you just had it...make sure you know where things are, so you don't waste time and energy.
10. Have a place for everything. Try and mostly put things in their places. One of our biggest problems in keeping clean is the stuff that doesn't really live anywhere. Mail we might want to look at eventually. The books that don't really fit on the shelves. The clothes that don't fit in the drawer, or on our bodies anymore. Instant mess. The more you can either get rid of things or make an appropriate place, the easier this all is. Make workspace for yourself, if you need it - accepting the realities of your life (ie, "I'm never going to dump all the junk mail, I like looking in the catalogs too much." And make a space for the catalogs). If you are going to be canning, for example, make room for it if possible, and plan that room into at least the times when you are canning. Have a place to put the mending, the knitting needles, a chair to sew in, a useful and comfortable space to do necessary mobile (ie, can be done in more than one place) chores.
11. Look at your schedule for time and space that might go unused (although remember, down time is good too) . Try new stuff and see if you can multi-task. For example, I learned to knit and breastfeed, to type and breastfeed, etc… out of sheer desperation to get things done. Otherwise, I never got to knit or write. I find that I can get a surprising amount of cleaning done if I set a timer for 15 minutes and say, "ok, I'm going to do what I can in the next 15 minutes". Knowing the time is short increases my efficiency. Remember, nothing has to be all or nothing. Can't hang all yourlaundry? Hang as much as you can, and the next dryer load will be that much shorter and use that much less energy. Don't have time to wash all the dishes by hand? Do as many as you can in 10 minutes,and try to do more each time. Then, you'll have that much longer between dishwasher loads. Most of us have a few 10 minute increments now and then we could spend doing some simple chore.
12. When in doubt, drink beer. Permaculture works from the principle that theoretically, yields are unlimited - you can optimize so much you get more out of a system than you ever put into it. That violates the laws of physics, of course, but it is fun to try. Beer works kind of like magic - you ferment it, people get to drink the beer ,and the grain is nearly as good for animal feed (and more digestible) as it was nutritionally before. So drink locally made, sustainable beer before doing household chores, and you'll find them much easier to bear. As you strive to get more out of it than you put into it, strive also to relax and enjoy yourself. Really, no one is going to remember whether the tile was grouted and the towels were clean when bad times come. But they will remember whether there was food, basic hygeine, a place to sleep, hospitality, good things to drink, and peace in the home. These are things worth having, and worth making time for. The rest is gravy.
Sharon in upstate NY, who is still nursing and, sadly, drinks verylittle beer.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
The Permaculture of Domesticity (Part I - Theory)
It struck me that since for many people the biggest problem in their domestic life is time, and thus the most compelling argument for using high-energy consumptive appliances like dishwashers and dryers is the time spent on chores, it might be worth strategizing on ways to manage domestic labor with the fewest possible inputs and the greatest degree of productivity and pleasure. (Of course, the first trick to increased productivity at my house would be to actually go do the domestic labor instead ofwriting about it - say, to go fold the laundry and put it away, rather than nattering on about the best ways to get it done. But*that's* not going to happen, is it ;-)?
I'm calling this the Permaculture of domestic life. For those not in the know, permaculture is "permanent culture" and it is one of the ways to get the most out of everything in life. And whether you do this because you have to (ie, the rolling blackouts in your area make it necessary) or because you want to, IMHO, all of us need to figure out ways to makeour domestic work manageable alongside our other work in the coming years. I'm by no means an expert here, and would welcome suggestions for more and better techniques.
First, the theory (even the sorting of underwear requires a good grounding in theory, or so I try to convince myself, as I merrily ignore the actual underwear in favor of the meta-under things and their philosophical grounding.) So here are the broad points of a Permaculture philosophy of domesticity (much of it stolen wholesale from various other, smarter people).
-1. "In Chaos lies unparalleled opportunity for imposing creative order." (Bill Mollison). Given that housekeeping is the act of imposing order, the key term here is "creative" - old ways may not do, traditional assumptions may be flawed. The first thing we needto do with housekeeping is look at the project with new eyes. We may find that there are better ways to do things, our what seems efficient, isn't.
-2. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" (Robert Heinlein, articulating the second law of thermodynamics). Energy must be used as wisely and efficiently as possible, and we must make as much effort as possible to use ambient energy before it escapes our reach. Human energy, fossil fuel energy, mental energy, renewable resource energy - all have end points. Those that are most limited must be used with the most care and attention to avoid waste.
-3. "Every object must responsibly provide for its replacement; society must, as a condition of use, replace an equal or greater resource than the one used up." (Mollison) When energy is consumed, it should be gainful, and provide the maximum benefit with the fewest possible consequences both for the user and for others affected. If we use labor saving devices, the uses we turn our saved time to should be valuable, since our use of them cost others and the environment something. If we use fossil fuel energies, we should store or conserve more energy than it cost us.
-4. "The problem is the solution. Everything works both ways. It is only how we see things that makes them advantageous or not."(Mollison) We can choose actively to see domestic labor however we want, and we can choose to make use of things we've often viewed as a problem. Wastes and involuntary outputs should be reintegrated into the system. Our attitude, and our creative adaptability are perhaps the most important tools we have.
-5. "That Which is Hateful to You, Do Not Do to the Other." (TheTalmud). If you are not willing to absorb all the consequences of your actions personally, in your own immediate environment, you should reconsider your actions. There is no such place as "away" - we cannot throw things "away" or waste things without doing harm to others. Thus, we cannot conceive environmental consequences, or consequences to people we cannot see as not part of our practice. Preserving what we have is virtually always the most energy, time and money efficient way of acting for the earth and people as awhole.
-6 "Make the Least Change for the Greatest Possible effect"(Mollison) Don't make more work for yourself than you need to. Evaluate carefully what you already have, and what resources(and "problems") you can make use of. Domestic life, like any other part of life, can be an optimization exercise.
Ok, now that we're done talking theory, how does that play out in actual life, when you've got dirty dishes to wash, laundry to do, things to get done, meals to cook, plus your job, your internet life, your family, and all the other stuff you've taken on. How do you get things done?
That'll be the subject of Part II.
Sharon
I'm calling this the Permaculture of domestic life. For those not in the know, permaculture is "permanent culture" and it is one of the ways to get the most out of everything in life. And whether you do this because you have to (ie, the rolling blackouts in your area make it necessary) or because you want to, IMHO, all of us need to figure out ways to makeour domestic work manageable alongside our other work in the coming years. I'm by no means an expert here, and would welcome suggestions for more and better techniques.
First, the theory (even the sorting of underwear requires a good grounding in theory, or so I try to convince myself, as I merrily ignore the actual underwear in favor of the meta-under things and their philosophical grounding.) So here are the broad points of a Permaculture philosophy of domesticity (much of it stolen wholesale from various other, smarter people).
-1. "In Chaos lies unparalleled opportunity for imposing creative order." (Bill Mollison). Given that housekeeping is the act of imposing order, the key term here is "creative" - old ways may not do, traditional assumptions may be flawed. The first thing we needto do with housekeeping is look at the project with new eyes. We may find that there are better ways to do things, our what seems efficient, isn't.
-2. "There is no such thing as a free lunch" (Robert Heinlein, articulating the second law of thermodynamics). Energy must be used as wisely and efficiently as possible, and we must make as much effort as possible to use ambient energy before it escapes our reach. Human energy, fossil fuel energy, mental energy, renewable resource energy - all have end points. Those that are most limited must be used with the most care and attention to avoid waste.
-3. "Every object must responsibly provide for its replacement; society must, as a condition of use, replace an equal or greater resource than the one used up." (Mollison) When energy is consumed, it should be gainful, and provide the maximum benefit with the fewest possible consequences both for the user and for others affected. If we use labor saving devices, the uses we turn our saved time to should be valuable, since our use of them cost others and the environment something. If we use fossil fuel energies, we should store or conserve more energy than it cost us.
-4. "The problem is the solution. Everything works both ways. It is only how we see things that makes them advantageous or not."(Mollison) We can choose actively to see domestic labor however we want, and we can choose to make use of things we've often viewed as a problem. Wastes and involuntary outputs should be reintegrated into the system. Our attitude, and our creative adaptability are perhaps the most important tools we have.
-5. "That Which is Hateful to You, Do Not Do to the Other." (TheTalmud). If you are not willing to absorb all the consequences of your actions personally, in your own immediate environment, you should reconsider your actions. There is no such place as "away" - we cannot throw things "away" or waste things without doing harm to others. Thus, we cannot conceive environmental consequences, or consequences to people we cannot see as not part of our practice. Preserving what we have is virtually always the most energy, time and money efficient way of acting for the earth and people as awhole.
-6 "Make the Least Change for the Greatest Possible effect"(Mollison) Don't make more work for yourself than you need to. Evaluate carefully what you already have, and what resources(and "problems") you can make use of. Domestic life, like any other part of life, can be an optimization exercise.
Ok, now that we're done talking theory, how does that play out in actual life, when you've got dirty dishes to wash, laundry to do, things to get done, meals to cook, plus your job, your internet life, your family, and all the other stuff you've taken on. How do you get things done?
That'll be the subject of Part II.
Sharon
Monday, August 07, 2006
Buy nothing, week 1
Well, it has been a week now. I'm not missing the shopping at all - the goal is to shop 1x per month at our local coop and the asian grocery store, and then no more than 3xs per week at our local farmstand for things like milk (not currently able to barter for milk, although we have at times), fruit outside what we grow, and other things we don't produce.
So far the big dilemma is whether to replace the 50 chicks that gotten eaten by something unknown (very mysterious). We lost our layers for next year (our current batch are 2+ years old and starting to slow a bit), as well as 25 bantam chicks that I'd planned to give away to various people I know who want to try keeping chickens in their suburban backyards. I figured cochin bantams would be excellent - they are attractive, quiet, decent layers and good setters, as well as small and good foragers.
I think I've decided that I will replace the layers, since they are a business expense - we sell eggs and make a decent profit off of them. But I'm less sure about the banties - a pity, since it was a good cause.
I'm also looking for a free kitten - we lost two cats last week. One of our indoor cats (Tycho, our cat's cat) slipped out and met with a neighbor's German Shepherd. His spine was broken, and he had to be put down. And we lost Yorick (Alas Poor Yorick, actually) to the neurological condition that he's had for years. That leaves us with three cats, all fairly elderly, none of them a spectacular mouser (Yorick was by far our best, although Angus is good at catching bats and birds that slip into the house). I think we need a kitten. But, of course, nobody *needs* a kitten, right? Hence, we look for a freebie.
But I admit, otherwise, I feel a pleasant sense of satisfaction at not having to go near a mall, particularly as my friends complain about the joys of back to school shopping. My children, dressed in a combination of gifts, yard sale clothes, cousin cast offs and things I've made for them may look like hopeless ragamuffins, but they are cute ragamuffins, and at least I don't have to go to the mall.
We had guests all this week, including my Mother-in-law, who despite the fact that we've explicitly asked her not to compensate for our not-buying things (after all, we're choosing this, not living in a cardboard box in the train station) arrived with a big bag of toys for the kids (just little things, of course, she said ;-)), brought cookies and a meal of take out malay food, and insisted on buying us some ice cream before she left. She's very, very worried her son and grandsons might die of starvation or deprivation, I suspect. But she's also very, very sweet. My sister kindly asked me, "Can you go out to dinner if I buy?" I find it kind of funny (although also very wonderful) that people are so willing to try and save us from ourselves. And who knows, after a year without restaurants, I might be. But so far (and fortified by the take-out Malay MIL brought) I'm able to handle the first week sans restaurants (given that where we live there are only two options - pizza and diner, neither very good, I often go months without eating out - we're better cooks than any food we can buy very locally) without *too* much strain ;-).
Someone asked what we are saving money for. Partly to increase our charitable donations. Partly to add to our preparations - we want to reinsulate, add more food storage, rip up the carpet, fence the yard. But mostly, I'm only generally curious about how much money we'll save (although, of course, we can always use the money). What I most want to accomplish is transforming my relationship to scarcity - I want my instinctive reaction to losing something, breaking something, running out to be "how can I manage without it/repair it myself/find something else/make it do" not "I need to get..."
Sharon
So far the big dilemma is whether to replace the 50 chicks that gotten eaten by something unknown (very mysterious). We lost our layers for next year (our current batch are 2+ years old and starting to slow a bit), as well as 25 bantam chicks that I'd planned to give away to various people I know who want to try keeping chickens in their suburban backyards. I figured cochin bantams would be excellent - they are attractive, quiet, decent layers and good setters, as well as small and good foragers.
I think I've decided that I will replace the layers, since they are a business expense - we sell eggs and make a decent profit off of them. But I'm less sure about the banties - a pity, since it was a good cause.
I'm also looking for a free kitten - we lost two cats last week. One of our indoor cats (Tycho, our cat's cat) slipped out and met with a neighbor's German Shepherd. His spine was broken, and he had to be put down. And we lost Yorick (Alas Poor Yorick, actually) to the neurological condition that he's had for years. That leaves us with three cats, all fairly elderly, none of them a spectacular mouser (Yorick was by far our best, although Angus is good at catching bats and birds that slip into the house). I think we need a kitten. But, of course, nobody *needs* a kitten, right? Hence, we look for a freebie.
But I admit, otherwise, I feel a pleasant sense of satisfaction at not having to go near a mall, particularly as my friends complain about the joys of back to school shopping. My children, dressed in a combination of gifts, yard sale clothes, cousin cast offs and things I've made for them may look like hopeless ragamuffins, but they are cute ragamuffins, and at least I don't have to go to the mall.
We had guests all this week, including my Mother-in-law, who despite the fact that we've explicitly asked her not to compensate for our not-buying things (after all, we're choosing this, not living in a cardboard box in the train station) arrived with a big bag of toys for the kids (just little things, of course, she said ;-)), brought cookies and a meal of take out malay food, and insisted on buying us some ice cream before she left. She's very, very worried her son and grandsons might die of starvation or deprivation, I suspect. But she's also very, very sweet. My sister kindly asked me, "Can you go out to dinner if I buy?" I find it kind of funny (although also very wonderful) that people are so willing to try and save us from ourselves. And who knows, after a year without restaurants, I might be. But so far (and fortified by the take-out Malay MIL brought) I'm able to handle the first week sans restaurants (given that where we live there are only two options - pizza and diner, neither very good, I often go months without eating out - we're better cooks than any food we can buy very locally) without *too* much strain ;-).
Someone asked what we are saving money for. Partly to increase our charitable donations. Partly to add to our preparations - we want to reinsulate, add more food storage, rip up the carpet, fence the yard. But mostly, I'm only generally curious about how much money we'll save (although, of course, we can always use the money). What I most want to accomplish is transforming my relationship to scarcity - I want my instinctive reaction to losing something, breaking something, running out to be "how can I manage without it/repair it myself/find something else/make it do" not "I need to get..."
Sharon
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Hot Weather
We're pretty comfortable today inside the house. It is 101 degrees outside, and 77 in here, with windows closed, shades drawn and ceiling fans on. We're lucky to have a good house for this - the newer part of the house is tremendously well insulated, and the older part, is, for reasons completely inexplicable to me, cool in the summer while it is cold in the winter. The dogs have dug a den under the porch and seem happy there. But even when we lived in a fourth floor apartment, we could manage with regular cool showers, window fans and trips to the movies. We had an air conditioner for a while - and then my cat, Entropy (now long deceased) had a horrible incontinent period as he was dying, and peed in the air conditioner. The scent of cat-urine processed cool air was not worth the price.
But the heat is frustrating and scary, not least because it leads us to the worst kinds of short-term thinking. I can't count the people I know who say they "need" air conditioning - even though air conditioning emits greenhouse gasses at a rate that means that their kids are only going to need it much worse. We're unwilling to endure even the shortest term discomfort for long term security.
Not to mention the fact that everything feels worse when you come out of air conditioning. Unless you are in serious danger of health consequences, find other ways, particularly here in the Northeast. And remember, it is temporary. Winter will be here soon enough.
Sharon
But the heat is frustrating and scary, not least because it leads us to the worst kinds of short-term thinking. I can't count the people I know who say they "need" air conditioning - even though air conditioning emits greenhouse gasses at a rate that means that their kids are only going to need it much worse. We're unwilling to endure even the shortest term discomfort for long term security.
Not to mention the fact that everything feels worse when you come out of air conditioning. Unless you are in serious danger of health consequences, find other ways, particularly here in the Northeast. And remember, it is temporary. Winter will be here soon enough.
Sharon
The Buy-Nothing Year Begins
Today begins Eric and my exercise in non-consumption. For one year, we're going to purchase nothing that isn't necessary. No processed foods. Much less gas (we're trying to reduce driving by 50%). Much less electricity (50% reduction). No books, no music, no movies, no videos (this last won't be much of a hardship - my MIL gave us netflix last year, so we've got that for a while, but we won't renew unless she does). No junk food. No clothing. No toys. No meals out. No alcohol (given that I've been pregnant or nursing for the last 7 years, this won't be the hardship it sounds like to others). No reeses peanut butter cups (which to me do not fall in the category of junk, processed foods or non-essentials ordinarily ;-). No coffee or tea (we don't drink coffee, and we'll use up the tea we have or do without.) No magazine subscriptions, presents for anyone (we make 'em or do without.) No travel except mandatory work or to visit relatives, and a lot less of that.
We did buy a few things in advance, front-loading as we call it, mostly homeschooling materials for Simon for this year, and a few extra (but desperately needed, of course ;-P) books for me. And I've got a tiny stash of Reeses. Eric's got a couple of 12 packs of beer (he asked me, "Am I being rude if I don't offer guests beer, when I've only got 30 bottles for an entire year." My answer is "yes.") But when things run out, we will try not to replace them. The rule is that first, we make do or do without. If we can't, we then try and either fix it or make it ourselves. Last and only if we deem it impossible to live without do we replace it.
We will buy toilet paper, the components of food (no pre-made foods - not that we ate many, but the kids like pretzels and granola bars and I'm fond of a particular kind of sesame sauce, etc...). We'll buy the components to make gifts, if we cannot make them from what we have (sadly, this is not an excuse to purchase yarn, since I could make gifts for many thousands of people from the yarn I already possess, or so Eric estimates ;-).
Books will be the hard thing for me, I know. I read a lot and read fast. Eric will miss movies and music, and we'll both miss eating out. The kid will miss trips out for ice cream (we'll make ice cream at home instead), but they are young enough not to mind this very much, and over-indulged enough not to feel a drastic loss having to play with their many, many toys.
The thing is, we're on average far more frugal than most people in the culture - but there's a surprising amount of fat in our budget (not to mention the fat on me from the reeses and other indulgences - I'm hoping to lose some weight this year). And someone has to do it. Actually, people have done it - there's a book, one I'm working on now but recommend _Not Buying It_ by Judith Levine, about a couple that did the same. I admit, much as I like Ms. Levine's writing style (I do, quite a lot) and find her funny and erudite, I don't find myself drawing a lot of logical parallels. Much of the book is devoted to how much she misses entertainment - theater, art, musical performances and especially movies. Perhaps because I have four kids under 7, those joys are already mostly closed to me. I've been to three plays since Eli was born, one concert, and perhaps a dozen movies. I'm fine without it. She also misses buying clothes, something that I do only when roped and hogtied.
What will be hard for me is the pleasure of yard saling, of browsing used book stores, and of buying supplies to make things like quilts and knitted objects. And it will be hard to eliminate the convenience of not meeting people at restaurants. But mostly, it will be about gaining things - more time, more money for essentials (we will use some of the funds during the year to reinsulate our house and do other energy conservation activities), for tzedakah (1/4 of our savings will go to charity), and less thought about what I don't have, what I need, what I want. I suspect I'll enjoy it.
Wish me luck!
Sharon
We did buy a few things in advance, front-loading as we call it, mostly homeschooling materials for Simon for this year, and a few extra (but desperately needed, of course ;-P) books for me. And I've got a tiny stash of Reeses. Eric's got a couple of 12 packs of beer (he asked me, "Am I being rude if I don't offer guests beer, when I've only got 30 bottles for an entire year." My answer is "yes.") But when things run out, we will try not to replace them. The rule is that first, we make do or do without. If we can't, we then try and either fix it or make it ourselves. Last and only if we deem it impossible to live without do we replace it.
We will buy toilet paper, the components of food (no pre-made foods - not that we ate many, but the kids like pretzels and granola bars and I'm fond of a particular kind of sesame sauce, etc...). We'll buy the components to make gifts, if we cannot make them from what we have (sadly, this is not an excuse to purchase yarn, since I could make gifts for many thousands of people from the yarn I already possess, or so Eric estimates ;-).
Books will be the hard thing for me, I know. I read a lot and read fast. Eric will miss movies and music, and we'll both miss eating out. The kid will miss trips out for ice cream (we'll make ice cream at home instead), but they are young enough not to mind this very much, and over-indulged enough not to feel a drastic loss having to play with their many, many toys.
The thing is, we're on average far more frugal than most people in the culture - but there's a surprising amount of fat in our budget (not to mention the fat on me from the reeses and other indulgences - I'm hoping to lose some weight this year). And someone has to do it. Actually, people have done it - there's a book, one I'm working on now but recommend _Not Buying It_ by Judith Levine, about a couple that did the same. I admit, much as I like Ms. Levine's writing style (I do, quite a lot) and find her funny and erudite, I don't find myself drawing a lot of logical parallels. Much of the book is devoted to how much she misses entertainment - theater, art, musical performances and especially movies. Perhaps because I have four kids under 7, those joys are already mostly closed to me. I've been to three plays since Eli was born, one concert, and perhaps a dozen movies. I'm fine without it. She also misses buying clothes, something that I do only when roped and hogtied.
What will be hard for me is the pleasure of yard saling, of browsing used book stores, and of buying supplies to make things like quilts and knitted objects. And it will be hard to eliminate the convenience of not meeting people at restaurants. But mostly, it will be about gaining things - more time, more money for essentials (we will use some of the funds during the year to reinsulate our house and do other energy conservation activities), for tzedakah (1/4 of our savings will go to charity), and less thought about what I don't have, what I need, what I want. I suspect I'll enjoy it.
Wish me luck!
Sharon
Friday, July 14, 2006
Peak oil flyer for familes - draft one
I'm hoping to transform this into a flyer than can be handed out to parents at parent-type events, and hopefully encourage more people to look more deeply into peak oil. There will be website addresses and book references at the end for further investigation. Comments please?
Gas Prices are rising, with no end in sight. New Oil discoveries fall further every year. The oil being extracted is of lower quality, and costs more to get at. Natural gas is getting more expensive every year and is in danger of running out. It is called peak oil - and it means that fossil fuel will be getting more expensive and less available every year.
What will your children’s lives be like in 20 years if we don’t prepare for fossil fuel shortage TODAY?
Your children will be unlikely to:
- Be able to attend college. One logical economic effect of fossil fuel shortages is economic crisis. You can expect to lose your job, and have difficulty saving for children’s education. We can expect cuts in student aid packages, and to find financial aid more difficult to get, as more and more families need it.
- Find good jobs. Everything we do right now depends on large quantities of energy - energy to commute to work, to heat and cool and run the workplace, to purchase materials, to market and sell them, to transport them. When the economy falters, and costs get higher, unemployment rises, dramatically. Your children and grandchildren will face a world where jobs are much scarcer than they are today.
- Have adequate medical care. As companies are more and more strapped by high fuel prices, even those who have jobs will likely lose their benefits. More and more people will be uninsured, and too poor to pay for medical care. Your children may have to choose between groceries and dental care, essential medications and paying their rent or mortgage.
- Have enough food to eat. With poverty comes hunger. Rising fossil fuel prices raise the cost of EVERYTHING, including food. Lack of fertilizer and fuel for growing and transporting food means that your children and grandchildren are likely to grow up in a world where supermarket shelves are empty and they know hunger.
- Be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Heating oil and natural gas are both rising rapidly in price, and that rise reflects the fact that there is little new oil being found. Competition for resources from other nations will drive prices still higher, and may make oil and gas nearly unavailable for heating and cooling. At the same time, as the climate shifts, temperature extremes get more severe. Your children may grow up shivering in their beds, and in danger of heat stroke, asthma attacks and other medical consequences from extreme heat and poor summer air quality.
- Travel much - the cost of visiting you far away, or seeing the world is about to get prohibitive. You may not see much of your children and grandchildren if they live far away.
They will be likely to:
- Live in a much more polluted world than you do. Because we’ve squandered a lot of time to work on renewable energy, we’re most likely to shift to coal and nuclear energy to take up some of the slack. Coal puts mercury into the atmosphere causing autism and brain damage in children, poisons ground water and acidifies rain. Nuclear accidents and storage leaks can cause increased cancer rates and endanger thousands - including your kids.
- Go to war over oil and gas resources. Already, we’re fighting in part to ensure access to fossil fuel resources in the middle east. As we run shorter, we’re likely to see the draft reinstituted and our children sent around the world to fight, be disabled and die for oil and gas.
- Live as long as you do. With poorer nutrition, medical care, more wars and more pollution, your children are likely to die younger than you do. Watching our children die is the worst nightmare of most parents, and it may be our reality.
What can we do to stop it?
-CONSERVE - don’t just recycle, change your life so that you children can have a life. Bicycle or walk instead of driving. Turn off the a/c. Skip the vacation. Use less, use it up, make it do, do without.
- BUY - local food, produced with the fewest possible chemical and fossil fuel inputs. Don’t spend money you don’t have to. Purchase things from local merchants, rather than large corporations whenever possible.
- WRITE (or email) your congresspeople and vote for increased funding for conservation, renewable energy and public transportation. Tell the president and congress that you want to get out of Iraq, and turn our resources to preparing our nation for the coming crisis.
-VOTE for candidates who support the above, and for those who support anti-poverty programs like food pantries and WIC. Remember, your children may be the poor of tomorrow through no fault of their own.
-AGITATE - demonstrate, write and speak in support of programs that encourage conservation and sustainability in your community, your state and your nation.
- SPEAK - tell others about peak oil. Warn your friends, your neighbors, your family. Get together with neighbors, church, synagogue, mosque members, family members and friends, and make plans for a future with a lot less.
- GROW - a garden, no matter how small. Every bit of your food that you can produce is one less calorie of oil we have to burn.
- TEACH - your children about the future, and prepare them for the skills they may need in the future. Teach them to grow a garden, to have healthy bodies that can walk and bike for miles, to live simply, to make do, to appreciate what they have.
- PREPARE - build a three month supply of stored foods for a balanced diet. Store water. Consider collecting rainwater from your roof. Take advantage of medical benefits now to get healthier.
- GIVE - your children a chance at a life as good as the one you’ve had, by using less and taking less.
Gas Prices are rising, with no end in sight. New Oil discoveries fall further every year. The oil being extracted is of lower quality, and costs more to get at. Natural gas is getting more expensive every year and is in danger of running out. It is called peak oil - and it means that fossil fuel will be getting more expensive and less available every year.
What will your children’s lives be like in 20 years if we don’t prepare for fossil fuel shortage TODAY?
Your children will be unlikely to:
- Be able to attend college. One logical economic effect of fossil fuel shortages is economic crisis. You can expect to lose your job, and have difficulty saving for children’s education. We can expect cuts in student aid packages, and to find financial aid more difficult to get, as more and more families need it.
- Find good jobs. Everything we do right now depends on large quantities of energy - energy to commute to work, to heat and cool and run the workplace, to purchase materials, to market and sell them, to transport them. When the economy falters, and costs get higher, unemployment rises, dramatically. Your children and grandchildren will face a world where jobs are much scarcer than they are today.
- Have adequate medical care. As companies are more and more strapped by high fuel prices, even those who have jobs will likely lose their benefits. More and more people will be uninsured, and too poor to pay for medical care. Your children may have to choose between groceries and dental care, essential medications and paying their rent or mortgage.
- Have enough food to eat. With poverty comes hunger. Rising fossil fuel prices raise the cost of EVERYTHING, including food. Lack of fertilizer and fuel for growing and transporting food means that your children and grandchildren are likely to grow up in a world where supermarket shelves are empty and they know hunger.
- Be warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Heating oil and natural gas are both rising rapidly in price, and that rise reflects the fact that there is little new oil being found. Competition for resources from other nations will drive prices still higher, and may make oil and gas nearly unavailable for heating and cooling. At the same time, as the climate shifts, temperature extremes get more severe. Your children may grow up shivering in their beds, and in danger of heat stroke, asthma attacks and other medical consequences from extreme heat and poor summer air quality.
- Travel much - the cost of visiting you far away, or seeing the world is about to get prohibitive. You may not see much of your children and grandchildren if they live far away.
They will be likely to:
- Live in a much more polluted world than you do. Because we’ve squandered a lot of time to work on renewable energy, we’re most likely to shift to coal and nuclear energy to take up some of the slack. Coal puts mercury into the atmosphere causing autism and brain damage in children, poisons ground water and acidifies rain. Nuclear accidents and storage leaks can cause increased cancer rates and endanger thousands - including your kids.
- Go to war over oil and gas resources. Already, we’re fighting in part to ensure access to fossil fuel resources in the middle east. As we run shorter, we’re likely to see the draft reinstituted and our children sent around the world to fight, be disabled and die for oil and gas.
- Live as long as you do. With poorer nutrition, medical care, more wars and more pollution, your children are likely to die younger than you do. Watching our children die is the worst nightmare of most parents, and it may be our reality.
What can we do to stop it?
-CONSERVE - don’t just recycle, change your life so that you children can have a life. Bicycle or walk instead of driving. Turn off the a/c. Skip the vacation. Use less, use it up, make it do, do without.
- BUY - local food, produced with the fewest possible chemical and fossil fuel inputs. Don’t spend money you don’t have to. Purchase things from local merchants, rather than large corporations whenever possible.
- WRITE (or email) your congresspeople and vote for increased funding for conservation, renewable energy and public transportation. Tell the president and congress that you want to get out of Iraq, and turn our resources to preparing our nation for the coming crisis.
-VOTE for candidates who support the above, and for those who support anti-poverty programs like food pantries and WIC. Remember, your children may be the poor of tomorrow through no fault of their own.
-AGITATE - demonstrate, write and speak in support of programs that encourage conservation and sustainability in your community, your state and your nation.
- SPEAK - tell others about peak oil. Warn your friends, your neighbors, your family. Get together with neighbors, church, synagogue, mosque members, family members and friends, and make plans for a future with a lot less.
- GROW - a garden, no matter how small. Every bit of your food that you can produce is one less calorie of oil we have to burn.
- TEACH - your children about the future, and prepare them for the skills they may need in the future. Teach them to grow a garden, to have healthy bodies that can walk and bike for miles, to live simply, to make do, to appreciate what they have.
- PREPARE - build a three month supply of stored foods for a balanced diet. Store water. Consider collecting rainwater from your roof. Take advantage of medical benefits now to get healthier.
- GIVE - your children a chance at a life as good as the one you’ve had, by using less and taking less.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Did World War III start yesterday morning?
The great thing about predicting human events is that you are so often wrong. In this case, nothing would make me happier than to be in error. But, G-d help us all, I think the odds aren't that bad that I' m right. It is possible that yesterday morning, we started World War III.
The beginnings of wars are often hard to identify. Which act lit the spark on the tinderbox? Which straw was the final one? Like peak oil itself, the beginnings of war are often visible only in retrospect. Why today? Why, when we might make the case a world war war began when the US invaded Iraq? Why when this particular cause might turn out to be just another brush fire?
We don't know. We can only guess. Yesterday morning, Israel invaded Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, and began shelling civilian targets. Hezbollah is demanding the release of 9000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel is threatening to destroy Lebanon and potentially Syria as well. Iran and Syria are both making noises in support ofHezbollah, and our president and Germany are making noises in support of Israel. Iran has already threatened to close the gulf to oil transport in retaliation for any US or Israeli strike into Syria. Our government has been looking for an excuse to invade Iran, and here is one ready-made - Iran's long standing economic support and military support of Hezbollah. Moreover, American strategy in the middle east is deeply tied into Israel, and there is no questionthat we will provide support of some sort or another if Israel fully commits to war with Lebanon and perhaps Syria.
Another American beachhead, run through Israel, is likely to spark more conflict with Iran and other nations in the middle east, and encourage them to retaliate by cutting off oil supplies. And full-scale, multi-national war in the middle east is something no energy dependent nation inthe world (that is, basically all of us) can afford to ignore. As Iraq fragments and the US is increasingly over committed, China and Russia are caught between their economic and energy ties to Syria and Iran, and their desire not to antagonize the US. But if the middle east fully ignites, neither China nor Russia will be free not to choose sides. They will have to protect their own interests. And I believe nothing good could possibly come from so many people with big guns and nuclear bombs trying to decide which side they are on.
I could be wrong. This could all just peter out, or end in a peaceful solution. I pray it be so. But the crisis pattern we're seeing resembles things I've seen before in history books. I won't be surprised if someday, today is named the beginning of the next world conflict, the one that we've all known was coming. As I said before, G-d help us all, and may I just end up looking silly, making predictions that don't come true.
If not, though, the only thing that will stop this from becoming a greater disaster is the will and strength of people all over the world to say, "stop." Because this is madness. In Israel, I would pray you will say "Stop!" no matter how desperately your hearts are aching for those children/soldiers who were stolen from you. In Gaza and Iran and Beirut, I pray you will say "Stop!" and find a way that leads to peace. In the US, we must say "Stop!" and prepare to consume less and use less and absorb any oil shocks coming to us, rather than strike military blows to get our way. And those who could be drawn in so disastrously must stand up as the voices of wisdom, and also say "Stop!" and talk peace at those who are so hurt and angry they can only see war. Please G-d, we all have such wisdom.
Sharon
The beginnings of wars are often hard to identify. Which act lit the spark on the tinderbox? Which straw was the final one? Like peak oil itself, the beginnings of war are often visible only in retrospect. Why today? Why, when we might make the case a world war war began when the US invaded Iraq? Why when this particular cause might turn out to be just another brush fire?
We don't know. We can only guess. Yesterday morning, Israel invaded Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, and began shelling civilian targets. Hezbollah is demanding the release of 9000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel is threatening to destroy Lebanon and potentially Syria as well. Iran and Syria are both making noises in support ofHezbollah, and our president and Germany are making noises in support of Israel. Iran has already threatened to close the gulf to oil transport in retaliation for any US or Israeli strike into Syria. Our government has been looking for an excuse to invade Iran, and here is one ready-made - Iran's long standing economic support and military support of Hezbollah. Moreover, American strategy in the middle east is deeply tied into Israel, and there is no questionthat we will provide support of some sort or another if Israel fully commits to war with Lebanon and perhaps Syria.
Another American beachhead, run through Israel, is likely to spark more conflict with Iran and other nations in the middle east, and encourage them to retaliate by cutting off oil supplies. And full-scale, multi-national war in the middle east is something no energy dependent nation inthe world (that is, basically all of us) can afford to ignore. As Iraq fragments and the US is increasingly over committed, China and Russia are caught between their economic and energy ties to Syria and Iran, and their desire not to antagonize the US. But if the middle east fully ignites, neither China nor Russia will be free not to choose sides. They will have to protect their own interests. And I believe nothing good could possibly come from so many people with big guns and nuclear bombs trying to decide which side they are on.
I could be wrong. This could all just peter out, or end in a peaceful solution. I pray it be so. But the crisis pattern we're seeing resembles things I've seen before in history books. I won't be surprised if someday, today is named the beginning of the next world conflict, the one that we've all known was coming. As I said before, G-d help us all, and may I just end up looking silly, making predictions that don't come true.
If not, though, the only thing that will stop this from becoming a greater disaster is the will and strength of people all over the world to say, "stop." Because this is madness. In Israel, I would pray you will say "Stop!" no matter how desperately your hearts are aching for those children/soldiers who were stolen from you. In Gaza and Iran and Beirut, I pray you will say "Stop!" and find a way that leads to peace. In the US, we must say "Stop!" and prepare to consume less and use less and absorb any oil shocks coming to us, rather than strike military blows to get our way. And those who could be drawn in so disastrously must stand up as the voices of wisdom, and also say "Stop!" and talk peace at those who are so hurt and angry they can only see war. Please G-d, we all have such wisdom.
Sharon
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
In Praise of Weeds
Last year I decided not to mulch a good chunk of our garden, in the interest of seeing how hard it was to maintain if mulch materials wereever scarce. I love permanent mulch - I love the way the soil improves under it, I love the way that the soil stays moist when it is dry and also handles heavy rainfall much better, and I love sitting on the warm mulch while I pick tomatoes or cucumbers. But I don't wantto be too dependent upon any particular gardening method, so I left a patch in front of the house (on the theory that sheer embarassment might encourage me to weed) unmulched and went about my business.
This was partly fueled by a discussion I had a few years ago with afriend of mine who is an herbalist and gardener at Sturbridge Village(an 1830s living history museum), who pointed out that most garden descriptions of the time are very unconcerned with weeding, and many permitted large quantities of weeds to grow up as mulch underneath plantings, just pulling them as they began to shade other plants. I've done that a few times by accident, but this, (besides proving that embarassment will not drive me to weeding if there is anything more fun to do ;-)), was my first formal experiment. I have to say, I think the weeds have done me more good than bad. Now obviously, ymmv, and those of you with moisture shortages or very tight spaces probably won't have this luxury, but my observation so far has been that as long as the weeds aren't allowed to take over completely, or to shade out food plants, that the competition isn't a bad one, necessarily.
My weedy tomatoes have actually grown faster than the mulched ones, and set fruit earlier than mulched varieties ofthe same species. I've been managing the weeds, rather than completely getting rid of them. Some, we eat or use for medicinal purposes, and that takes care of that. I pull out the lambsquarters and wild salsify as I eat them, but don't worry too much about them when they are small. I'm lettingsome of the wild oats that aren't too much in the way mature, and will feed them to the chickens. I even transplanted a few over to a better spot ;-). The mulleins I left because I think they are pretty, and if there's ever a shortage, the leaves make terrific toilet paper. Some of the greens (extra plantain that we don't want, pigweeds, chickweed) go straight to the chickens and geese as harvested feed. Then, there are some weeds I'm actually delighted to see - I've never had them before, and I want them. I'm encouraging the wild yarrow to grow, since I find it better for medicinal purposes than the stuff I cultivate, and it is lovely - one of my favorite wildflowers. This is the first year I've had either purslane or stinging nettle anywhere on the property - I've always had to forage elswhere, and I'm more than a little pleased to see them. Both are fairly well-behaved (in that they don't really take over), and very good to eat (use gloves with the nettles, and cook them first). I'm also excited to seecteasel here - people in upstate NY used to grow fields of them for thewool processing industry, and I'm planning on harvesting mine for thesame reason. Plantain I like to let go to the green seed stage, and then harvest and dry the seed heads - they make marvellous free birdfood in the winter. Pigweeds and other wild amaranths are great for the same purpose. Bedstraw and Burdock are allowed to mature until just before they set seeds, and used for dyeing and eating respectively (ok, I don't always get to them before they set seed, which is a problem).
I also always allow some weeds to go to flower on the fringes of the garden. Along with the dill and cilantro I plant to attract pollinators, I notice that queen anne's lace and mullein are good insect attractants. Canada and Bull thistle get taken right out, as do a few others, like ground ivy, which are real pests. I reserve the right to kick out any weed that takes more than its fair share, or sticks me with prickers when I step on it. But for the most part, weeding is a desultory chore for me, done at a fairly low key. As long as the plants aren't too crowded or shaded, and the weeds are useful ones to me, leaving them be doesn't seem to do a lot of harm to *most* crops, and the weeds will generally get pulled for whatever purpose eventually.
There are exceptions -peppers here are easily shaded out by faster growing weeds, and carrots can't handle any weed pressure at all. But for every crop that needs hand weeding, there are those, like bush beans, zinnias,tomatoes and corn that on fertile soil, with adequate moisture, seem entirely untroubled by competition, and that will eventually shade out the weeds on their own. My math so far suggests that I actually take more useful plants off of my land when I plant a little further apart and allow some weed competetion than when I plant my own food plants more tightly together.
One of the biggest pests in my garden is the tomato. No matter how diligently I harvest, every year I spend more time pulling out fast growing tomato volunteers than I do burdock or thistles. They tend to shade everything out, because they grow so fast. I leave some, of course, but it does point out that even in my cold climate, I could probably rely for much of my tomato crop on volunteers, provided I didn't mind waiting until September to harvest (I do). I'll probably go back to mulching next year - after I transplant in my plantain and wild yarrows. But the other advantage of leaving the weeds, assuming you can afford the loss in moisture and fertility, is that pulled weeds make an excellent mulch. If I ever run out of straw and undercropping material, I probably will do just that and allow theweeds to grow up, pull them, and use them to smother the rest.
I think it worth praising the weeds, at least once in a while,before I squish them ;-).
This was partly fueled by a discussion I had a few years ago with afriend of mine who is an herbalist and gardener at Sturbridge Village(an 1830s living history museum), who pointed out that most garden descriptions of the time are very unconcerned with weeding, and many permitted large quantities of weeds to grow up as mulch underneath plantings, just pulling them as they began to shade other plants. I've done that a few times by accident, but this, (besides proving that embarassment will not drive me to weeding if there is anything more fun to do ;-)), was my first formal experiment. I have to say, I think the weeds have done me more good than bad. Now obviously, ymmv, and those of you with moisture shortages or very tight spaces probably won't have this luxury, but my observation so far has been that as long as the weeds aren't allowed to take over completely, or to shade out food plants, that the competition isn't a bad one, necessarily.
My weedy tomatoes have actually grown faster than the mulched ones, and set fruit earlier than mulched varieties ofthe same species. I've been managing the weeds, rather than completely getting rid of them. Some, we eat or use for medicinal purposes, and that takes care of that. I pull out the lambsquarters and wild salsify as I eat them, but don't worry too much about them when they are small. I'm lettingsome of the wild oats that aren't too much in the way mature, and will feed them to the chickens. I even transplanted a few over to a better spot ;-). The mulleins I left because I think they are pretty, and if there's ever a shortage, the leaves make terrific toilet paper. Some of the greens (extra plantain that we don't want, pigweeds, chickweed) go straight to the chickens and geese as harvested feed. Then, there are some weeds I'm actually delighted to see - I've never had them before, and I want them. I'm encouraging the wild yarrow to grow, since I find it better for medicinal purposes than the stuff I cultivate, and it is lovely - one of my favorite wildflowers. This is the first year I've had either purslane or stinging nettle anywhere on the property - I've always had to forage elswhere, and I'm more than a little pleased to see them. Both are fairly well-behaved (in that they don't really take over), and very good to eat (use gloves with the nettles, and cook them first). I'm also excited to seecteasel here - people in upstate NY used to grow fields of them for thewool processing industry, and I'm planning on harvesting mine for thesame reason. Plantain I like to let go to the green seed stage, and then harvest and dry the seed heads - they make marvellous free birdfood in the winter. Pigweeds and other wild amaranths are great for the same purpose. Bedstraw and Burdock are allowed to mature until just before they set seeds, and used for dyeing and eating respectively (ok, I don't always get to them before they set seed, which is a problem).
I also always allow some weeds to go to flower on the fringes of the garden. Along with the dill and cilantro I plant to attract pollinators, I notice that queen anne's lace and mullein are good insect attractants. Canada and Bull thistle get taken right out, as do a few others, like ground ivy, which are real pests. I reserve the right to kick out any weed that takes more than its fair share, or sticks me with prickers when I step on it. But for the most part, weeding is a desultory chore for me, done at a fairly low key. As long as the plants aren't too crowded or shaded, and the weeds are useful ones to me, leaving them be doesn't seem to do a lot of harm to *most* crops, and the weeds will generally get pulled for whatever purpose eventually.
There are exceptions -peppers here are easily shaded out by faster growing weeds, and carrots can't handle any weed pressure at all. But for every crop that needs hand weeding, there are those, like bush beans, zinnias,tomatoes and corn that on fertile soil, with adequate moisture, seem entirely untroubled by competition, and that will eventually shade out the weeds on their own. My math so far suggests that I actually take more useful plants off of my land when I plant a little further apart and allow some weed competetion than when I plant my own food plants more tightly together.
One of the biggest pests in my garden is the tomato. No matter how diligently I harvest, every year I spend more time pulling out fast growing tomato volunteers than I do burdock or thistles. They tend to shade everything out, because they grow so fast. I leave some, of course, but it does point out that even in my cold climate, I could probably rely for much of my tomato crop on volunteers, provided I didn't mind waiting until September to harvest (I do). I'll probably go back to mulching next year - after I transplant in my plantain and wild yarrows. But the other advantage of leaving the weeds, assuming you can afford the loss in moisture and fertility, is that pulled weeds make an excellent mulch. If I ever run out of straw and undercropping material, I probably will do just that and allow theweeds to grow up, pull them, and use them to smother the rest.
I think it worth praising the weeds, at least once in a while,before I squish them ;-).
When I started this blog...
...not quite two years ago, I announced that oil was at $50 per barrel. Early last week, it passed $75, and oil futures, I'm told, are being traded at above $80. The only good thing about this is that I stand to win my bet with my economist buddy, Steve (that oil will pass $100 per barrel within 3 years- a bet I made about 2 years ago) with plenty of time to say, "nyah, nyah." Small satisfaction that.
This is just the beginning, folks. We're looking from just before, or just after the peak, but things start going downhill pretty fast from here. I'm sure some readers believe that I'm just that wacky doomsday chick on the blog, but you cannot lose by preparing yourself now. By storing some food, and water, by adapting your home to low or no fossil fuel use. If worse comes to worse, you'll still be better off having that food, that water, that money you save. We're in an inflationary economic cycle - at a minimum, the food, woodstove and insulation you buy today will be cheaper than buying it tomorrow.
Please. If you read this, take me seriously for one moment. You can make fun of me later. You can call me a fool. But do a few things to keep yourselves safe in hard times. It can only help.
Sharon
This is just the beginning, folks. We're looking from just before, or just after the peak, but things start going downhill pretty fast from here. I'm sure some readers believe that I'm just that wacky doomsday chick on the blog, but you cannot lose by preparing yourself now. By storing some food, and water, by adapting your home to low or no fossil fuel use. If worse comes to worse, you'll still be better off having that food, that water, that money you save. We're in an inflationary economic cycle - at a minimum, the food, woodstove and insulation you buy today will be cheaper than buying it tomorrow.
Please. If you read this, take me seriously for one moment. You can make fun of me later. You can call me a fool. But do a few things to keep yourselves safe in hard times. It can only help.
Sharon
Thursday, July 06, 2006
We lost one today.
In wedding magazine rhetoric, and victorian prose, a wedding day is the happiest day of one's life. Now I had fun at both my weddings, the one that took and the one that didn't, but neither one ranked up there in the happiest days of my life. But there's a wedding that *did* rank up there - not my own, but my mother and step-mother's. The day they were able to legalize their relationship (at that point 25 years and still going strong) may have been the happiest day of my life, other than when my children were born. I remember telling my sons that someday, they would be able to tell their own grandchildren that Nana and Nunu (don't ask about the Nunu thing) got married on that day in May. That they were the first gay people in their town to marry, and that their children were so very proud of them and happy for them.
It wasn't just their children, either. My phone rang off the hook all that day with friends and family members calling to wish joy to my Mom and Sue. Members of my synagogue called. My neighbors in our rural farming community called. Friends I hadn't seen in years called. My ex-husband (and good friend) called, with wishes from himself, his wife and his parents. On an internet list I've belonged to for years, where a lot of the population is conservative Christian, people wished my mothers joy, no matter what they thought of the issue in general. I don't think I've ever wept with happiness before, but I did that day, not just because my mother and Sue were able to enter into legal protections they've never had before, but because this was an act of justice and delight, and everyone who knew me, and knew my family was shared our happiness. My friend and honorary brother Jesse was there in Cambridge when, at midnight, city hall began to issue marriage licenses. He hollered and yelled and laughed and danced at one of the biggest parties he'd ever been to, and called me to share the joy.
New York missed its chance to be the second state in the Union to adopt gay marriage. It missed its chance to lead the nation today, when the state supreme court argued that there were compelling reasons, mostly about parenting, for the state to limit marriage to heterosexuals. Besides rehashing a whole lot of unproven speculation (no one has ever successfully demonstrated that children of gay families are any worse off than the children of any other families), New York missed its own chance to be right, and just and *JOYFUL* - because in a sense, that's what it this is about. Yes, it is about civil rights and politics, justice and mercy. But a wedding (at least a state sanctioned one - we can leave sacredness and holiness to those who concern themselves with faith, not legality) is a party, and a good one, when it is done right. People laugh and dance, they drink wine and sing, and celebrate love and trust and happiness. And the people getting married in New York, who have been denied and reviled and left out for decades would throw the best party anyone has ever seen. Love is a many splendored thing, and its greatest splendor is joy, delight (in the true sublime sense), happiness.
Four bitter judges cost a hell of a lot of joy today.
On a personal note, I've long hoped to convince my mother and Sue to move here for their retirement someday. That won't happen unless the New York State Legislature fixes the errors of the court. I hope it does. But what New York lost can't fully be replaced - a chance to spot the error, fix it fast, and turn to the party and a celebration of human love. I know I'll be there dancing on the day it does, and my children too.
Sharon
It wasn't just their children, either. My phone rang off the hook all that day with friends and family members calling to wish joy to my Mom and Sue. Members of my synagogue called. My neighbors in our rural farming community called. Friends I hadn't seen in years called. My ex-husband (and good friend) called, with wishes from himself, his wife and his parents. On an internet list I've belonged to for years, where a lot of the population is conservative Christian, people wished my mothers joy, no matter what they thought of the issue in general. I don't think I've ever wept with happiness before, but I did that day, not just because my mother and Sue were able to enter into legal protections they've never had before, but because this was an act of justice and delight, and everyone who knew me, and knew my family was shared our happiness. My friend and honorary brother Jesse was there in Cambridge when, at midnight, city hall began to issue marriage licenses. He hollered and yelled and laughed and danced at one of the biggest parties he'd ever been to, and called me to share the joy.
New York missed its chance to be the second state in the Union to adopt gay marriage. It missed its chance to lead the nation today, when the state supreme court argued that there were compelling reasons, mostly about parenting, for the state to limit marriage to heterosexuals. Besides rehashing a whole lot of unproven speculation (no one has ever successfully demonstrated that children of gay families are any worse off than the children of any other families), New York missed its own chance to be right, and just and *JOYFUL* - because in a sense, that's what it this is about. Yes, it is about civil rights and politics, justice and mercy. But a wedding (at least a state sanctioned one - we can leave sacredness and holiness to those who concern themselves with faith, not legality) is a party, and a good one, when it is done right. People laugh and dance, they drink wine and sing, and celebrate love and trust and happiness. And the people getting married in New York, who have been denied and reviled and left out for decades would throw the best party anyone has ever seen. Love is a many splendored thing, and its greatest splendor is joy, delight (in the true sublime sense), happiness.
Four bitter judges cost a hell of a lot of joy today.
On a personal note, I've long hoped to convince my mother and Sue to move here for their retirement someday. That won't happen unless the New York State Legislature fixes the errors of the court. I hope it does. But what New York lost can't fully be replaced - a chance to spot the error, fix it fast, and turn to the party and a celebration of human love. I know I'll be there dancing on the day it does, and my children too.
Sharon
Saturday, July 01, 2006
The rain is raining all around...
The rhymes and poems of my childhood stuck around in the back of my head until I had children of my own to read them too, and now they are back faster. Simon challenged me to recite as many poems about rain (since I constantly recite odd bits to the kids) as I could, and I got to 9 before breaking up. The one most appropriate at the moment is probably the old nursery rhyme about Dr. Foster, who went to Gloucester. As you'll recall, "He stepped in a puddle up to his middle/And never went there again." Well, if you had been here this past week, I think there's a good shot you'd never want to come again. The puddles weren't quite as high here as closer to the Mohawk, Hudson and Schoharie rivers, but there was enough rain that our occasional patches of sun have never dried the ground enough for me to mow the lawn in the back. Thus, Eric is scything it down for hay. This is not a part of the property that is *supposed* to be growing hay.
Still, we're fortunate. We're too high for the floods. And the Gilboa dam, a few miles west of here, has held through all the spring and summer rains. We're not in the flood path, but if the dam breaks (and it may), we're on the escape route. As far as I can tell, after much angst about whether and when the dam might break, the major result has been a bunch of signs saying "Flood Evacuation Route" pointing up. That's helpful.
What else is going on here? We're harvesting peas, onions, greens of all kinds, radishes and baby carrots. We usually try to have our first tomatoes ready by the fourth of July, but everything is so late this year that I have no hope at all of success. We're working on the fall crops - we've had so much wet weather and difficulty that I fear we have to give up on many of the earlier summer ones.
The boys were delighted when the sun came out for a bit today - it gave them a chance to splash in the little wading pool I got at a yard sale this year. And, of course, there's the playset. Grandma sweetly gave the children an *enormous* playset, and the kids in the neighborhood swarm over it like bees. It is a wonderful blessing, enabling us to cut car trips (Eli has a strong need for sensory stimulation and playgrounds fill it), and giving us a neighborhood play area. One of the houses on our road just sold, and rumor has it, to a family with *10* kids - I'm delighted. More playmates for my kids, more pickup baseball games, more friendships, more grownups to chat over the pleasures and angst of parenting. Our neighborhood is clearly an odd demographic - our 8 house street will, if this rumor is correct, have 23 children on it, at least 8 of whom are homeschooled.
We're currently plotting how best to reduce our energy consumption and adapt our home for lowered inputs. We have, of course, limited funds and many desires. Do we renovate the old kitchen to make it completely non-electric, so that we can use our existing wood cookstove and cisterns to cook? Do we convert the addition to passive solar gain? Replace the crappy windows on the sunporch? Add a greenhouse? Add a masonry stove? An outside wood furnace and solar panels to run it? Convert entirely to indoor wood heat? What shall we do?
That's about the excitement here!
Sharon
Still, we're fortunate. We're too high for the floods. And the Gilboa dam, a few miles west of here, has held through all the spring and summer rains. We're not in the flood path, but if the dam breaks (and it may), we're on the escape route. As far as I can tell, after much angst about whether and when the dam might break, the major result has been a bunch of signs saying "Flood Evacuation Route" pointing up. That's helpful.
What else is going on here? We're harvesting peas, onions, greens of all kinds, radishes and baby carrots. We usually try to have our first tomatoes ready by the fourth of July, but everything is so late this year that I have no hope at all of success. We're working on the fall crops - we've had so much wet weather and difficulty that I fear we have to give up on many of the earlier summer ones.
The boys were delighted when the sun came out for a bit today - it gave them a chance to splash in the little wading pool I got at a yard sale this year. And, of course, there's the playset. Grandma sweetly gave the children an *enormous* playset, and the kids in the neighborhood swarm over it like bees. It is a wonderful blessing, enabling us to cut car trips (Eli has a strong need for sensory stimulation and playgrounds fill it), and giving us a neighborhood play area. One of the houses on our road just sold, and rumor has it, to a family with *10* kids - I'm delighted. More playmates for my kids, more pickup baseball games, more friendships, more grownups to chat over the pleasures and angst of parenting. Our neighborhood is clearly an odd demographic - our 8 house street will, if this rumor is correct, have 23 children on it, at least 8 of whom are homeschooled.
We're currently plotting how best to reduce our energy consumption and adapt our home for lowered inputs. We have, of course, limited funds and many desires. Do we renovate the old kitchen to make it completely non-electric, so that we can use our existing wood cookstove and cisterns to cook? Do we convert the addition to passive solar gain? Replace the crappy windows on the sunporch? Add a greenhouse? Add a masonry stove? An outside wood furnace and solar panels to run it? Convert entirely to indoor wood heat? What shall we do?
That's about the excitement here!
Sharon
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Is Peak Oil a Penis Thing?
Most of the major figures in the peak oil movement are men, and white men at that. That's not an indictment of some very smart people who are doing their best to let people know what's coming, but it is an observation that requires some analysis. Because every disaster strikes the most vulnerable people in society first and hardest, and in many cases, women and people of color stand to bear the brunt of some disturbing changes, and yet they mostly aren't being told this by people who look like them, or with whom they can easily identify. Peak oil gets chat in _Fortune_ and on NPR, but not on hip hop stations, or in _Good Housekeeping_. And while I might be hoping for too much to expect _Cosmo_ to do a feature keeping your lips moist after all the petroleum based glosses are gone, some of this has to do with medium.
Visit a peak oil website and look around. A lot of the articles are by petroleum geologists, and a lot of them are about arcane (to ordinary people) things like extraction rates and tar sands. This makes perfect sense - the first calls to action came from the people who were best equipped to evaluate how much fossil fuel there is in the ground (although honestly, no one really knows exactly - we can only give estimates). And petroleum geologists, no matter how wonderful and smart, tend to focus on the arcane. They, and a lot of the people who follow this (including me, oddly enough, despite my creds as a humanities scholar who is supposed to fear numbers, but doesn't) are interested in the details of how many million gallons of seawater are being pumped in the Ghawar, and whether the date of the peak is 2005 or 2010. And they write with that stuff in mind. While there are certainly increasing numbers of female petroleum geologists, it is a field that is weighted towards men, and they tend to talk to one another like overeducated white guys talk to one another - debating the details. Matt Savinar, author a good book on peak oil and a useful website wrote an article recently about this (And I'm not just mentioning this because my name is in there along with a lot of semi-famous petroleum geologists - although it is, and Matt very sweetly suggests that I'm too gentle and nurturing to toot my own horn or butt heads too hard on these subjects. Those of you who know me should try really hard not to choke to death as you laugh about the idea that I'm too gentle and nurturing for anything ;-)), in which he suggests that mostly peak oil scholars do this to look good to girls, which is why there aren't many women involved ;-).
But here's the thing - you can spend a lot of time on the math of peak oil if that's your sort of thing, but it isn't really necessary. The one figure you do need to understand is the concept of EROEI - Energy Returned Over Energy Input. All that means is that you have to get a certain amount of energy back over and above what you have to use to get the energy. That's why things like biodiesel aren't going to save us - they use more energy to make than they provide (ok, not the only reason - the other one is that if we grow fuel instead of food, we all get skinny and cranky). We all took 7th grade earth science - everyone, that is, every person in the whole world with two brain cells to rub together knows that we're going to have used up half the oil in the ground someday - we all know this is a finite resource. There isn't really any debate on that subject. The US Geological Survey says about 20 years. My husband's college environmental physics textbook (written by a guy who works for Shell, no less) says 20 years from 1997. Some people say we've already peaked. Some people say 2010.
The only other thing you really need to know is that regardless of when it happens - today or last week or 15 years from now, we're in trouble if we don't fix our culture NOW. The DOE report that came out last year suggested that we *might* be able to avoid major economic problems and fuel shortages if we work like crazy for 20 years, devoting most of our energy and resources as a nation to it. But we're not, and even the USGS numbers suggest that we're just at the 20 year mark right now.
So peak oil isn't really about the hard science. Oh, it is still fascinating to watch people like Ken Deffeyes (who probably rightly makes some fun of humanitites trained people like me who don't much care about the details) try and date peak oil to the day. But all of us know peak oil is coming - that only takes common sense. And we have the information to know that we have to fix this problem right now, today, with all the power and energy we have. And the reality is, that we might not have enough time. This is not a subject that requires a rocket scientist (even though I'm married to one - he's not as useful as you'd think ;-)) - ordinary people can look easily at the data that others, who went before us, have so helpfully compiled. And the reality is that petroleum geologists and environmental physicists and economists aren't any better than you and I at answering the big question - where do we go from here? How do we protect ourselves, our country, our communities?
So the next question is what do we do. And that's not just a question for petroleum geologists, but for ordinary people - for bus drivers and farmers, engineers and music teachers, carpenters and homemakers, long haul truckers and ministers, women and men, white people, black people, Asians, members of every ethnicity and community and culture we've got. Because every single one of us is going to feel peak oil. We don't have to sit around and argue about how long before hydrogen fuel cells are ready - we just have to know the simple things - the future for our kids and grandkids is less bright than for our own. Maybe we can make it just as good if we really get down to it today. More likely, it is too late, and we're like the weakest fairy godmothers at the baptism - we can't take the curse away, we can just soften it a little. But everything we do to soften it is a victory for ourselves, for our kids, our grandkids, our world, our culture. Everything. We need real, democratic input, but for that, we need peak oil to have the same face as the rest of us, and be spoken of in the languages of all the people, not just white guys with Ph.ds (please don't mistake me - I'm damned grateful to all of them, and am not belittling their contribution at all).
Matt Savinar suggested that we women aren't going to get girls out of being a peak oil activist, so there's less incentive for us to make ourselves famous, to get down and dirty in the peak oil fights (check it out here http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/OriginalArticles/whymen.html. ) But he's not quite correct - me, I'm just as ambitious for peak oil fame as he is. But for different reasons. My kids *lives* depend on me getting the word out, and getting the world to change. Not to mention the fact that changing diapers and doing laundry get dull now and again, and discussing this stuff does exercise the brain. I'm working on getting a little bit famous myself - Eric and I are writing a book and looking for a publisher, and I'm going to be a speaker at a national peak oil conference in Ohio this fall. I admit, it isn't the immediate gratification of getting male admirers (my husband would definitely object, though) - but the long term isn't that long when you have kids. I'd like to be famous because people think I'm smart and have a lot of good stuff to say - but I'll settle for making a lot of noise and praying that someone pays attention, and that we begin to make changes.
It is time to have women and minorities stand up and speak out about peak oil. To speak out about its potential effects for our communities, and to speak out about the future. Our lives and our kids lives depend on it. So write those emails. Write those books. Post those messages. Start those websites. Start marching and talking and yelling at playdate and the bar and on the radio. Make some noise. There are people out there who need to hear.
Sharon
Visit a peak oil website and look around. A lot of the articles are by petroleum geologists, and a lot of them are about arcane (to ordinary people) things like extraction rates and tar sands. This makes perfect sense - the first calls to action came from the people who were best equipped to evaluate how much fossil fuel there is in the ground (although honestly, no one really knows exactly - we can only give estimates). And petroleum geologists, no matter how wonderful and smart, tend to focus on the arcane. They, and a lot of the people who follow this (including me, oddly enough, despite my creds as a humanities scholar who is supposed to fear numbers, but doesn't) are interested in the details of how many million gallons of seawater are being pumped in the Ghawar, and whether the date of the peak is 2005 or 2010. And they write with that stuff in mind. While there are certainly increasing numbers of female petroleum geologists, it is a field that is weighted towards men, and they tend to talk to one another like overeducated white guys talk to one another - debating the details. Matt Savinar, author a good book on peak oil and a useful website wrote an article recently about this (And I'm not just mentioning this because my name is in there along with a lot of semi-famous petroleum geologists - although it is, and Matt very sweetly suggests that I'm too gentle and nurturing to toot my own horn or butt heads too hard on these subjects. Those of you who know me should try really hard not to choke to death as you laugh about the idea that I'm too gentle and nurturing for anything ;-)), in which he suggests that mostly peak oil scholars do this to look good to girls, which is why there aren't many women involved ;-).
But here's the thing - you can spend a lot of time on the math of peak oil if that's your sort of thing, but it isn't really necessary. The one figure you do need to understand is the concept of EROEI - Energy Returned Over Energy Input. All that means is that you have to get a certain amount of energy back over and above what you have to use to get the energy. That's why things like biodiesel aren't going to save us - they use more energy to make than they provide (ok, not the only reason - the other one is that if we grow fuel instead of food, we all get skinny and cranky). We all took 7th grade earth science - everyone, that is, every person in the whole world with two brain cells to rub together knows that we're going to have used up half the oil in the ground someday - we all know this is a finite resource. There isn't really any debate on that subject. The US Geological Survey says about 20 years. My husband's college environmental physics textbook (written by a guy who works for Shell, no less) says 20 years from 1997. Some people say we've already peaked. Some people say 2010.
The only other thing you really need to know is that regardless of when it happens - today or last week or 15 years from now, we're in trouble if we don't fix our culture NOW. The DOE report that came out last year suggested that we *might* be able to avoid major economic problems and fuel shortages if we work like crazy for 20 years, devoting most of our energy and resources as a nation to it. But we're not, and even the USGS numbers suggest that we're just at the 20 year mark right now.
So peak oil isn't really about the hard science. Oh, it is still fascinating to watch people like Ken Deffeyes (who probably rightly makes some fun of humanitites trained people like me who don't much care about the details) try and date peak oil to the day. But all of us know peak oil is coming - that only takes common sense. And we have the information to know that we have to fix this problem right now, today, with all the power and energy we have. And the reality is, that we might not have enough time. This is not a subject that requires a rocket scientist (even though I'm married to one - he's not as useful as you'd think ;-)) - ordinary people can look easily at the data that others, who went before us, have so helpfully compiled. And the reality is that petroleum geologists and environmental physicists and economists aren't any better than you and I at answering the big question - where do we go from here? How do we protect ourselves, our country, our communities?
So the next question is what do we do. And that's not just a question for petroleum geologists, but for ordinary people - for bus drivers and farmers, engineers and music teachers, carpenters and homemakers, long haul truckers and ministers, women and men, white people, black people, Asians, members of every ethnicity and community and culture we've got. Because every single one of us is going to feel peak oil. We don't have to sit around and argue about how long before hydrogen fuel cells are ready - we just have to know the simple things - the future for our kids and grandkids is less bright than for our own. Maybe we can make it just as good if we really get down to it today. More likely, it is too late, and we're like the weakest fairy godmothers at the baptism - we can't take the curse away, we can just soften it a little. But everything we do to soften it is a victory for ourselves, for our kids, our grandkids, our world, our culture. Everything. We need real, democratic input, but for that, we need peak oil to have the same face as the rest of us, and be spoken of in the languages of all the people, not just white guys with Ph.ds (please don't mistake me - I'm damned grateful to all of them, and am not belittling their contribution at all).
Matt Savinar suggested that we women aren't going to get girls out of being a peak oil activist, so there's less incentive for us to make ourselves famous, to get down and dirty in the peak oil fights (check it out here http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/OriginalArticles/whymen.html. ) But he's not quite correct - me, I'm just as ambitious for peak oil fame as he is. But for different reasons. My kids *lives* depend on me getting the word out, and getting the world to change. Not to mention the fact that changing diapers and doing laundry get dull now and again, and discussing this stuff does exercise the brain. I'm working on getting a little bit famous myself - Eric and I are writing a book and looking for a publisher, and I'm going to be a speaker at a national peak oil conference in Ohio this fall. I admit, it isn't the immediate gratification of getting male admirers (my husband would definitely object, though) - but the long term isn't that long when you have kids. I'd like to be famous because people think I'm smart and have a lot of good stuff to say - but I'll settle for making a lot of noise and praying that someone pays attention, and that we begin to make changes.
It is time to have women and minorities stand up and speak out about peak oil. To speak out about its potential effects for our communities, and to speak out about the future. Our lives and our kids lives depend on it. So write those emails. Write those books. Post those messages. Start those websites. Start marching and talking and yelling at playdate and the bar and on the radio. Make some noise. There are people out there who need to hear.
Sharon
Sunday, June 04, 2006
The Omnivore's Dilemma
I didn't expect to learn much from Michael Pollan's new book, _The Omnivore's Dilemma_ - since I write and talk regularly about the problems of industrial agriculture, local food production and sustainability, I thought that while I'd probably enjoy his writing (I took a great deal of pleasure in his prior books on gardening), his book would be enlightening to a rather different audience than myself. But, in fact, I did learn a great deal. Pollan's gift is to entertainingly present complexities, without being weighed down by his own excellent scholarship - it is a gift, to know that much about something and to know which bits of evidence will compell and which will merely bore. He's an enormously erudite guy, without being even slightly dull. Several people I know who are far less engaged by food issues than I say they found it compelling and readable.
I will add up front, that one of the two things that most irritated me about this book was that in the mid-1980s, Margaret Visser, a brilliant food writer, wrote a very similar book, _Much Depends on Dinner_. Neither the book nor the author were particularly obscure - the book won several awards, and Visser went on to write another one about table manners (great book, btw, and highly recommended), and the books were published by Pollan's own publisher. And yet, Pollan's book does not cite or acknowledge the book, even though many of the chapters (those on chicken and corn especially) were very similar in their approach and analysis. Someone, either Pollan in his research (which, I think, was otherwise good), or his editor missed something - because the concept of eating a meal and being outraged by the history of its context is not his. Visser's book, particularly the chapter on rice, which I read in high school, was my biggest early influence in thinking about food, so it rankles me (even though these things happen in books) that Pollan ignored her.
But returning to the main point, I did learn a great deal from Pollan - I found out, among other things, exactly what Xanthan gum is (hadn't you always wondered, even if you knew it couldn't be good?), made a connection I'd never perceived before between the widespread alcoholism in America in the 19th century and the widespread obesity of today (both due to the need to use up agricultural excesses of corn) and heard as concise and compelling an account of the complexities of farm subsidies as I've heard before. I hadn't thought, for example that anyone could give me any more reasons not to eat at McDonalds, but Pollan added a couple.
The first section of the book traces a meal at McDonalds back to its basic ingredient - corn. From the corn that feeds the chickens to the xanthan gum in the milkshake to the sweetener in the ketchup and oil in which the fries are cooked, McDonalds is mostly corn. Since Fast Food Nation and the other exposes, I don't think there's anyone who cares who doesn't know how gross fast food is, and Pollan admirably stays away from the yuckiness factor (not that there isn't reason to go there, but it has been rather overdone of late). Instead, he goes to the aesthetic one, accusing Americans who eat fast food of having become like koalas, capable of absorbing only corn, to terrible cost. In some sense, as someone who likes to eat, his description of our reliance upon (and the costs thereof) corn is more grotesque than any expose of slaughterhouses could be.
He then describes the history of two organic meals, one of them bought on a trip to whole foods, and an industrially produced organic meal, the other local, sustainable and produced to a large degree from Joel Salatin's Polyface farm, where he acted as reporter/farm hand for a week. It may be here that Pollan's book is most valuable, because it makes a distinction that your average Mom who buys at Whole foods has never made - that industrial organic food is more industrial than organic. This book has been roundly hyped on NPR and in the New York Times, and has the potential to change a lot of minds - and despite my later critiques, I will be enormously grateful if Pollan can simply convince people to look beyond the word organic and think about the costs of their food to the environment and the people who grow it. This is a potentially influential book, and Pollan does not make the mistake that many, many food writers make, of reading the word "organic" to mean sustainable.
While acknowledges that large scale, organic, industrial food is better than nothing, he doesn't cut it a lot of slack for its drenching in fossil fuels, use and sometimes misuse of migrant labor, and general unsustainability. Perhaps his best writing in the book is when he attempts to analyze whether it is possible to grow food sustainably and well on any scale at all, and when he concludes that you can't, someone like me, who is trying to grow food on a small scale, looks up ready to cheer. Because such a conclusion should lead inevitably to the next step - ie, to the idea that the only solution to the problem of industrial agriculture is that a lot more people have to grow food, both for sale and at home. But he never quite gets there, and that may be the great flaw of the book. Still, however, I think that the line that the distinctions Pollan does draw are deeply helpful, and could potentially change things a great deal.
In the final section, Pollan eats a meal that he has hunted, or gathered, or grown himself. In doing this, he spends a lot of time coming to terms with hunting and meat eating (he kills his own chicken for dinner at Polyface farm, and also purchases a steer destined for McDonalds, although its final end is as much of a mystery as such things could possibly ever be). Here is where, I expected, Pollan will figure out how we might reasonably eat, humanely and sustainably. But in fact, the last chapter could be described as "Yuppie Jewish guy goes hunting for the first time" - and not just any kind of hunting, but hunting for wild boar in the California mountains with a bunch of European chefs bent on recreating the food of their homelands for Chez Panisse. Pollan may be violating the traditions of his Jewish upbringing (Jews don't hunt, not just because they are often urbanites, but because the laws of kashruth forbid it, and the sense of it as unfitting has lingered long past the observation of the law in other respects for many Jews), but he never actually leaves his class behind. And that is one of the deeper problems of the book - the meal he seeks to make is not a deer burger and homemade potato fries, but wine-braised leg of boar with boar liver pate and cherry something or other (admittedly, it sounded terrific).
Intermittently throughout the book, Pollan attempts to deal with the problem of elitism - whether or not sustainable food is yuppie food. And there's a legitimate case to be made that there is. Pollan, of course, points out the illogic both of what we spend on food (less than anyone in the world) and the externalities that are not figured into the cost of the McDonalds meal, but he never gets down and dirty with the question of class. He quotes Joel Salatin on the subject that regulation adds more to his cost than organic production, notes the costs of meals and that Salatin's customers are mixed in economic situation, but he never fully addresses who it is who mostly eats fast food and who it is who mostly eats organic, and the all-important whys of that question.
When Pollan finally gets down to the ultimate local meal, the chapter is mostly about his angst over killing animals and meat eating (although it was fun to watch Pollan duke it out intellectually with Peter Singer), but it all gets played out over a meal with class overtones so profound and powerful that you cannot escape them. Going boar hunting with a sicilian chef doesn't seem to have much relevance to going deer hunting with a bunch of blue collar guys who live next door, nor is the meal he plans to produce something that anyone could make and eat very often. Speaking as someone who does not hunt (that kosher thing) but whose father did, and who believes that human predation is a perfectly normal thing, and preferrable, say, to having lyme disease from an excess of white-tailed deer (oh, it isn't that easy, of course, but I'll write more on vegetarianism and meat eating another time), I think Pollan ends up using the meal he decided to make as a way of choosing to avoid the logical conclusion of his writing, and the book is the poorer for it. The closing chapter is not about how we could eat, but about the impossibility of producing our own food, and, to a large degree, about the impossibility of even eating sustainably. And I think to a large degree that's because he chose a meal that is unreproducable for millions - as opposed to the simple, ordinary chicken and corn or french fries of his organic and conventional prior meals.
His conclusions, drawn from his experiences on Salatin's farm and of hunting and gathering (and presumably of eating at McDonalds) are implicitly that sustainable eating is never going to happen on any great scale. At the end of his section on Salatin's farm, he likens Salatin to Luther, creating his own new denominations of people for whom food quality and healthfulness matters, small niches of (elitist) people who care about their food in the great wilderness. But implying this suggests that most other people (I wonder who - the ones who eat at McDonalds more and are mostly of a different class?) don't actually care deeply about their food's taste, health and environmental cost.
And his final set of conclusions are deeply disappointing to me, personally. Because he creates the ground work for a fairly simple conclusion - industrial scale food production, whether organic or non, is a failure, a disaster for those who care about ethics or the environment. In a way, it doesn't matter whether what you care about is the suffering of animals (industrial slaughter) or the suffering of humans (malnutrition), the extermination of songbirds (pesticides) or rising cancer rates (pesticides) or the extermination of everyone due to global warming, the conclusion that Pollan expertly and gracefully leads us to - ie, that many more people need to take a role in their own food systems, both by buying locally, encouraging the creation of millions of new small farms instead of an expanding industrial system, and by growing some of their own (or hunting it, or foraging), is finally left off, in the interest of implying that the problem is irresolvable. This, I think, is rather a cheap ending, and an unfair one to the person who has sorted through the complexities of his arguments and analysis and comes out wanting to know what to do next.
Pollan tells us at the very end, referring to his home produced meal and the one from McDonalds, "...these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable." But the fact that the home produced meal is unsustainable and unreproducable is his choice - because a dinner of potatoes and eggs with salad, equally local, equally gathered, is sustainable and available to anyone with a bit of backyard if they want it. By implying that self-provisioning is a fantasy in this modern world, Pollan essentially suggests we leave the farming to the farmers - but there simply aren't enough farmers to have a small, local, organic farm everywhere. If we're to reduce our footprint more than anyone can by hopping over to whole foods in the SUV and picking up a box of whole wheat mac and cheese and some organic apples from China, people are going to have to take some responsibility for feeding themselves. No, they don't have to go hunt wild boar. But they might have to grow a garden, or make possible a nearby farm. They might have to encourage their children to grow up to be farmers. And they might have to imagine a world in which feeding oneself is not either a work of magic or a work of industry, but simply the ordinary job that ordinary people have been doing for thousands of years.
Sharon
I will add up front, that one of the two things that most irritated me about this book was that in the mid-1980s, Margaret Visser, a brilliant food writer, wrote a very similar book, _Much Depends on Dinner_. Neither the book nor the author were particularly obscure - the book won several awards, and Visser went on to write another one about table manners (great book, btw, and highly recommended), and the books were published by Pollan's own publisher. And yet, Pollan's book does not cite or acknowledge the book, even though many of the chapters (those on chicken and corn especially) were very similar in their approach and analysis. Someone, either Pollan in his research (which, I think, was otherwise good), or his editor missed something - because the concept of eating a meal and being outraged by the history of its context is not his. Visser's book, particularly the chapter on rice, which I read in high school, was my biggest early influence in thinking about food, so it rankles me (even though these things happen in books) that Pollan ignored her.
But returning to the main point, I did learn a great deal from Pollan - I found out, among other things, exactly what Xanthan gum is (hadn't you always wondered, even if you knew it couldn't be good?), made a connection I'd never perceived before between the widespread alcoholism in America in the 19th century and the widespread obesity of today (both due to the need to use up agricultural excesses of corn) and heard as concise and compelling an account of the complexities of farm subsidies as I've heard before. I hadn't thought, for example that anyone could give me any more reasons not to eat at McDonalds, but Pollan added a couple.
The first section of the book traces a meal at McDonalds back to its basic ingredient - corn. From the corn that feeds the chickens to the xanthan gum in the milkshake to the sweetener in the ketchup and oil in which the fries are cooked, McDonalds is mostly corn. Since Fast Food Nation and the other exposes, I don't think there's anyone who cares who doesn't know how gross fast food is, and Pollan admirably stays away from the yuckiness factor (not that there isn't reason to go there, but it has been rather overdone of late). Instead, he goes to the aesthetic one, accusing Americans who eat fast food of having become like koalas, capable of absorbing only corn, to terrible cost. In some sense, as someone who likes to eat, his description of our reliance upon (and the costs thereof) corn is more grotesque than any expose of slaughterhouses could be.
He then describes the history of two organic meals, one of them bought on a trip to whole foods, and an industrially produced organic meal, the other local, sustainable and produced to a large degree from Joel Salatin's Polyface farm, where he acted as reporter/farm hand for a week. It may be here that Pollan's book is most valuable, because it makes a distinction that your average Mom who buys at Whole foods has never made - that industrial organic food is more industrial than organic. This book has been roundly hyped on NPR and in the New York Times, and has the potential to change a lot of minds - and despite my later critiques, I will be enormously grateful if Pollan can simply convince people to look beyond the word organic and think about the costs of their food to the environment and the people who grow it. This is a potentially influential book, and Pollan does not make the mistake that many, many food writers make, of reading the word "organic" to mean sustainable.
While acknowledges that large scale, organic, industrial food is better than nothing, he doesn't cut it a lot of slack for its drenching in fossil fuels, use and sometimes misuse of migrant labor, and general unsustainability. Perhaps his best writing in the book is when he attempts to analyze whether it is possible to grow food sustainably and well on any scale at all, and when he concludes that you can't, someone like me, who is trying to grow food on a small scale, looks up ready to cheer. Because such a conclusion should lead inevitably to the next step - ie, to the idea that the only solution to the problem of industrial agriculture is that a lot more people have to grow food, both for sale and at home. But he never quite gets there, and that may be the great flaw of the book. Still, however, I think that the line that the distinctions Pollan does draw are deeply helpful, and could potentially change things a great deal.
In the final section, Pollan eats a meal that he has hunted, or gathered, or grown himself. In doing this, he spends a lot of time coming to terms with hunting and meat eating (he kills his own chicken for dinner at Polyface farm, and also purchases a steer destined for McDonalds, although its final end is as much of a mystery as such things could possibly ever be). Here is where, I expected, Pollan will figure out how we might reasonably eat, humanely and sustainably. But in fact, the last chapter could be described as "Yuppie Jewish guy goes hunting for the first time" - and not just any kind of hunting, but hunting for wild boar in the California mountains with a bunch of European chefs bent on recreating the food of their homelands for Chez Panisse. Pollan may be violating the traditions of his Jewish upbringing (Jews don't hunt, not just because they are often urbanites, but because the laws of kashruth forbid it, and the sense of it as unfitting has lingered long past the observation of the law in other respects for many Jews), but he never actually leaves his class behind. And that is one of the deeper problems of the book - the meal he seeks to make is not a deer burger and homemade potato fries, but wine-braised leg of boar with boar liver pate and cherry something or other (admittedly, it sounded terrific).
Intermittently throughout the book, Pollan attempts to deal with the problem of elitism - whether or not sustainable food is yuppie food. And there's a legitimate case to be made that there is. Pollan, of course, points out the illogic both of what we spend on food (less than anyone in the world) and the externalities that are not figured into the cost of the McDonalds meal, but he never gets down and dirty with the question of class. He quotes Joel Salatin on the subject that regulation adds more to his cost than organic production, notes the costs of meals and that Salatin's customers are mixed in economic situation, but he never fully addresses who it is who mostly eats fast food and who it is who mostly eats organic, and the all-important whys of that question.
When Pollan finally gets down to the ultimate local meal, the chapter is mostly about his angst over killing animals and meat eating (although it was fun to watch Pollan duke it out intellectually with Peter Singer), but it all gets played out over a meal with class overtones so profound and powerful that you cannot escape them. Going boar hunting with a sicilian chef doesn't seem to have much relevance to going deer hunting with a bunch of blue collar guys who live next door, nor is the meal he plans to produce something that anyone could make and eat very often. Speaking as someone who does not hunt (that kosher thing) but whose father did, and who believes that human predation is a perfectly normal thing, and preferrable, say, to having lyme disease from an excess of white-tailed deer (oh, it isn't that easy, of course, but I'll write more on vegetarianism and meat eating another time), I think Pollan ends up using the meal he decided to make as a way of choosing to avoid the logical conclusion of his writing, and the book is the poorer for it. The closing chapter is not about how we could eat, but about the impossibility of producing our own food, and, to a large degree, about the impossibility of even eating sustainably. And I think to a large degree that's because he chose a meal that is unreproducable for millions - as opposed to the simple, ordinary chicken and corn or french fries of his organic and conventional prior meals.
His conclusions, drawn from his experiences on Salatin's farm and of hunting and gathering (and presumably of eating at McDonalds) are implicitly that sustainable eating is never going to happen on any great scale. At the end of his section on Salatin's farm, he likens Salatin to Luther, creating his own new denominations of people for whom food quality and healthfulness matters, small niches of (elitist) people who care about their food in the great wilderness. But implying this suggests that most other people (I wonder who - the ones who eat at McDonalds more and are mostly of a different class?) don't actually care deeply about their food's taste, health and environmental cost.
And his final set of conclusions are deeply disappointing to me, personally. Because he creates the ground work for a fairly simple conclusion - industrial scale food production, whether organic or non, is a failure, a disaster for those who care about ethics or the environment. In a way, it doesn't matter whether what you care about is the suffering of animals (industrial slaughter) or the suffering of humans (malnutrition), the extermination of songbirds (pesticides) or rising cancer rates (pesticides) or the extermination of everyone due to global warming, the conclusion that Pollan expertly and gracefully leads us to - ie, that many more people need to take a role in their own food systems, both by buying locally, encouraging the creation of millions of new small farms instead of an expanding industrial system, and by growing some of their own (or hunting it, or foraging), is finally left off, in the interest of implying that the problem is irresolvable. This, I think, is rather a cheap ending, and an unfair one to the person who has sorted through the complexities of his arguments and analysis and comes out wanting to know what to do next.
Pollan tells us at the very end, referring to his home produced meal and the one from McDonalds, "...these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable." But the fact that the home produced meal is unsustainable and unreproducable is his choice - because a dinner of potatoes and eggs with salad, equally local, equally gathered, is sustainable and available to anyone with a bit of backyard if they want it. By implying that self-provisioning is a fantasy in this modern world, Pollan essentially suggests we leave the farming to the farmers - but there simply aren't enough farmers to have a small, local, organic farm everywhere. If we're to reduce our footprint more than anyone can by hopping over to whole foods in the SUV and picking up a box of whole wheat mac and cheese and some organic apples from China, people are going to have to take some responsibility for feeding themselves. No, they don't have to go hunt wild boar. But they might have to grow a garden, or make possible a nearby farm. They might have to encourage their children to grow up to be farmers. And they might have to imagine a world in which feeding oneself is not either a work of magic or a work of industry, but simply the ordinary job that ordinary people have been doing for thousands of years.
Sharon
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Architecture at Issue
I just finished working my way through the NYTimes Magazine Architecture issue, and the final reward was at the back, in personal essay by a small Indian architect on his reaction to the biggest, fanciest bit of architecture that India has put up to date. He points out the ways that "high tech" architecture avoids simple solutions for expensive, environmentally unfriendly ones, and the ways in which they avoid involving or engaging human beings.
Now I should say that for someone who spent the formative years of her adulthood training in the study of high culture (literature), I'm a disturbingly low culture sort of person. For all that I'm a Shakespearean by training, I often fail to be engaged by the debates and battles of contemporary high culture, not excluding literature. Quite often, I frankly couldn't give a shit. This may well be a personal failing. But I also suspect that great art of every kind comes out of cultures less priveleged and personally comfortable than our own. I suspect our wealth has come to destroy some of our capacity to make art. Or rather, I fear it.
I've seen a lot of "high culture" buildings from this half of the 20th century (although I've never lived in one - Eric lived in one of the infamous Groepius dorms at Harvard, but I merely lived in a succession of nearly equally hideous but much less famous ugly dorms at Brandeis), and I admit, I'm rarely engaged by them. They often fall in the category of "Well yes, but so?" which is my own personal, awkward construction. I invented it to apply to literary studies, in which scholars or novelists so often laboriously struggle to reach a conclusion that offers you nowhere else to go and illuminates nothing else (to be fair, I've written quite a few papers of this sort, which is why I'm so expert on them ;-). The nuances of most architecture can be appreciated in about 10 minutes - and when you are done appreciating (look, the building looks like a bird's nest, and the pipes are on the outside - wow!) what else is there to do - except, of course, if you live next to it or work in it, when its central deficiencies (office buildings suck no matter how you pretty them up) provide amusing commentary for your guests. There are buildings one goes back to again and again and sees something new in - but most of them are old, and none of them are office buildings.
The Times magazine is, of course, the mouth piece of a kind of middle of the road, capitalist liberalism, and so it sort of gets the conflict between the idea that buildings can be radical and the recognition that most of the so called radical buildings in the world are office buildings, where the most reactionary forms of capitalism are practiced. Or they are museums, monuments to establishment high culture and nostalgia. So they interview an architect who critiques the American habit of lighting buildings at night, never noticing any incongruity in his habit of building big wonking buildings so that people can commute to work in them from Pennsylvania, or they write an article about the problems of New Urbanist visions of Biloxi, and the tragedy of trying to bring overpriced yuppie housing to the poor. But the basic premise of contemporary architecture, which is about building big structures that are environmentally unsustainable, mostly ugly, and kind of pointless, is never really reconsidered, except by this lone person piece from India. And it is presented by the magazine as resolutely localized, about in part the loss of a local, indigenous culture, rather than a problem of architecture everywhere, which for the most part is about erasing nature, and people.
It isn't just architecture that has failed its form and function mission - literature has as well, and so has art in many cases. But writing a novel is comparatively cheap, and so is buying one. We all have the chance to control the environmental impact of our fiction - don't waste trees on it by buying it if it sucks. Art may need a bit of climate control to prevent deterioration, but compared to a building, it is perfectly green, no matter how much turpentine was used. Buildings are big, expensive, bits of something that is supposed to be art. But big and expensive and resource consumptive and good for business, with lots of lights and desks and climate control can never, ever, truly be radical. If it is art, it is radical, and it challenges basic assumptions.
That's not to say that architecture can't be radical. But stadiums and museums and office space can't truly be radical. Your house can be. Make a house that uses less, and is beautiful in a simple, clean way, that contains things made by you or friends, and that meets your needs but not every want, and has meaning, and you'll make better art than most practicing architects.
Sharon
Now I should say that for someone who spent the formative years of her adulthood training in the study of high culture (literature), I'm a disturbingly low culture sort of person. For all that I'm a Shakespearean by training, I often fail to be engaged by the debates and battles of contemporary high culture, not excluding literature. Quite often, I frankly couldn't give a shit. This may well be a personal failing. But I also suspect that great art of every kind comes out of cultures less priveleged and personally comfortable than our own. I suspect our wealth has come to destroy some of our capacity to make art. Or rather, I fear it.
I've seen a lot of "high culture" buildings from this half of the 20th century (although I've never lived in one - Eric lived in one of the infamous Groepius dorms at Harvard, but I merely lived in a succession of nearly equally hideous but much less famous ugly dorms at Brandeis), and I admit, I'm rarely engaged by them. They often fall in the category of "Well yes, but so?" which is my own personal, awkward construction. I invented it to apply to literary studies, in which scholars or novelists so often laboriously struggle to reach a conclusion that offers you nowhere else to go and illuminates nothing else (to be fair, I've written quite a few papers of this sort, which is why I'm so expert on them ;-). The nuances of most architecture can be appreciated in about 10 minutes - and when you are done appreciating (look, the building looks like a bird's nest, and the pipes are on the outside - wow!) what else is there to do - except, of course, if you live next to it or work in it, when its central deficiencies (office buildings suck no matter how you pretty them up) provide amusing commentary for your guests. There are buildings one goes back to again and again and sees something new in - but most of them are old, and none of them are office buildings.
The Times magazine is, of course, the mouth piece of a kind of middle of the road, capitalist liberalism, and so it sort of gets the conflict between the idea that buildings can be radical and the recognition that most of the so called radical buildings in the world are office buildings, where the most reactionary forms of capitalism are practiced. Or they are museums, monuments to establishment high culture and nostalgia. So they interview an architect who critiques the American habit of lighting buildings at night, never noticing any incongruity in his habit of building big wonking buildings so that people can commute to work in them from Pennsylvania, or they write an article about the problems of New Urbanist visions of Biloxi, and the tragedy of trying to bring overpriced yuppie housing to the poor. But the basic premise of contemporary architecture, which is about building big structures that are environmentally unsustainable, mostly ugly, and kind of pointless, is never really reconsidered, except by this lone person piece from India. And it is presented by the magazine as resolutely localized, about in part the loss of a local, indigenous culture, rather than a problem of architecture everywhere, which for the most part is about erasing nature, and people.
It isn't just architecture that has failed its form and function mission - literature has as well, and so has art in many cases. But writing a novel is comparatively cheap, and so is buying one. We all have the chance to control the environmental impact of our fiction - don't waste trees on it by buying it if it sucks. Art may need a bit of climate control to prevent deterioration, but compared to a building, it is perfectly green, no matter how much turpentine was used. Buildings are big, expensive, bits of something that is supposed to be art. But big and expensive and resource consumptive and good for business, with lots of lights and desks and climate control can never, ever, truly be radical. If it is art, it is radical, and it challenges basic assumptions.
That's not to say that architecture can't be radical. But stadiums and museums and office space can't truly be radical. Your house can be. Make a house that uses less, and is beautiful in a simple, clean way, that contains things made by you or friends, and that meets your needs but not every want, and has meaning, and you'll make better art than most practicing architects.
Sharon
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Staple foods and the future - Food and Peak Oil Part II
Why, you ask, should I believe that anything about food is going to change in the future? After all, people are always predicting the end of the world, and, you point out, we've never gone hungry yet. In fact, many of us are carrying a few too many meals around on our waistlines - me definitely included. So why worry about food?
We burn 100 calories of fossil fuels, mostly oil and natural gas, for every calorie of food we eat. We burn oil and gas in every stage of food production - natural gas creates fertilizers, pesticides come from both oil and gas, soil is tilled and food is picked with oil based machinery, and with the labor of people who use trucks and cars to travel and follow the harvest. The food is packaged in plastic (oil), and then loaded on trucks, where it may be refridgerated or dried. It is then transported to your supermarket, which is heated, lighted, and run on oil. All to get that four calorie, totally out of season strawberry into your mouth.
There is nothing sustainable about this system - most vegetables are mainly made from water, and we're using a whole lot of energy to take water from places (like California) that don't have nearly enough, and ship it to places that already have plenty. And every bite funds OPEC and its dissidents. And we can't do it forever - as oil prices rise dramatically, food prices will rise. At the moment, Americans pay less for their food as a percentage of their income than anyone else in the world - but that's about to change. In fact it is changing - we've seen dramatic price rises in things like butter, produce, etc... in the last year, but not enough to make most middle class people stop buying them. That too will change.
It is rather more efficient to transport grains, which are shipped dry, often by rail, than it is to truck produce. So grains and beans may continue to be reasonably priced, particularly if grown locally. But you can expect that as energy prices rise and the economy falters, food prices will rise - a considerable problem when you've just lost your job, or your mortgage payment is about to jump with rising interest rates. But we must change our eating habits - we must start thinking about how to get the most nutritional value for the best price, how to produce food locally and at home, and rethink how we eat, before a crisis makes it happen in a much less positive way.
In one of last year's issues of "Permaculture Activist" there was an essay on common permaculture errors, one of which points out that permaculture has not fully explored the problem of how to adapt oureating habits in sustainable, practical ways. They've talked a lot about how to grow food, but less about how to change over from pringles to homegrown. I think that's absolutely true, and true of peak oil as well - one of the things wetend to elide, when talking about food and gardens, is how to actually change our eating habits, and how to adapt to the diet that is coming for us. Because it isn't a small issue - people who have other options won't eat things they don't like, no matter how deficient nutritionally their diet becomes, and adapting to a new diet in a time of crisis is not only difficult, it can be damaging, even fatal to the ill, elderly and children. If we're going to prepare for thepeak, we also have to prepare our bodies and our minds to eating sustainably.
Why do you have to change your diet now? Think back to the last time something really awful happened to you - someone close to you died, you were depressed, something horrible hit you. Think about what you ate. Not much, maybe. Or maybe just comfort foods. You certainly didn't try new recipes - you didn't have the emotional energy, nor would you even have bothered to eat if you had to try a lot of new foods. Now think about the last family celebration you had. What did you eat? Traditional foods of your community, your family, your culture. How much pleasure and satsifaction did you derive from eating those things? How much is your sense of family, community, celebration, joy, love tied up in what you eat? For many of us, food is a significant repository of our memories. Do you want to take those things away from your family at exactly the time they struggle the most?
That's why we all have to make the dietary changeover (if we haven't already) now - to establish new foods of our family and culture, or adapt the old ones to the new requirements of reasonable energy inputs, to ensure that our elderly, our children, the ill will not suffer or even die from the shock of dietary change, and to make sure we are all able to keep strong and healthy when we need it most. The changes involved strike me as taking place in two ways - the first, is eating from our food storage (and building a food storage). The second, eating locally produced, seasonal, *available* food all year round. They are seperate but inter-related issues. In a time of crisis, we may well have a year or two or three that we cannot eat fresh, local foods, and we need to find ways to make nutritious, balanced, tasty, enjoyable meals from our food storage, probably from limited ingredients. The second one doesn't seem difficult, but is - if you've ever produced a lot of food from your garden and animals, you'll realize how disconnected from seasonality our culture is - how many food combinations simply don't go together in nature (carrots and peas, the ubiquitous frozen duo, for example), or will beimpossible to replicate (I love sushi, but it isn't going to be a major feature of my diet here in upstate NY.) Eating seasonally usually involves eating a *lot* of something, for a short while, and then either not eating it again for a year, or eating it in a different preserved form - that is, tomatoes every day during the warm season, and then canned or dried tomatoes for the winter and spring. So for every major crop we produce, we need both ways to take the greatest advantage of it during its fresh season, and, if possible, a tasty way to preserve it and its nutritional value.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean you need to preserve 100 different crops - most cultures that rely on their own produce and meat have staple foodstuffs, a staple starch and a staple protein that are the mainstay of their diet and then add other ingredients as flavorings. Whether rice and fish, corn and beans, pork and corn, potatoes and milk, etc..., every peasant culture is based around easily grown starches and protein foods. In the first world, we've moved away from this habit - both in our culture's tendency to over emphasize the protein above the staple starch and in our endless demand for variety. But eating this way doesn't have to be unpleasant - while appetite fatigue is a real phenomenon, most people *like* and enjoy their staple foods, and are aware of subtleties and flavors within them that can't be perceivedby outsiders. So one of the first steps is to figure out what you are realistically going to eat if you have to live on what is grown in your climate, by you or some other local farmer. If you live in upstate NY, like me, as much as you may like rice (sadly, my staple starch of preference;-(), it isn't going to be your primary grain. Potatoes, corn, oats or wheat are much more likely. Look around at the native peoples in your area - what did they eat? Check out the farmers in your area -while small farmers may grow sweet potatoes, for example, if no one grows them on a large scale, they will probably not be available unless you grow your own.
Whatever you do, think now about food, and start finding ways of making basic foods delicious and part of your daily diet.
Sharon
We burn 100 calories of fossil fuels, mostly oil and natural gas, for every calorie of food we eat. We burn oil and gas in every stage of food production - natural gas creates fertilizers, pesticides come from both oil and gas, soil is tilled and food is picked with oil based machinery, and with the labor of people who use trucks and cars to travel and follow the harvest. The food is packaged in plastic (oil), and then loaded on trucks, where it may be refridgerated or dried. It is then transported to your supermarket, which is heated, lighted, and run on oil. All to get that four calorie, totally out of season strawberry into your mouth.
There is nothing sustainable about this system - most vegetables are mainly made from water, and we're using a whole lot of energy to take water from places (like California) that don't have nearly enough, and ship it to places that already have plenty. And every bite funds OPEC and its dissidents. And we can't do it forever - as oil prices rise dramatically, food prices will rise. At the moment, Americans pay less for their food as a percentage of their income than anyone else in the world - but that's about to change. In fact it is changing - we've seen dramatic price rises in things like butter, produce, etc... in the last year, but not enough to make most middle class people stop buying them. That too will change.
It is rather more efficient to transport grains, which are shipped dry, often by rail, than it is to truck produce. So grains and beans may continue to be reasonably priced, particularly if grown locally. But you can expect that as energy prices rise and the economy falters, food prices will rise - a considerable problem when you've just lost your job, or your mortgage payment is about to jump with rising interest rates. But we must change our eating habits - we must start thinking about how to get the most nutritional value for the best price, how to produce food locally and at home, and rethink how we eat, before a crisis makes it happen in a much less positive way.
In one of last year's issues of "Permaculture Activist" there was an essay on common permaculture errors, one of which points out that permaculture has not fully explored the problem of how to adapt oureating habits in sustainable, practical ways. They've talked a lot about how to grow food, but less about how to change over from pringles to homegrown. I think that's absolutely true, and true of peak oil as well - one of the things wetend to elide, when talking about food and gardens, is how to actually change our eating habits, and how to adapt to the diet that is coming for us. Because it isn't a small issue - people who have other options won't eat things they don't like, no matter how deficient nutritionally their diet becomes, and adapting to a new diet in a time of crisis is not only difficult, it can be damaging, even fatal to the ill, elderly and children. If we're going to prepare for thepeak, we also have to prepare our bodies and our minds to eating sustainably.
Why do you have to change your diet now? Think back to the last time something really awful happened to you - someone close to you died, you were depressed, something horrible hit you. Think about what you ate. Not much, maybe. Or maybe just comfort foods. You certainly didn't try new recipes - you didn't have the emotional energy, nor would you even have bothered to eat if you had to try a lot of new foods. Now think about the last family celebration you had. What did you eat? Traditional foods of your community, your family, your culture. How much pleasure and satsifaction did you derive from eating those things? How much is your sense of family, community, celebration, joy, love tied up in what you eat? For many of us, food is a significant repository of our memories. Do you want to take those things away from your family at exactly the time they struggle the most?
That's why we all have to make the dietary changeover (if we haven't already) now - to establish new foods of our family and culture, or adapt the old ones to the new requirements of reasonable energy inputs, to ensure that our elderly, our children, the ill will not suffer or even die from the shock of dietary change, and to make sure we are all able to keep strong and healthy when we need it most. The changes involved strike me as taking place in two ways - the first, is eating from our food storage (and building a food storage). The second, eating locally produced, seasonal, *available* food all year round. They are seperate but inter-related issues. In a time of crisis, we may well have a year or two or three that we cannot eat fresh, local foods, and we need to find ways to make nutritious, balanced, tasty, enjoyable meals from our food storage, probably from limited ingredients. The second one doesn't seem difficult, but is - if you've ever produced a lot of food from your garden and animals, you'll realize how disconnected from seasonality our culture is - how many food combinations simply don't go together in nature (carrots and peas, the ubiquitous frozen duo, for example), or will beimpossible to replicate (I love sushi, but it isn't going to be a major feature of my diet here in upstate NY.) Eating seasonally usually involves eating a *lot* of something, for a short while, and then either not eating it again for a year, or eating it in a different preserved form - that is, tomatoes every day during the warm season, and then canned or dried tomatoes for the winter and spring. So for every major crop we produce, we need both ways to take the greatest advantage of it during its fresh season, and, if possible, a tasty way to preserve it and its nutritional value.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean you need to preserve 100 different crops - most cultures that rely on their own produce and meat have staple foodstuffs, a staple starch and a staple protein that are the mainstay of their diet and then add other ingredients as flavorings. Whether rice and fish, corn and beans, pork and corn, potatoes and milk, etc..., every peasant culture is based around easily grown starches and protein foods. In the first world, we've moved away from this habit - both in our culture's tendency to over emphasize the protein above the staple starch and in our endless demand for variety. But eating this way doesn't have to be unpleasant - while appetite fatigue is a real phenomenon, most people *like* and enjoy their staple foods, and are aware of subtleties and flavors within them that can't be perceivedby outsiders. So one of the first steps is to figure out what you are realistically going to eat if you have to live on what is grown in your climate, by you or some other local farmer. If you live in upstate NY, like me, as much as you may like rice (sadly, my staple starch of preference;-(), it isn't going to be your primary grain. Potatoes, corn, oats or wheat are much more likely. Look around at the native peoples in your area - what did they eat? Check out the farmers in your area -while small farmers may grow sweet potatoes, for example, if no one grows them on a large scale, they will probably not be available unless you grow your own.
Whatever you do, think now about food, and start finding ways of making basic foods delicious and part of your daily diet.
Sharon
Food After the Peak: Part 1: Domesticity and Common Sense
About a year ago I posted a series of articles on the ROE2 newsgroup about how to eat in a peak oil future where we are all poorer, food surpluses are smaller, and the energy we rely on for things like electric stoves, refridgeration, etc... is out of our means. I'm reprinting it in slightly modified form here, in case anyone is interested. The pieces are not in order - this was originally part 3.
If you were born after the 1940s, you were probably raised, to one degree or another, to believe that domestic work, including foodproduction is monotonous, brain numbing, unskilled, and pointless. In many cases we believe it is ideally performed, assuming you make enough money, by either a non-white, non-english speaking private employeee, or a non-white employee of a restaurant. At best, home food production issomething to fight about, a tedious conflict at the heart of your family life where you and your spouse debate yet again who will microwave the macaroni and cheese, and clean up afterwards. None of it is worthy of your intellect, of course.
If you are a 40 something, middle class liberal in your average American city, you probably would deny you think the above, but would point out that yourhigh powered job/busy schedule means that you can't help picking up fast food or pizza or eating out three nights a week, putting your kids in daycare, and hiring a lawn service and house cleaners. Of course it is more important, you argue, that you are working and paying all those people (whose skin color and/or gender is pure coincidence), and, of course, voting for the social changes that will inspire the eventual improvement of their situations. If you are an American conservative of the same approximate demographic, you probably want to know what my point is ;-) ;-).
Some facts about Americans and food.1. The wealthiest 20 % eat out for more than 60% of their meals. The poorest 20% eat out for the exact same percentage of their meals. The difference exists on only three levels - 1. how likely the restaurant is to be a fast food chain and how nutritious the meal is; 2. how many cookbooks that they never cook from are on the shelves of the kitchen they do not enter; and 3.How likely they are to say they "love" to cook, without ever actually doing it (in America, people who say they "hate" to cook actually eatin slightly more often than people who "love" it.)
2. One out of every 3 Americans eat in a fast food restaurant on any given day. More than half of all Americans eat 6 or more meals per week at a fast food restaurant. Think about that.
3. Of meals eaten at home, 65% involve the use of pre-processedor "prepared" ingredients, and 75% involve a microwave. 70% ofAmericans have no idea how to make stuffing not from a mix, 61%cannot make mashed potatoes from actual potatoes, rather than a box,and 90% buy boneless chicken breasts because they can't figure outhow to debone them.
4. A vast majority of American meals involved at least two of the following 6 ingredients - white bread, chicken breasts, ground beef, potatoes (more than 75% of which come in the form of either boxed potatoes, chips or frozen fries/tater tots), milk, ketchup.
I suspect a lot of people on this list feel rather superior at themoment. *I* bake my own bread, we say. I don't eat out that often. I never, ever go to McDonalds (just Taco Bell, and that only once ina while, right before a meeting, you know.) Ok, now imagine yourselves required to do the simple job of makingyour own food for a month. Piece of cake? Here's the deal. You haveto produce three meals a day, plus beverages and snacks entirely from whole foods in your storage, garden or barn, or easily obtained from local producers within 25 miles of your home. You must do so using sustainable methods, no microwave or electric stove. You cannot goto the store - you must use what you have, and ensure that it willlast. You have no refrigeration, so each meal must be precisely the right size to ensure no waste. You need to pay special attention tothe dietary needs and palates of the sick, elderly, children, pregnant and nursing mothers. You need to be sure that everyone gets enough to fuel increased physical labor (ie, walking places instead of driving, growing food in a garden) and a balanced and varied enough diet to make sure they remain healthy. It also must be palatable enough to ensure lack of waste and adequate consumption.
Meanwhile, you have to stretch limited food supplies, and limited supplies of fats, sugars, eggs, dairy and meats to ensure you will not go hungry later, if food supplies tighten. Of course, part of the job is the logistics and planning - did you start the sprouts on Friday, so that they would be ready for today's salad? Is the next batch of yogurt ready as the first one runs out? How early did you need to get up to get the bread baked before lunch? Did you plant a next crop of lettuce? How long can you keep those eggs warm? Did you grind enough flour for the pancakes, or do you have to go back and do it again? Are you sure that you've left enough baking soda for birthday cakes? Meanwhile, besides the ordinary work of food production, you have to inventory, maintain, track, manage, preserve, protect and prevent rot on the food you have in storage and coming in. That means that besides three meals a day, you need to keep track of how much sugar is left, to make applesauce when the last apples start to soften, dry and can those strawberries that come flooding in when the season starts, walk the six miles to the food market that is likely to have live chickens this week, forage for wild greens, make six gallons of sauerkraut, figure out away to make up for the absence of vanilla, white flour and eggs in your child's birthday cake, plan for extra guests and hospitality, as well as festival meals and special occasions.
Unskilled labor indeed. Try it for a month. Seriously, it will not only give you new appreciation for the value and creativity of domestic labor (and for the work done by human beings through most of history and in most poor cultures today), but it will also point up the fact that only part of the project is knowing good recipes for whole wheat. The rest is figuring out how to make good, interesting, balanced, varied food out of what you have 3 meals a day, 365 days a year, with your own hands,sustainable methods and local resources. If you don't know how to do it going into peak oil, you can expect your transition to be more painful, hungrier and harder all around.
Cheers,
Sharon (who hasn't managed to do it either)
If you were born after the 1940s, you were probably raised, to one degree or another, to believe that domestic work, including foodproduction is monotonous, brain numbing, unskilled, and pointless. In many cases we believe it is ideally performed, assuming you make enough money, by either a non-white, non-english speaking private employeee, or a non-white employee of a restaurant. At best, home food production issomething to fight about, a tedious conflict at the heart of your family life where you and your spouse debate yet again who will microwave the macaroni and cheese, and clean up afterwards. None of it is worthy of your intellect, of course.
If you are a 40 something, middle class liberal in your average American city, you probably would deny you think the above, but would point out that yourhigh powered job/busy schedule means that you can't help picking up fast food or pizza or eating out three nights a week, putting your kids in daycare, and hiring a lawn service and house cleaners. Of course it is more important, you argue, that you are working and paying all those people (whose skin color and/or gender is pure coincidence), and, of course, voting for the social changes that will inspire the eventual improvement of their situations. If you are an American conservative of the same approximate demographic, you probably want to know what my point is ;-) ;-).
Some facts about Americans and food.1. The wealthiest 20 % eat out for more than 60% of their meals. The poorest 20% eat out for the exact same percentage of their meals. The difference exists on only three levels - 1. how likely the restaurant is to be a fast food chain and how nutritious the meal is; 2. how many cookbooks that they never cook from are on the shelves of the kitchen they do not enter; and 3.How likely they are to say they "love" to cook, without ever actually doing it (in America, people who say they "hate" to cook actually eatin slightly more often than people who "love" it.)
2. One out of every 3 Americans eat in a fast food restaurant on any given day. More than half of all Americans eat 6 or more meals per week at a fast food restaurant. Think about that.
3. Of meals eaten at home, 65% involve the use of pre-processedor "prepared" ingredients, and 75% involve a microwave. 70% ofAmericans have no idea how to make stuffing not from a mix, 61%cannot make mashed potatoes from actual potatoes, rather than a box,and 90% buy boneless chicken breasts because they can't figure outhow to debone them.
4. A vast majority of American meals involved at least two of the following 6 ingredients - white bread, chicken breasts, ground beef, potatoes (more than 75% of which come in the form of either boxed potatoes, chips or frozen fries/tater tots), milk, ketchup.
I suspect a lot of people on this list feel rather superior at themoment. *I* bake my own bread, we say. I don't eat out that often. I never, ever go to McDonalds (just Taco Bell, and that only once ina while, right before a meeting, you know.) Ok, now imagine yourselves required to do the simple job of makingyour own food for a month. Piece of cake? Here's the deal. You haveto produce three meals a day, plus beverages and snacks entirely from whole foods in your storage, garden or barn, or easily obtained from local producers within 25 miles of your home. You must do so using sustainable methods, no microwave or electric stove. You cannot goto the store - you must use what you have, and ensure that it willlast. You have no refrigeration, so each meal must be precisely the right size to ensure no waste. You need to pay special attention tothe dietary needs and palates of the sick, elderly, children, pregnant and nursing mothers. You need to be sure that everyone gets enough to fuel increased physical labor (ie, walking places instead of driving, growing food in a garden) and a balanced and varied enough diet to make sure they remain healthy. It also must be palatable enough to ensure lack of waste and adequate consumption.
Meanwhile, you have to stretch limited food supplies, and limited supplies of fats, sugars, eggs, dairy and meats to ensure you will not go hungry later, if food supplies tighten. Of course, part of the job is the logistics and planning - did you start the sprouts on Friday, so that they would be ready for today's salad? Is the next batch of yogurt ready as the first one runs out? How early did you need to get up to get the bread baked before lunch? Did you plant a next crop of lettuce? How long can you keep those eggs warm? Did you grind enough flour for the pancakes, or do you have to go back and do it again? Are you sure that you've left enough baking soda for birthday cakes? Meanwhile, besides the ordinary work of food production, you have to inventory, maintain, track, manage, preserve, protect and prevent rot on the food you have in storage and coming in. That means that besides three meals a day, you need to keep track of how much sugar is left, to make applesauce when the last apples start to soften, dry and can those strawberries that come flooding in when the season starts, walk the six miles to the food market that is likely to have live chickens this week, forage for wild greens, make six gallons of sauerkraut, figure out away to make up for the absence of vanilla, white flour and eggs in your child's birthday cake, plan for extra guests and hospitality, as well as festival meals and special occasions.
Unskilled labor indeed. Try it for a month. Seriously, it will not only give you new appreciation for the value and creativity of domestic labor (and for the work done by human beings through most of history and in most poor cultures today), but it will also point up the fact that only part of the project is knowing good recipes for whole wheat. The rest is figuring out how to make good, interesting, balanced, varied food out of what you have 3 meals a day, 365 days a year, with your own hands,sustainable methods and local resources. If you don't know how to do it going into peak oil, you can expect your transition to be more painful, hungrier and harder all around.
Cheers,
Sharon (who hasn't managed to do it either)
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