Early Spring, Hard Freeze, Fruit??

We don’t know yet how this week's freeze will affect the fruit harvest this year. The color of trees in bloom is still intact, but you know there will be consequences when the temperature has dropped into the low 20’s. Even if climate change gives us warmth in the early spring, when the weather turns those arctic winds still blow straight down on us, with too little time and distance to warm them up along the way.

A couple years ago I was selecting fruit trees for our orchard, and I ran across a paper on frost sensitivity. What I remember is that the risk of losing the harvest depends on how far along the flowers are, but that different varieties within a species may be more or less sensitive to freezing even with flowers at the same stage of development.  The most sensitive time occurs as the buds are opening, before they’ve been pollinated. If the stigma or the style freezes, there’s no way for pollen to unite with egg, and no fruit develops. I inferred from this that the ovary is more hardy (or better protected) than the rest of the pistil, so if the time for fertilization has come and gone, the harvest is more likely to come through.

The plums have been in full bloom, and humming with bees, for the past week. Any fertilization that was going to happen with those is already done. But the pears and apricots were just starting to open, and the cherry buds are swelling but still closed. The juneberries in the woods are in bloom, but the one in our front yard is at the same stage as the cherries. Apples are more cautious, being longer acquainted with our fickle northern weather. So if my memory is correct, it seems the pears and apricots are most at risk.

My roommate Rhonda grew up in a household where food storage was a way of life. When they had a boom year for peaches a few years ago, her mom processed non-stop for the entire season, putting away as much fruit as humanly possible. She didn’t ask, “How much is a year’s supply?” but rather, “How much time can I squeeze out of my day?”

Rhonda said at the time she thought her mom was nuts, putting away so much more than they could possibly eat before the next year's harvest. But the crop has failed three years in a row since then, and her mom still has peaches to eat.

Me, I just finished the last of the dried pears a couple days ago. I may try that strategy some day, but if I lose this year’s harvest, I’ll be doing without next winter.

Life changes in certain predictable ways when you switch back to a local/regional food supply, and this is one of them. A local diet reveals your dependence on the weather, and the climate, and the seasons, and the planet itself, in a much more intimate way. Weather rarely wipes out every region where a particular food is grown, all in the same year, but it can easily wipe out your region's harvest. For the people at the top of the global food chain – Americans, that is, with our ability to out-bid the rest of the world in the global marketplace – food shortages appear (for now) to be a thing of the past. But for people who are lower down the chain, and people who eat locally, and people who depend on the harvest for their income, a regional crop failure can be a disaster. This is especially true if the region is specialized to grow a single crop for a global marketplace, instead of a variety of different foods for local or regional consumption. 

Diversity is crucial, if you want your region (or even your home garden) to produce reliably. One of the things I've discovered in my garden is that, every year, at least one crop fails, and at least one crop does really well. So if I grow many different crops, the character of my diet may change from year to year, but I always have enough. So far, that's been my response to the unpredictability of the weather.

Weeds and MREs

It's weed-eating season. I'm starting to clear the garden beds, and all those tender bits of green are just too tempting to resist. I was amused last night to notice that Sophia had cleaned her plate of the cleavers with garlic and scallions, and had barely touched the kale (one of our winter mainstays). I guess she's getting tired of the monotony, too. This afternoon I had dandelion buds with lemon butter, and we've got a bowl of mustard greens and garlic mustard greens waiting in the fridge.

My shiitake log "bloomed" this week too, and we had those for dinner tonight with shallots and a red wine sauce. The rest of the meal consisted of flank steak, boiled beets, and sauerkraut, with an apple-oatmeal crisp for dessert. A lot of winter fare with just a touch of spring.

At the other end of the food(like) spectrum, Greg decided to break open his "week's supply of food" MRE box at lunch today, and try them out. The box is about four years old, but he hadn't opened it yet. The MREs were not (as I had expected) freeze-dried; they really are intended to be eaten straight out of the foil wrapper. Between the three of us, we opened six different packages to try -- "Peanut Butter," "Crackers," "Cheese Tortellini in Tomato Sauce," "Mexican Style Rice," "Cherry Blueberry Cobbler," and "Beverage Base Raspberry." Sophia and I tasted the rice, and Greg ate the other five.

He said the peanut butter tasted like peanut butter (aside from being sweetened and fortified,) and the crackers, though bland, were unremarkable. The most unusual thing about the beverage base (a.k.a. kool-aid) was that it was sugar free; he wondered what was the point of including it at all, since it has no nutritive value. I speculated that it might be intended to mask the taste of swamp water (properly boiled and sterilized swamp water, of course, but even so...) The ingredients lists were surprisingly ordinary -- most of the chemicals were already familiar from supermarket packages.

The big disappointments were the, um, edible food-like substances whose names implied actual recipes. The tortellini and the rice were incredibly mealy, and the cobbler was "the texture of overdone oatmeal."

Sophia and I both stopped eating after two or three bites. I found the chili powder flavor overwhelming, but it was the mealiness that really did me in. I'm not sure how Greg managed to choke down two entire packets of that stuff, but I guess we already knew he's not a picky eater.

Then again, Sophia's not a picky eater either, at least not by my standards. She's never even come close to the "eats nothing but mac and cheese" status of other kids her age. But she wasn't willing to finish the package of rice, even after she begged Greg to let her try it.

Shelf Life Issues

We've been all out of our usual snack nuts for weeks now, and I'm getting desperate for variety in our snacks. I opened a jar of walnuts yesterday -- a food I normally only use for cooking -- and started to munch. But they tasted a bit off, and on investigating more closely, I realized they're starting to go rancid.

Rancid foods are hazardous to your health, so I avoid them as much as possible. Avoiding rancid foods creates a conflict with our goal of storing a year's supply, as many oily foods go rancid faster than that. But according to Diamond Foods, shelled nuts should keep in the pantry for 18 months, or in the refrigerator for 24. The date on this walnut jar is 7/11, which means we've only had them for 8 months. Why are they going bad so soon?

It's hard to predict how long a food will keep, when you don't know how old it already is before you buy it. I tend to think of the origins of store-bought foods as mysterious and unknowable, but that's not entirely true. In this case, we bought the walnuts in mid-summer, and it's a fall crop, so I could have inferred that they were close to a year old already. Not surprising, then, that they're starting to go bad by now. I need to take store-bought foods out of that black box in my head, and remember that they were produced from soil and sunlight on a seasonal schedule, just like the rest of my food.

What to do, then, about preventing walnuts (and other oily foods) from going rancid? California Walnuts makes no predictions about how long they will last, but recommends storing them refrigerated or frozen. Refrigeration would put them in competition for a limited amount of energy-intensive storage space, so I prefer to minimize the need for it, but it is frustrating when food goes bad. We store unopened containers of almonds and oils in the root cellar, and there's plenty of space in there, but it's a lot less convenient.

Another approach would be to mail order direct from a farmer when the new crop comes in, the same way I do with my almonds. That way I would know for sure how fresh they are. We've mail ordered walnuts and pistachios before as an add-on to an almond order, when I was buying from a seller who had all three. But I would have to think about whether it's worth a separate order for something I use in such small quantities.

We could also switch to black walnuts, and harvest them ourselves (we have tons of trees along the stream bed at White Hawk.) That would mean dealing with shelling them, and getting tannin stains all over everything. Might be fun to try once, but I'm not sure I'm quite ready yet to incorporate that into my annual routine.

I guess I'll have to give it some more thought.

Rationing and Sharing

We've had a couple of experiences in the past few days that are related to shortages.

The first has to do with almond milk. First, Greg ran out of cow's milk, and started eating breakfast using my almond milk instead. All of a sudden we were going through almond milk twice as fast, and generating almond meal twice as fast, and our schedule got all disrupted.

I'd gotten into a routine where I would make enough almond milk to last Sophia and me for three days; I would make it twice during the week, and fix flapjacks or waffles on the weekend. Now all of a sudden we were running out in a day and a half, and I wouldn't notice that I needed to soak almonds again. We had several mornings where there was only enough milk for one or two people. This was particularly challenging on school days. Sophia's breakfast has to take priority, because she's on a deadline, and we don't have enough time to switch unexpectedly to fixing a cooked breakfast. And I found I was getting stressed out when I saw Greg reaching for the last of the milk, when I wasn't going to have time to eat myself until I got her out the door.

He found another carton of milk in his freezer, and switched back to that, but we're going to have to work out a new breakfast routine when he gets back from New Jersey (he left on Friday, and will be home later this week.) But in the meantime, I noticed that I'm almost out of flax seed, at *both* houses. I use about a tablespoon of flax seed in each batch of almond milk, and I realized over the weekend that there were only about three tablespoons left. I knew it was running low at my place, but I had thought there was another jar at Greg's, and it turns out there wasn't.

I had to decide whether to start rationing, and using less per batch, or whether to finish it off and then do without. During a food shortage, decisions like that hinge on predictions about what will happen next. I know that this particular shortage will end in less than two weeks, and I'll be able to restock. So I decided to drop my usage back to 1/2 tablespoon per batch, figuring that will come close to getting us through the month.

If I was expecting a long-term shortage (as might happen, for example, when a product is discontinued, or a crop fails and is unavailable for a year) then the question comes down to, "how hard is it to find an alternative?" You might want to just jump in and do it, or you might want to put it off as long as possible. In this case, the flax seed improves the consistency of the milk, which is a cosmetic issue that's easy enough to ignore. But it also changes the baking properties of the almond meal. Too much, and the bread stays pudding-like instead of developing a bread-like texture as it bakes. Too little, and it gets crumbly and falls apart. It may take time to adjust my recipes to compensate: it might change my usage of other ingredients, and I might need to find a different set of recipes that are less dependent on texture.

In a real disaster situation, many things would be changing at once, and we'd be all be maxed out on the amount of disruption we could handle. The ability to maintain a familiar routine around food -- or any one aspect of our lives -- could make the difference between feeling stressed out and getting overwhelmed and unable to cope. So we might not want to wing it and start experimenting right away.

I may need new recipes for almond meal anyway, since I'm generating so much more of it with Greg starting to use the milk too. On the other hand, I might plan for more mornings with hot cereal, which uses a lot less milk.

The other incident was about sweet potatoes. I'd been looking at our stash, thinking it was shrinking fast but we would have plenty to last through the end of the month. Then my roommate Rhonda reminded me that some of the sweet potatoes were hers, as a barter exchange for helping me clean them last fall. She pulled out an armful for her share, and I blanched when I saw how many she was taking. After some discussion, we realized (among other things) that I was feeling much more possessive of my sweet potatoes when I discovered we might run out of them before the end of the month.

That feeling is clearly not rational -- we have an abundance of other food, and the sweet potatoes run out every year around this time. On the other hand, hoarding is such a characteristic response to food shortages that it's no surprise to see that urge surfacing. This is another example of how disrupted routines -- in this case, changes in who is asking to share a food supply -- might exacerbate an already stressful situation. In communities with pre-existing tensions, shortages can even lead to violence, as people who need a resource clash with people who don't want to share.

Greg and I both live in intentional communities, but (so far as I know) neither has discussed how food and other resources might be shared in an emergency situation. In America, the default is private ownership, and most people feel morally justified in keeping our resources to ourselves, even when others around us are homeless or starving. But the boundaries around this are unclear. Some people would readily share with strangers, while others wouldn't share with their own extended family. Some people are willing to share when they believe others are needy through no fault of their own, but refuse when they perceive others as lazy or irresponsible.

How we respond to our own needs, and the needs of our neighbors and friends, could have a profound impact on our ability to pull together as a community in the face of a long emergency. So it's worth thinking through who we would include, and to what extent and why, if a real shortage were to occur.

Taking Stock: Meat

"According to the Agriculture Department, Americans eat over 110 pounds of red meat per year [5 oz per day] ... along with 106 pounds of poultry [4 1/2 oz per day]." -- Does-Eating-Meat-Increase-Your-Risk-of-Dying? That would not be us. We do eat meat, for a variety of reasons, but our meat consumption is way less than the American norm. Which is a good thing, because we simply don't have enough freezer space for 650 pounds of meat (a year's supply for three average Americans.)

My target rate for meat consumption is about two ounces per person per day. I got that number from a talk by Chris Peters, a researcher over at Cornell who does research on local diets. Chris did a study comparing omnivorous with vegetarian diets, with varying fat contents, to determine what kind of a local New York diet would feed the largest number of people. He concluded that, because we have so much land that is better suited to pasture than agriculture, we can feed more people locally on a diet that includes a little bit of meat.

So far, we haven't paid much attention to meat when stocking up -- we buy haphazardly, and haven't tracked usage at all. I know that a pound of meat serves the three of us for two dinners, and we include meat in our dinners a bit more than half the time, so doing the math, we probably use about 100 pounds a year for dinners. We sometimes eat meat at breakfast or lunch as well, so with that plus a little padding on the estimate, we might consume 150 to 200 pounds of meat a year.

Even at that rate, it would take a *lot* of freezer space to store a year's supply of meat. We do have a chest freezer, but the meat has to share it with fruits and veggies and random leftovers. So we don't try very hard to keep a year's supply on hand. (I figure we probably make up for it by keeping more than a year's supply of beans.)

Here's what I currently have in the freezer:

• turkey, 8 lb
• 2 chickens, 7 1/2 lbs
• ground lamb, 6 lb
• misc. lamb pieces, 6 lb
• lamb stew meat, 3 3/4 lb
• bacon, 3 lb
• eye round roast, 2 1/2 lb
• 
  
  pork chops, 2 lbs
• italian sausage, 1 1/2 lb
• buffalo steak, 1 1/4 lb
• ham steak, 1 lb
• buffalo sticks, ~1 lb (14 sticks)
• chicken sausage, 3/4 lb
• flank steak, 3/4 lb
• fish, 3/4 lb
• canned fish -- 11 tins (~4 lb)

The total weight is approximately 50 pounds, which according to my ballpark estimate ought to last about 3-4 months.

So, as a cross check here's what I think we've eaten so far this month (as of 3/15):

• turkey, 2 legs & 2 wings (guess: 3 lbs?)
• summer sausage & salami, 2 lb
• ground lamb, 1 lb
• italian sausage, 1/2 lb
• buffalo snack sticks, 1/2 lb
• bacon, 1/2 lb

If that reflects our typical consumption, it would put us at 180 pounds a year. Two ounces per person per day is about 135 pounds in a year, so we may be a bit over our target. Good to know; I should probably cut back a little. (The limiting factor comes down to advance planning -- beans, our primary locally-available alternative, require overnight soaking and long cooking times. Dairy and soy are out for two of us, due to allergies.)

Fukushima

Here we are at the anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It seems like an opportune time to reflect on the nature of local and regional emergencies. One year ago, Japan saw three different kinds of disaster in quick succession, any one of which might have been devastating in its own right. Vast amounts of property were destroyed, many thousands of people were killed or left homeless, and an entire region of the country was evacuated or at risk of evacuation due to radiation leaks. Shortages of food, water, and shelter were widespread, and rebuilding will take years to complete. It's likely that long-term health consequences will continue to surface for decades to come.

Farther afield, spreading radiation was a concern, as were shortages of various industrial products. People mobilized all over the world for relief efforts, and the radiation monitoring industry flourished, but concerns about contamination of Japanese food products have largely been swept under the rug. Again, long-term health problems may surface over time, but they're unlikely to be traced back to the source.

This is only one of a series of real-world disasters and emergencies that we've witnessed in recent years: hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis; war, terrorism and genocide; drought, famine, flood; volcanic eruptions; nuclear disasters; recession, depression, and economic collapse. We haven't seen any major plagues recently, but fears of plague resurface each time a new disease is identified.

To some extent, all this turmoil is only life as usual, viewed on a global scale. Disruptions to the status quo happen all the time, all over the world. From a slightly different perspective, our ordinary day-to-day routines are no more than a lull between emergencies, just as summer is no more than a lull between winters. The urge to set aside a surplus in times of abundance, to prepare for times of scarcity, must by now be written into our genetic code: it's been our primary way of life for more generations than we can count. Our modern urban lifestyle -- where we assume predictability and continuity; where seasons affect little more than our wardrobes and leisure activities; where we expect to keep our houses at the same temperature year 'round and to eat fresh produce in the dead of winter -- may be the aberration, not the norm.

Running Out Of Things

We're starting to run out of some of the perishables. Greg is now officially out of cheese for his lunches, and he's running low on milk. Sophia and I still have some frozen bread left, and one package of GF bread mix, but Greg is all out of wheat bread. We finished the last box of sweetened Morning O's this morning, though we still have some sweetened rice cereal and the granola I just made. We usually mix these with unsweetened cereals -- of which we still have plenty -- in an attempt to get the sweetness without the blood sugar spike. We also finished off the tortillas last night, though we still have half a package of vegan cheese (which is reserved for making pizza -- we have one meal's worth of GF pizza crust mix.)

I sent Greg off today with a salami and some olive paté, which he can eat with crackers for today's lunch. I'm not sure what he'll be eating for lunch after that, though we do still have plenty of crackers and peanut butter. He was joking last week about breaking out some of his stockpile of MRIs, but I don't know how serious he was. (I'm not sure what MRI stands for, other than magnetic resonance imaging, but he's referring to those freeze-dried food packets.)

As a non-food-related observation, my gas tank is also running on empty now. So if our challenge had included fuel, this would be the end of life-as-usual tasks like driving Sophia to after-school programs and commuting between the houses. Greg has started taking the bus (almost) every day to get to work and back, as sort of an addendum to the challenge experience.

A Sampling of Menus:

• (dinner) hot italian buffalo sausage with collard greens, roasted beets & potatoes, kohlrabi salad
• (dinner) turkey, baked squash, sauerkraut
• (dinner) homemade rice nachos with refried beans, salsa, vegan cheese, and mache
• (school lunch) leftover turkey & refried beans w/rice, carrots, frozen blueberries
• (school lunch) leftover lentil/lamb curry w/rice, sliced jerusalem artichokes, frozen blueberries

The nachos were made with rice tortillas that we found in the freezer. We hadn't been using them because they get stiff so easily, and crack when we try to fold them, but the nacho idea worked out really well. I cut them in sixths and deep fried them, and they turned out a good bit tastier than I was expecting.