Speaker 1: What's avoiding starvation my autonomous neighborhood collectives. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: it could happen here a podcast about things not being
Speaker 1: as good as they are and trying to make them better.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans my co host today as many days
Speaker 1: Garrison Davis Garrison say hello to the people, high people, Garrison.
Speaker 1: What are we? What are we? What do we? What
Speaker 1: do we? What do we? What do we? What do
Speaker 1: we do? What do we? What are we doing today?
Speaker 1: Thank you of We are going to be having a
Speaker 1: discussion on um food and food preservation and finding. Do
Speaker 1: you mean like putting in the freezer? Well, what if
Speaker 1: the freezer is not working? The freezer is always working.
Speaker 1: This is America. When the power goes out for two weeks,
Speaker 1: aren't you Well that's one of our guests for today.
Speaker 1: My friends be in a lane um who who you've
Speaker 1: heard earlier this week and who We're going to talk
Speaker 1: about food storage and particularly again our focus this week
Speaker 1: is like we keep getting a lot of people being
Speaker 1: like I have no money or very little money or
Speaker 1: very little space. I'm not gonna be able to grow things.
Speaker 1: How can I possibly you know, gather food store food,
Speaker 1: like build resiliency. I don't have any any kind of farmland.
Speaker 1: And the good news is, no matter where you live,
Speaker 1: things that are edible grow, and you can get those
Speaker 1: things and you can find ways to make them last
Speaker 1: longer than they would if you just kept them in
Speaker 1: a sack. And that's a pretty cool thing to do.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to hand it over to be in
Speaker 1: a lane. I love for that. Okay, I don't have
Speaker 1: much space. I don't have much money. Was kind of
Speaker 1: how I got into doing canning in the first place.
Speaker 1: For myself, I used to be very, very poor. I
Speaker 1: was on food stamps, I had no money. I was
Speaker 1: a broke punk. And one of my friends was like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: there's this farmer at the farmer's market and if you
Speaker 1: help them clean up, they'll let you take away whatever
Speaker 1: leftover produce they have that they don't want, So you
Speaker 1: can just load up a bag with produce. All you
Speaker 1: gotta do is help them load the truck at the
Speaker 1: end of the day. So that's what I did every
Speaker 1: single Wednesday for the next five years, no matter what come,
Speaker 1: hell or high water. But with that that also came
Speaker 1: there's you started realizing that there's gluts and then lacks
Speaker 1: of things. Um, much like you know, everything that's happening
Speaker 1: in society now, just in general, there was seasons when
Speaker 1: there was nothing but you were It was easy to
Speaker 1: at the end of a farmer's market day walk home
Speaker 1: with a fifty pound flat of tomatoes, and you know
Speaker 1: times of the year where it was nothing but cabbage,
Speaker 1: and you might have wanted tomatoes a lot. And canning
Speaker 1: was great because it helped to will out when I
Speaker 1: could get things without having to dive into the you know,
Speaker 1: sixty books a month, I got in food stamps and
Speaker 1: spend it at the farmer's market. On that instead, I
Speaker 1: could use it to have a variety of vegetables or
Speaker 1: canned goods or other things in order to flavor my raman. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I first came at this kind of from working on farms,
Speaker 1: where similarly there are gluts. There are times of year
Speaker 1: where you literally cannot eat melons fast enough, and everybody
Speaker 1: who works on farms talked about getting the melon ships
Speaker 1: because you're eating as many melons as you possibly can,
Speaker 1: and it turns out that doesn't always agree with you.
Speaker 1: Um and uh. And then you know there's the time
Speaker 1: of year where, well, if you want to eat some
Speaker 1: month old potatoes and some two month old squash and
Speaker 1: maybe some storage cabbage. Great, and otherwise there's no produce
Speaker 1: to be had. So preserving food is well, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different ways to do it, and it seems
Speaker 1: really intense a lot of the time because people talk
Speaker 1: about like batchuli is um, you're going to die of
Speaker 1: botulism if you have home canned food. And so first off,
Speaker 1: there's just to dispel a lot of myths about things.
Speaker 1: There's actually really really really low instances of bautual is
Speaker 1: um um. I'm not going to say it doesn't happen,
Speaker 1: but there's actually very few cases of bauchuli is um
Speaker 1: per year, and a lot of them are from industrial
Speaker 1: canned goods. Don't eat a can if it's bowing out
Speaker 1: in the sides of the top, throw the can, well,
Speaker 1: bury the can, bury it in the woods far away.
Speaker 1: But then also beyond canning, there's a lot of different
Speaker 1: ways of food preservation. You know, you were joking about, like,
Speaker 1: but don't toss it in the freezer. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I toss a lot of things in the freezer. Shouldn't
Speaker 1: not a bad idea? Yeah, I mean, we got all
Speaker 1: sorts of animals from the farm in the freezer. Right now,
Speaker 1: we've got a lot of blueberries because a couple of squirrels.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was a random thing. Um, just just some
Speaker 1: squirrels on the side for squirrel for heat is but yeah,
Speaker 1: they were. Not having a freezer is a bad idea.
Speaker 1: It's just that the freezer depends on you know, having
Speaker 1: our or at least having a backup power source or
Speaker 1: generator or a generator or or or um. And in
Speaker 1: the case that you don't have access to those things
Speaker 1: or can't afford to get a whole extra freezer, and
Speaker 1: that fills up a substantial part of your power the
Speaker 1: free or I can't afford the power the freezer. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, we we definitely saw this past winter with
Speaker 1: the power outages that were caused by um, you know,
Speaker 1: inclement weather, and it suddenly became very hard to acquire
Speaker 1: dry ice because dry ice will keep stuff cold for longer.
Speaker 1: But everybody who's gone camping and used dry and they're
Speaker 1: cooler knows that. So as soon as there's an interruption
Speaker 1: in people's ability to refrigerate their food, the entire regional
Speaker 1: stock of dry ice is going to disappear. So what
Speaker 1: we're looking at more in what we're talking about today
Speaker 1: is a little bit more like the things that you
Speaker 1: don't need to keep anywhere, but like a cabinet that
Speaker 1: maybe doesn't get boiling hot, and if it's sort of
Speaker 1: a room temperature cabinet, you can store a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: I've personally found the backs of closets, like think about
Speaker 1: all of the areas that you don't clean. You're like,
Speaker 1: I just shove things back here and hope that they
Speaker 1: disappear because I don't actually care about them, or like
Speaker 1: the backs of broom closets. UM that actually, for a
Speaker 1: long time was my place where I would store canned
Speaker 1: goods because you can just stack the palettes of jars,
Speaker 1: the flats of them. Because if you buy jars from
Speaker 1: this supermarket, UM buy mar Canning stores anywhere, Safeway has them,
Speaker 1: Walmart has them, you can They're not expensive. You can
Speaker 1: just they come in a little square flat. And so
Speaker 1: after I would fill them, I just put them all
Speaker 1: back in there and then I could just stack those
Speaker 1: as a little tower and then you know, hand them
Speaker 1: out as gifts for the rest of the year, which
Speaker 1: was also definitely saying that you do when you have
Speaker 1: absolutely no money and people are like, oh, we're having
Speaker 1: a New Year's Eve party and you're like, I brought
Speaker 1: you jam, and they're like, oh, great, blueberry lovely. But
Speaker 1: it's nice as something to be you can give people
Speaker 1: beyond canning because sometimes, like right now, it's incredibly hard
Speaker 1: to find the metal lids that go on canning jars
Speaker 1: or in some cases the jars. That's actually was recently
Speaker 1: looking for more jar lids and ended up buying flats
Speaker 1: of jars instead because as four different stores told me,
Speaker 1: there's a supply chain disruption in getting jar lids. There's
Speaker 1: also a lot of ways that you can preserve stuff
Speaker 1: with drying. You can also do a lot with salt,
Speaker 1: vinegar and sugar preserving as well, so that you don't
Speaker 1: necessarily need the resealable jars or like new lids for that.
Speaker 1: So there's a bunch of different methods um lact of
Speaker 1: fermentation as well, like fermenting things. So what would you
Speaker 1: like to talk about first? Let's start with just like
Speaker 1: what is what is the actual process of canning beyond
Speaker 1: like just dumping stuff into a can and sealing it. Um.
Speaker 1: So there's canning by itself is ceiling jars with heat.
Speaker 1: So that was, oh God, really really came into its
Speaker 1: own around like World War two was like industrial canning.
Speaker 1: And the thing about it is even within canning, there's
Speaker 1: two different types. There's low heat and high heat canning.
Speaker 1: Low heat is actually just boiling water temperature, and high
Speaker 1: heat you actually need to go above the temperature of
Speaker 1: boiling water so you can pressure can. Um you need
Speaker 1: a pressure cooker. They terrify me. I don't pressure can
Speaker 1: because I haven't quite gotten over the images of when
Speaker 1: they explode and give people steam burns. I know plenty
Speaker 1: of people who do pressure can, and it's great for them.
Speaker 1: You can pressure can at high heat anything. You can
Speaker 1: toss raw fish or raw meat in oil and jars
Speaker 1: or in water in jars, and you can pressure can
Speaker 1: it and it will cook and seal the jars and
Speaker 1: it is very safe. Low temperature canning is still relying
Speaker 1: on one of the other methods, like salt, sugar, acid
Speaker 1: for the to keep down bacteria. So all it does,
Speaker 1: though is it makes the same so you can do
Speaker 1: this with or without canning. It just makes the jars
Speaker 1: keep a lot longer because it preserves them so it's
Speaker 1: the process of you take a jar and then you
Speaker 1: either use a clean ring. If you're using those latching
Speaker 1: reusable jars with these nice rings on them that you
Speaker 1: can use over and over again, really handy when there
Speaker 1: are supply chain disruptions to know that you can re
Speaker 1: use your jar and ring. We're talking about like the
Speaker 1: Mason jars that you you you would get in uh
Speaker 1: bars that are too expense of five years ago. They
Speaker 1: would pour your terrible I P A in them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you can use them for other things too. These
Speaker 1: are the well there's two. There's big jars that have
Speaker 1: a lid that is attached and it laughs the yea
Speaker 1: and so those have a those have a rubbers that
Speaker 1: you can and as long as you keep those oiled
Speaker 1: and clean, you can reuse those for years. They do
Speaker 1: eventually wear out, but they use a long time. Others
Speaker 1: is Mason or ball canning jars, and those actually have
Speaker 1: a two piece top. They have a middle ring that
Speaker 1: you just need to make sure it's not like horrifically
Speaker 1: dented or rusted through. It's reusable for a very long time.
Speaker 1: And then you have a lid and the lid can
Speaker 1: only really they are recommended to only use once I've
Speaker 1: re used them like twice. Can once you can like
Speaker 1: once it's canned and you you can take stuff out
Speaker 1: put it back on. You don't have to like replace
Speaker 1: the lid every time you get some preserves out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the tiny piece of rubber that is what steals
Speaker 1: it is very thin, and so it's not very reusable
Speaker 1: for more to pull can't batches of food and and
Speaker 1: true to farm. You know, if you go looking around
Speaker 1: in you know, rummage sales, vintage stores, whatever, you will
Speaker 1: probably find either very cheap or very overpriced some of
Speaker 1: those old hinged jars and tons of Mason jars and
Speaker 1: tons of Mason jars. You will often need to replace
Speaker 1: either the lids or the rubber gaskets in order to
Speaker 1: make them safe to star food in. But in either case,
Speaker 1: whether you're using the little the mason or ball jars
Speaker 1: that you'll find in lots of stores or the big
Speaker 1: latching ones, um, the jars are the more expensive spots. Things.
Speaker 1: The lids and the rubber rings are more inexpensive to replace.
Speaker 1: So if you can find them at Goodwill, if you
Speaker 1: can find them at Goodwill bins or all the places
Speaker 1: it's great. You should always grab them. Jars are never
Speaker 1: a bad idea. Yeah, so canning there's a million different
Speaker 1: ways to can. I do a lot of jams, jellies, pickles,
Speaker 1: and tomatoes, which are all things that are canned that
Speaker 1: are preserved either with acid or sugar in either case, Um,
Speaker 1: jams and jellies being sugar and pickles and stuff being acid. Yes,
Speaker 1: those are my two favorites. They're very simple to learn.
Speaker 1: And then you can always expand recipes and everything else. Um.
Speaker 1: But with pickles and tomatoes and other things, having the
Speaker 1: PHB very acidic is what actually does the preservation of
Speaker 1: the food and keeps down fungus is molds, bacterias, and stuff.
Speaker 1: And with jams and jellies, the natural acidity of the
Speaker 1: fruit mixed with a lot of sugar is what keeps
Speaker 1: the fruits from going bad or anything. And the great
Speaker 1: thing about canning fruit is that, like when you're when
Speaker 1: you're thinking about what is the greatest number of free
Speaker 1: calories available to most people in a city during the
Speaker 1: seasons where fruit grows, it's often going to be fruit,
Speaker 1: And like you you'd be surprised, like where you could
Speaker 1: do like Los Angeles, where I used to live, there
Speaker 1: was much of the year like seven eight months you
Speaker 1: could fill your arms with fruit if you knew where
Speaker 1: to go. And there's an app called Falling Fruit that
Speaker 1: you can use to find people mark like where different
Speaker 1: trees are a lot of like you'll be surprised even
Speaker 1: if you think, like, well, there's no fruit in my area,
Speaker 1: go try falling Fruit. You you may find that out.
Speaker 1: Actually there's a shipload of fruit. And I just was
Speaker 1: not looking or as you often find, I didn't realize
Speaker 1: that was an edible plant. I assume those berries were.
Speaker 1: We're not food and and they can be. And and
Speaker 1: that's a lot of like free you know when you
Speaker 1: especially when you're inking pserve that's really calorically dense. And
Speaker 1: and that also ties in with in the sort of
Speaker 1: survival utility aspect of this, because like canning is fun,
Speaker 1: and harvesting fruit is fun, and having stuff you made
Speaker 1: to give pomegranates from rich people's houses do it, sure, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean, but part of part of the other thing
Speaker 1: to think about here is that like providing yourself with
Speaker 1: a reserve of different kinds of nutrition and different like
Speaker 1: there's you get an assortment of stuff. So you know
Speaker 1: you aren't having to constantly buy it because honestly, the
Speaker 1: most expensive in terms of carbon output, the most expensive
Speaker 1: in terms of cost per calorie in grocery stores tends
Speaker 1: to come from the stuff that's you know, been shipped
Speaker 1: up from Argentina because it's not in season up here,
Speaker 1: or while you're getting grapes in January, right and blueberries,
Speaker 1: you can actually watch them move all the way down
Speaker 1: the northern hemisphere over the course of the growing season
Speaker 1: until they're like growing them down in Chile right before
Speaker 1: they start being able to grow them again. So yeah,
Speaker 1: So just thinking about like the things that are available
Speaker 1: when they are available, um. And you'll see this all
Speaker 1: the time, like the good forage spots. When they're available,
Speaker 1: there will be c of people all they're all collecting stuff, um.
Speaker 1: And getting to know some of the things that you
Speaker 1: like and that grow near you and what time of
Speaker 1: year they come into season, and maybe forming some relationships
Speaker 1: with people and being like, hey, I noticed you have
Speaker 1: a chestnut tree in your backyard. Can I come and
Speaker 1: harvest chestnuts? Hey, you have this kind of oak, Can
Speaker 1: I come and get acorns from you? Because I want
Speaker 1: to do a leeching project. Hey, I was grabbing apples
Speaker 1: and I noticed that you're harvesting all these acorns. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that you could do anything with acorns. What
Speaker 1: is what are you doing with all those acorns? And
Speaker 1: one of the greatest things, too, is that a good
Speaker 1: fruit tree makes a lot of fruit. So much so.
Speaker 1: You know, we have a little plum that's near our house.
Speaker 1: It's a little plum tree. And since this year we
Speaker 1: managed to get to it before the raccoon did that
Speaker 1: likes to clamber over the roof. We got about two
Speaker 1: fifty pounds of plums off of the small fruit tree.
Speaker 1: And it is not very big. It has a footprint
Speaker 1: of maybe about ten ft in diameter of the widest
Speaker 1: part of the tree. But it drops quite a bit
Speaker 1: of fruit, especially if we get to it before it
Speaker 1: all drops on the ground and our cars and the
Speaker 1: driveway and the walkway and the cat and the cat.
Speaker 1: But if we get to it, it's a lot. So honestly,
Speaker 1: I set aside about a fifty pound tub that was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna make some jam. We're gonna dry some of these,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do things with it, and the rest we're
Speaker 1: able to give to friends. We tossed some of the
Speaker 1: free fridges. We toss some all, you know, we handed
Speaker 1: out because one good fruit tree makes a lot. So
Speaker 1: when you see fruit trees around town, when you walk
Speaker 1: under someone's cherry tree, it's okay to ask for fruit too,
Speaker 1: because I don't know anyone that uses every single piece
Speaker 1: of fruit off of any of their fruit trees. And
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things that you will see
Speaker 1: is that um a lot of cities try to discourage
Speaker 1: people from planting fruit trees along roads precisely because when
Speaker 1: they come into fruit, they produce so much fruit that
Speaker 1: it causes a problem. Also, it's a good way to
Speaker 1: form relationships in your neighborhood. You say like, hey, we
Speaker 1: have a whole bunch of plums, we have a ton
Speaker 1: of whatever is dropping all over your front yard. And
Speaker 1: then your neighbors may be like, oh, those weirdos who
Speaker 1: were collecting fruit that one time. This tree in my
Speaker 1: backyard that's about to drop all this stuff. I'll let
Speaker 1: them know and maybe they'll come so I don't have
Speaker 1: to clean it up afterwards. Yeah, which is again, like people,
Speaker 1: we talk a lot about the importance of building like
Speaker 1: community resiliency and community self defense, and folks act like, well,
Speaker 1: how do I actually do that? Well, that's maybe that's
Speaker 1: a start for you. Maybe the start is like you
Speaker 1: get to know what do they have? What do I have?
Speaker 1: And then you start talking about like, well, I'm gonta
Speaker 1: can some stuff. Do you want to learn how to can?
Speaker 1: You're like, oh, well, I was going to dry at ease.
Speaker 1: Do you want to learn it? Like? Or do you
Speaker 1: want to borrow a dehydrator? And then you're making connections
Speaker 1: that are very practical and also social in your area.
Speaker 1: I'll some one plug. We've talked a little bit about
Speaker 1: the process of canning. Dehydrators are great and are pretty affordable,
Speaker 1: and they're not expensive. Yeah, like I think you know,
Speaker 1: for sixty eight bucks, you can usually get a decent dehydrator.
Speaker 1: And if you don't have one, but you have an oven,
Speaker 1: if you put things on a baking rack very low heat,
Speaker 1: you can just put it. I would just turn my
Speaker 1: oven onto warm and you can lay out things in
Speaker 1: your oven. I have a nicer oven now that won't
Speaker 1: let me do this. But when I used to live
Speaker 1: in like my first junkie apartment, I would literally just
Speaker 1: stick a metal spoon like a one of my big
Speaker 1: cooking spoons in the door of the ovens so that
Speaker 1: it would open and that would just vent all of
Speaker 1: the steam of whatever I was drying in the oven.
Speaker 1: So and meanwhile, if you live in say a really
Speaker 1: dry climate or a climate where you have a really
Speaker 1: dry stretch of time when fruit is in season and
Speaker 1: you have windows, screens and an area where you can
Speaker 1: make or there's a steady breeze flowing across your your fruit,
Speaker 1: cut it thin, lay it out in the sun. And
Speaker 1: that's why there's so much sun dried X, Y and Z.
Speaker 1: That's really expensive when you go to drin Joe's or whatever,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, it's not just a matter. We
Speaker 1: shouldn't just say that like this is you have to
Speaker 1: forage for all this stuff, like it can be a
Speaker 1: matter of like, well, during these months, beef is is
Speaker 1: much cheaper. It's half as much as it will be later.
Speaker 1: I'm going to buy beef when it's cheap, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to make jerky now and then I will have
Speaker 1: protein when I can't afford to purchase protein or as
Speaker 1: much protein later. In the air. Speaking of jerky, I
Speaker 1: mean like one of the just in the vein of
Speaker 1: you know, building your own dehydrat or something. One other
Speaker 1: thing that that that I've done is you can just
Speaker 1: get a you know, a decent box fan and some
Speaker 1: furnace filters and strap them all together, and that can
Speaker 1: very successfully dry out jerky um so d dehydrators. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of different ways to y It is literally
Speaker 1: just kind of warm dry threes or less in some cases,
Speaker 1: and air that is moving, and it's it's like everything
Speaker 1: we've been talking about. There's the you can buy very
Speaker 1: expensivety hydrators if you want to. If you want to
Speaker 1: get a primo jerky making together, you can you can
Speaker 1: make that a real expensive thing, or you can do
Speaker 1: it for like trash, like with with discarded crap that
Speaker 1: you find around in people's like take piles. And I
Speaker 1: think also the other thing to think about we're talking
Speaker 1: about it's not all foraging, is to think about we've
Speaker 1: been talking about supply chain disruptions, but also one of
Speaker 1: the things in our current circumstances is the weird gluts
Speaker 1: and excesses and surpluses that are produced by our supply chains.
Speaker 1: And again, one of the big ways that I learned
Speaker 1: about food preservation was food not bombs and food preservation
Speaker 1: and also just food preparation. Was food not bombs way
Speaker 1: back in the day, like you need a special sound
Speaker 1: every time on specifically it could happen here someone mentions
Speaker 1: food not bombs. That was That was my entry back
Speaker 1: when I was just kind of a liberally journalist guy
Speaker 1: to like anarchist practice was like every protest I go to,
Speaker 1: there's these like krusty punks handing out sandwiches, um, and
Speaker 1: then they have neat stickers. I wonder what's going on here?
Speaker 1: And well, And one of the important things about food
Speaker 1: not bombs is that food not bombs has sort of
Speaker 1: two different ways that you obtain food for food not bombs.
Speaker 1: One is you form relationships with sts, farmers, people who
Speaker 1: are going to have a lot of food, a lot
Speaker 1: of supply coming in and there's stuff they're not going
Speaker 1: to be able to use, either because it's ugly or
Speaker 1: you know, it's carrots that look like dicks and they
Speaker 1: don't feel comfortable putting the carrots that look like dicks
Speaker 1: on the sidcause it's just it's just too hot or yeah.
Speaker 1: So you have your relationships with like local businesses and
Speaker 1: local suppliers who aren't going to be able to sell
Speaker 1: or use some of their stuff, and they're like great bread, right,
Speaker 1: day old bread. We are a bakery and we pride
Speaker 1: ourselves on fresh bread, so we're gonna give our day
Speaker 1: olds and it makes us feel good as liberals to
Speaker 1: give it to food, not bombs. And then on the
Speaker 1: flip side, there's the the fact that the supply chain
Speaker 1: is designed to produce these excesses, but then if it
Speaker 1: can't make money off of them, dispose of them. That's
Speaker 1: where you end up with, you know, cop scarting, copscarding
Speaker 1: dumpsters for example, don't dumpster from the cops that the
Speaker 1: cop guarded dumpsters. Those are the other dumpsters go to
Speaker 1: other dumpsters. It's infuriating, it's very frustrating. I get the
Speaker 1: desire to yell at the cop, but there will you
Speaker 1: can find dumpsters that are started. If you are a
Speaker 1: store or restaurant, you're legally protected to let people go
Speaker 1: through your dumpster. Yeah, not to you. Yeah. During the
Speaker 1: Clinton administration, there is legislation that was passed that straight
Speaker 1: up said like at a federal level, if you present
Speaker 1: I think the wording is seemingly wholesome and healthful food
Speaker 1: two people for free, even if it has plastic expiration
Speaker 1: date that you are legally protected because it's dumb to
Speaker 1: throw out food just because the thing that stamped on
Speaker 1: the package has expired. Now that does mean if you
Speaker 1: pick up some meat that's expired and the package is puffy,
Speaker 1: don't eat that. And it also there are also local
Speaker 1: ordinances and local laws that do restrict that more because
Speaker 1: there are places where people get arrested for handing out
Speaker 1: food to like, you know, homeless people and whatnot. But
Speaker 1: you know, check your local laws before doing anything. Is
Speaker 1: radical and violence is giving out as giving out free
Speaker 1: food to poor people. Yeah, there are these gluts um
Speaker 1: and there are these points where the supply chain is
Speaker 1: going to dump huge amounts of stuff into the system.
Speaker 1: For example, right now, we just talked about how canning
Speaker 1: supplies are kind of in short supply right now, which
Speaker 1: is weird. I guarantee you that that means in a
Speaker 1: couple of months there's going to be tons of canning
Speaker 1: supplies everywhere. Or you know, when there were power outages
Speaker 1: in Portland, then there was a bunch of stuff, even
Speaker 1: stuff that doesn't need to be refrigerated was getting thrown out.
Speaker 1: If it was stored in the refrigerated section, because stores
Speaker 1: have their specific protocols about like, oh well, if this
Speaker 1: is left, if this freezer is unplugged, we have to
Speaker 1: throw out everything in the freezer. Never Mind that a
Speaker 1: bunch of stuff in the freezer straight up says right
Speaker 1: there on it does not require refrigeration, or only refrigerate
Speaker 1: after opening, or refrigerate after opening. So think about, like
Speaker 1: where are your local systems going to produce these huge blots,
Speaker 1: Or maybe it's super cheap at certain times of year.
Speaker 1: You know, you maybe corn goes down to like fifteen
Speaker 1: cents an ear or five cents an ear at the
Speaker 1: end of at the at the end of August, right,
Speaker 1: so maybe you can get a whole ton of corn
Speaker 1: then you can dry it. Like you know, when I
Speaker 1: was a kid, we lived in California, and we were
Speaker 1: not doing a ton of canning. I did not grow
Speaker 1: up canning. I didn't grow up preserving food. I didn't
Speaker 1: in that type of way. But one thing that my
Speaker 1: mom would do is when our little Mira lemon tree
Speaker 1: was covered in lemons, she would just juice a whole
Speaker 1: pile of them and then poured into ice cube trays
Speaker 1: and then empty the ice cube trays into gallon bags,
Speaker 1: and then we had lemon you know, we would make
Speaker 1: lemonade all year round. And her recipe literally called for
Speaker 1: three lemon cubes to how much sugar and stuff that
Speaker 1: she had it measured out, and so she would just
Speaker 1: pop those in and that would just live in the
Speaker 1: refrigerator all year round. Was just constant lemonade. One other
Speaker 1: plug in terms of preserving stuff that I want to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about, but with the disclaimer that
Speaker 1: I am by no means an expert. Um One of
Speaker 1: the other things that you know, the punks of Yesteryear
Speaker 1: with their food not bombs houses got really excited out
Speaker 1: with things like crowd and kombucha UM. And there are
Speaker 1: some really great resources out there, specifically um wild Fermentation
Speaker 1: and the Art of Fermentation, which are both by a
Speaker 1: guy named Sander Cats on how to ferment food without
Speaker 1: you you know, you're using naturally occurring bacteria and fermentation
Speaker 1: as a means of preservation is possibly the oldest means
Speaker 1: of deliberate food storage that human beings have, and you
Speaker 1: can do it with a wide variety of things. And
Speaker 1: so again, if you're faced with one of those gluts
Speaker 1: where you have a ton of stuff and nowhere you
Speaker 1: can store it in your refrigerated storage areas, there's probably
Speaker 1: a way you can jam it, you can dry it,
Speaker 1: you can ferment it, you can you know, make vinegar
Speaker 1: out of it. And you can find guides for all
Speaker 1: of this for free online. Like all of this is
Speaker 1: accessible if you have a phone. There are people in
Speaker 1: people putting up videos on YouTube where you can watch
Speaker 1: them do it too. To makets, you do not have
Speaker 1: to purchase books in order to learn. There's also a
Speaker 1: lot of ways you know, you can make cold storages
Speaker 1: in your backyard. You can definitely, like I have a
Speaker 1: lot of guides on how to make your own roots
Speaker 1: sellers then very small spaces and do things. Because as
Speaker 1: long as you're not having your food produce the thing
Speaker 1: that makes it that makes your food go bad, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of different ways that you can prevent food
Speaker 1: spoilage but that you can learn from. But honestly, crowd
Speaker 1: and canning are probably some of the quickest and easiest
Speaker 1: and as a general rule, um you know, similarly, if
Speaker 1: you don't have access to building a garden, you probably
Speaker 1: also don't have access to like digging a root seller.
Speaker 1: That being said, if you have a room or a
Speaker 1: space in your house where you can reliably keep it
Speaker 1: cool and dark like below I don't know, seventy degrees dark,
Speaker 1: like closets, there's probably a spot in your basement if
Speaker 1: you live in a house where you have a basement,
Speaker 1: or if you live in a base because you situation. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: it's pretty easy. And for that matter, when we talk
Speaker 1: about like root sellers, there are totally some d i
Speaker 1: y schematics for literally digging a like three foot cube
Speaker 1: hole in your yard and sinking in something to line it,
Speaker 1: and then that's where you store stuff because if you
Speaker 1: dig down a few feet below ground, it stays fifty
Speaker 1: degrees year round. And I get like when you hear again,
Speaker 1: we keep coming back to this, Like, I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people get overwhelmed or get very anxious when
Speaker 1: they think about trying to build resiliency because they live
Speaker 1: in a tiny apartment, they don't have much in the
Speaker 1: way of money. The important one of the most important
Speaker 1: things to understand that like a lot of people, no
Speaker 1: matter how poor you are, poorer than you have been
Speaker 1: doing this kind of stuff for generations. Like, it's why
Speaker 1: most of our grandparents survived the thirties. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think one thing that people have a misinterpretation of with
Speaker 1: canning and stuff is that they are going to put
Speaker 1: stuff up, and they're gonna like put up their cans
Speaker 1: and their jars and then they will eventually build this.
Speaker 1: You know, I have food for twelve years buried here.
Speaker 1: Nothing has that great of a shelf life. I mean,
Speaker 1: I've definitely pulled out some jam that was from definitely
Speaker 1: didn't do that this year that I had forgotten in
Speaker 1: the back of a cupboard and eating it and it's fine.
Speaker 1: It's fine, but usually a couple three years couple. But
Speaker 1: the idea of canning and preserving was not that you
Speaker 1: are saving food in case the sky falls in and
Speaker 1: everyone is doomed. The reason that people preserve food was
Speaker 1: to extend the bounty of a harvest season for a
Speaker 1: few additional weeks or months. And if you think about
Speaker 1: it that way, you're extending what you have two times
Speaker 1: when it would be more enjoyable to eat it when
Speaker 1: it feels special. No, I mean, it's like jam. A
Speaker 1: big part of the reason for jam is there's really
Speaker 1: important nutrients in fruit that maybe you can't get in
Speaker 1: the dead of winter, but you can if you have
Speaker 1: jamp Just to be a farm nerd for a minute,
Speaker 1: because Robert, I know that you are a huge fan
Speaker 1: of pumpkin spice. Oh. The reason that my first cup
Speaker 1: of the season today amazing monster. The reason that pumpkins
Speaker 1: and cinnamon and apples and baking goods, baked goods with
Speaker 1: raisins in them are all like a big deal and
Speaker 1: are all like apples are a fruit that if you
Speaker 1: put apples in, say a barrel, there's the saying about
Speaker 1: one bad apple. Because if you make sure that an
Speaker 1: apple isn't rotting and you put it in a cool,
Speaker 1: dark space with decent ventilation, apples will keep for a
Speaker 1: very long time. Squash are a big deal. Pumpkins are
Speaker 1: a big deal around this time of year because buttercup squash,
Speaker 1: for example, and butternut squash are both storage squash. They
Speaker 1: taste better if they have been sitting in a dark
Speaker 1: storage area for like two months. Then they metabolized more
Speaker 1: of their starches into sugars, and they're tastier. A lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of like squash, root, vegetables, all of
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff that you associate with. You know,
Speaker 1: all harvest season is specifically storage crops, because I'm originally
Speaker 1: from New England. That's the time of year where you
Speaker 1: stop being able to get food out of the ground
Speaker 1: and everything freezes and dies, and then it doesn't start
Speaker 1: up again until April, and you need a way to
Speaker 1: keep eating in the meantime. And also, though, let's just
Speaker 1: remember that a lot of preserved foods are also neat,
Speaker 1: not just because they are a substitutor because they're saying
Speaker 1: the harvest, but because in order to preserve the food
Speaker 1: and keep the nutrients, you have to go through a process.
Speaker 1: You want to have the salt be too high, or
Speaker 1: the acidity be too high, or the sugar content be
Speaker 1: too high, or the water content be too low to
Speaker 1: enable bacterial growth, and so that the fruits and vegetables
Speaker 1: and meats or whatever don't rot. But that means that
Speaker 1: you get so many awesome and different flavors that you
Speaker 1: would never you know, grapes, grapes are great. Whatever grapes
Speaker 1: preserved in wine vinegar. That sounds really cool. You can
Speaker 1: do that, and then you have a completely different thing
Speaker 1: that you normally don't eat, you know, dried dried figs,
Speaker 1: apple chips, like, you also get a whole new variety
Speaker 1: of foods that are not just extending in harvest, but
Speaker 1: are also other things to eat. You know, my kids
Speaker 1: are not going to toss a whole pile of fresh
Speaker 1: fruit in their backpacks sometimes because it squishes at the
Speaker 1: bottom of their backpacks and I find it weeks later,
Speaker 1: and it's absolutely terrifying. On the other hand, a bunch
Speaker 1: of you know, dried dried prunes, plums and stuff from
Speaker 1: the garden that dried out. They'll take baggies of those,
Speaker 1: and if I find them a month later because they
Speaker 1: didn't eat them, it isn't the end of the world either.
Speaker 1: And and again like there's a lot of fun stuff
Speaker 1: like you know, yeah, grapes by themselves are are fine.
Speaker 1: You can also turn gray. It's into stuff that will
Speaker 1: help you preserve other stuff. And raisins in baked goods.
Speaker 1: If you've ever had a loaf of raisin bread and
Speaker 1: a loaf of white bread in the same bread box,
Speaker 1: the white bread will mold first. Raisins are actually a preservative.
Speaker 1: It's why people started putting raisins in bread. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think we should we should close out, but I
Speaker 1: kind of wanted to do that by circling back to
Speaker 1: the overall topic of this week, which is like building
Speaker 1: resiliency when you don't have much in the way of
Speaker 1: money or resources. And one of the things that you
Speaker 1: may not think of as building resiliency is exactly what
Speaker 1: you were talking about being in eu Elaine, paying attention
Speaker 1: to what is available, what time of the year, what
Speaker 1: is cheap, what time of the year, what is like,
Speaker 1: when do the gluts happen, and when do the shortages happen.
Speaker 1: Because that doesn't actually cost any money. You don't even
Speaker 1: have to buy things like you're already you're all always
Speaker 1: going to be going out to the store to get
Speaker 1: food occasionally. It's it's it's keeping an eye on understanding
Speaker 1: what is available growing naturally and what is available in
Speaker 1: the economy, because that connects you more to the environment
Speaker 1: you live in, to the climate as it changes um
Speaker 1: into your community, all of which make you more resilient,
Speaker 1: and then of which costs you a dime. It just
Speaker 1: cost you attention. Also just a plug for you know,
Speaker 1: people who have access to the ecosystems where this is relevant.
Speaker 1: Things like shellfish licenses are great I'm not going to
Speaker 1: tell anyone that they should, you know, seek out sport
Speaker 1: fishing as a means of obtaining calories. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: in Oregon, at least for I think it's five five bucks,
Speaker 1: nine bucks. It's up to ten bucks now. But so
Speaker 1: for ten bucks get a shellfish license. You go down
Speaker 1: to a cove and you rape cockles for an hour
Speaker 1: and then you have, you know, an enormous amount of
Speaker 1: food that you can do all of the preservation that
Speaker 1: we've talked about. You can also just make chowder and
Speaker 1: freeze it, you know whatever. But there's a lot of
Speaker 1: ways to to cheaply obtain calories from out in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, well that's going to do it for us today. Um,
Speaker 1: until next time, remember experiment on your friends with different
Speaker 1: medical care treatments. So don't do that. Although on the
Speaker 1: other hand, look up the if you are in the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest, there is the Portland Fruit Tree Project up
Speaker 1: here which goes around and connects gleaners with fruit trees
Speaker 1: that need to be gleaned. Um, so people who have
Speaker 1: over abundant trees that they don't want all the stuff.
Speaker 1: That's a really great resource. In other cities. I'm sure
Speaker 1: there's other things, and also the Falling Fruit map, so
Speaker 1: you can go online and if there's not already one
Speaker 1: in your area. They also make it really easy to
Speaker 1: be able to chart and put in trees in your area.
Speaker 1: So if it's saying that you're excited about and you
Speaker 1: love identifying trees, you can go in and actually start
Speaker 1: charting your neighborhood. Also figure out how to identify, you know,
Speaker 1: five wild plants that grow in your area that you
Speaker 1: can eat, because it's always nice to have more variety
Speaker 1: and it's fun to be out on a walk and
Speaker 1: be like, oh cool, now I have a thing that
Speaker 1: I can toss in with dinner when I get back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And we've talked about how there's like the poor version
Speaker 1: of the cheap version, there's also like the centrist version
Speaker 1: and the radical version of that. The centrist version is
Speaker 1: like I just want to know, like what kind of
Speaker 1: edible fruits grow naturally in my area. The more radical
Speaker 1: version is I'm going to start guerrilla grows of edible
Speaker 1: foods on like available in my area. I'm gonna seedball
Speaker 1: some ship. I'm gonna like very get a surgeon with
Speaker 1: my yeah to prepare food. Yeah, things that grow rise
Speaker 1: only take root real easy in the ecosystems they like,
Speaker 1: and are real hard to get rid of once they
Speaker 1: get crime gardens. I'm not going to say people should
Speaker 1: tear out the random trees that cities plant and then
Speaker 1: replace if you were, but it's possible to do trees
Speaker 1: didn't make food with trees that did make food in
Speaker 1: the same spot, probably nobody would notice except the people
Speaker 1: who got food, and there would be more or free
Speaker 1: calories in your area. If you know, the kind of
Speaker 1: things that have been happening in the last several years
Speaker 1: continue to happen. All right, that's the episode. That's the episode.