100 Friend Diet

A few weeks ago on Raise the Hammer, I made an offhand comment about the new criteria for stallholders in the downtown Farmer's Market, by saying that the relationships we are cultivating among local food producers will be invaluable at such a time when oil prices spike, and the local grocery store's warehouse on wheels inventory philosophy reveals itself as being incredibly shortsighted.

Well, we have decided to take the experiment in cultivating food producer friends a step further.

You have heard of the 100 mile diet, where you only eat food grown within 100 miles of where you live. Usually cheating of some kind is allowed, such as in Barbara Kingsolver's amazing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle where each family member was allowed to choose one 'out of area' food item they would keep. In these situations, it's almost always coffee or chocolate.

Instead, we are going to try and serve a thanksgiving meal, with as many ingredients as possible that have been produced, rather than sold, by people we know personally. And they must be within an hour or so drive of our house. Not as any kind of spiritual mileage number, rather that's just about the longest round trip our kids will sit through in the car without melting down.

As I write, my wife is on google researching local grain mills and dairies to try and figure out where she's going to get the ingredients for the bread she plans to bake, and the butter for the potatoes (whose supplier we already know well).

And it's not that we need to be "hey, can you come over and help me build a fence in my backyard" buddies. We just need to know them. To be able to put a face to a name and say "These beans came from Russ, and the potatoes and carrots are from our friends the Shearleas"

It's a daunting task, but one that leads to a lot more than just eating well. Building community deliberately is not something most people are familiar with how to do - us included. It's one thing to stumble across an already existing community (such as Raise the Hammer, or local foodies, etc) and realize you share a passion with others. It's another entirely to pull into the driveway of a local turkey farmer and say "Hey, we just wanted to know where our bird was coming from."

It's an exercise in connecting with an as-yet nonexistent community, but also with our food. We know where meat comes from, and that it was once a living breathing animal. And to be fair, my wife has a huge advantage over me in that regard, her father having been a hunter when she was growing up. But in an age of styrofoam and plastic wrap, it can be easy to forget that the drumstick you are eating was once attached to something that had a life. In many cases, depending on how little you paid for that club pack of drumsticks, and utterly wretched life.

So wish us well, I'll be sure to report back after Thanksgiving how well we've done, but judging from the remarks my wife has been making while I've been writing this, I suspect the answers will tell us more about a desperately broken food supply system than about our effort.

Labour (saving) day

So as the sun goes down on another Labour day, it seems fitting that I would write about labour. Lots and lots of labour.

This weekend, we canned 7 pints of peaches, 8 jars of hot sauce, a quart of lacto-fermenting pickles, and 5 pints of garden (i.e. non-cucumber) pickles. My wife baked a dozen muffins, nearly 6 dozen cookies (two types), made home-made granola, and a loaf of bread. We also went into the woods today and gleaned 6 lbs of apples from an orchard that was abandoned about 60 years ago – all for the farmhouse cider I'm going to start next weekend.

This was on top of all of the normal chores that need to get done to keep a house of 4 people going.

We are, quite frankly, exhausted. Normally we're pretty tuckered out by the end of the weekend, but tonight we are bone tired.

Two very frightening realizations came to me this evening as we were discussing the implications of this for a post-industrial society.

1.We are this exhausted despite the unlimited availability of devices such as a bread maker (used only for mixing the dough), a dishwasher, a washing machine, and a stand mixer.

2.Despite having nearly a well stocked pantry, and several dozen bags of home-grown veggies in the freezer on top of the canning we did in the last 72 hours, we have put up barely enough food to last us about a month. Maybe 6 weeks, tops.


Did I mention we are exhausted.

Yes, we are lightweights, but it brings me to an uncomfortable conclusion. The post-industrial economy that many of us have been talking about for some time now is not only going to be inconvenient (as I say often), it's going to be downright difficult.

At the farm down the road, Russ was apparently up until 3 am the other morning, canning enough tomatoes to get him through the year. Granted, he didn't have to get up at 5:45 the following morning and get ready to hop a GO train to Toronto to go to work, but 5-10-15 years down the road, how many of us will be doing both? How many of us will be trying to grow and preserve (or even buy-super-cheap-in-season-at-the-farmer's-market and preserve) in times of plenty, along with working 9-5s to make sure there is enough cash coming into the household to cover expenses that just can't be bartered for.

I know I'm painting a pretty bleak picture here, and frankly reading Dimitri Orlov is not helping one little bit. But you only have to turn on the TV, or open a newspaper (remember those? It's kind of like the internet, only it's on paper, and all the information is a day old) to see that a quick return to the heady days of even three years ago is appearing increasingly unlikely.

The combination of an unyielding environment/resource base and a population unwilling to compromise can lead to some pretty predictable outcomes.

This leads me to the second major topic of conversation this weekend. Peak Electricity. I have blogged before about how Ontario is moving to voluntary power rationing (they are calling it time of use rates, but potato-potahto). It occurred to me this weekend while we were using all of our very convenient labour saving devices, that two things will make the grid more secure: People using less power, and fewer people using any power in the first place.

Time of use rates do both.

For one, with the spike in power rates, as it stands now, the highest amount I pay is 7.5c/kwh, wheras under the new regime, if I use power any time during my normal day, I'm going to be paying at least 8c/kwh, if not higher. My bill is, quite simply, going to go up, no matter how many 'power hungry' chores I try to put off until the weekend or after 9pm. Just running my fridge, stove, and furnace (FSF) are going to cost up to 40% more than they do now during peak times.

Now, imagine if I was living on the margins of society, and could only barely afford the power I'm using now. I am conserving as much as I can, but even the FSF cost money to run, money I barely have.

Now those costs go up considerably, and I now have two options: Have my power cut off, or start skipping meals. The first clears up lots of excess capacity on the grid. The second necessitates the kind of weekend I've just had.

Suddenly the idea of a backyard garden, and doing some home canning becomes way more appealing. Provided that I have the skills, support, and self-confidence to give it a go in the first place...not a given by any stretch.

So I guess what I'm saying is that for many people in Ontario, the whole “canning tomatoes until 3 am and going to work for 9 the next morning” may not be forced on them after some unforeseen spike in oil prices – it may be forced on them next summer. Provided they still have the power that will be required to do the canning in the first place. All because there isn't enough generating capacity in Ontario to meet the projected needs in the next 10 years or so.

Resource scarcity isn't a problem for 5-10-15 years down the road. For a whole lot of people in Ontario, It's here. Now.