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The Self-Sufficient Gourmand (On 1/3 Acre!)
Jeff Vail, A Theory of Power (blog)
I’m pretty confident that you could drop me in most any climate and I could survive. I attended the Air Force’s Combat Survival Training course, learned that many things are quite edible, even if they do taste like crap (most notably: boiled thistle stalk!). It’s tough to “find” table salt in the wild, but ants are surprisingly tasty, full of protein, and practically everywhere (and the scent trails that they leave on fresh greens tastes like Italian dressing… sort of). Food self-sufficiency doesn’t seem that tough. Likewise, people can meet their basic nutritional requirements quite easily through gardening in a very small space-though endless boiled potatoes and roasted turnips doesn’t sound very appetizing. Never the less, the potential for food self-sufficiency is critical for my theory of rhizome society, as it is broadly predicated upon the notion of “minimal self-sufficiency.”
But that’s where I draw the line. I know that I can “get by,” but that doesn’t mean I want to give up fine foods. So what are the prospects of combining food self-sufficiency and a gourmet diet?
I laid out the kinds of food I would like to “survive” on-those things that I usually cook at home: a wide assortment of ultra-thin-crust pizzas, Spanish tapas, Mediterranean appetizers, hearty salads, fresh fruit, occasional Thai or Indian curries, etc. Fortunately (and perhaps not coincidentally), the climate constraints that I am dealing with (in this case, Southern Arizona) work fairly well for these food crops. How much land will it take to keep one person “in curry” with these lofty culinary goals? My answer may surprise you: about 1/3 of an acre.
(10 April 2007)
Urban farming thrives in Cuba
Jason Malik, People and Plantet
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cubans in towns and cities began spontaneously to grow their own food – organically – in whatever spaces available. In doing so, they started a revolution in food production which now makes a major contribution to their health and wellbeing. This is the first of a two-part article. ..
Founded in 1994 on a smaller nine-acre parcel of land, Vivero Alamar today is a 140-person venture growing a wide range of fruits and vegetables. A patchwork quilt of orchards, shade houses, and row crops provides a steady harvest of bright green lettuces, carrots, tomatoes, avocados, culinary and medicinal herbs, chard, and cucumbers. The crops are healthy-looking, well tended, and all grown without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. Vivero Alamar is a completely organic operation.
Upon harvest, the farm’s produce is sold to the neighbours at a colourful farm stand. Vivero Alamar also sells a range of organic composts and mulches for families’ use, as well as a broad selection of patio plants, propagated on site. In 2005 this neighbourhood-managed, worker-owned cooperative earned approximately $180,000. After capital improvements and operating expenses are taken into account, that translates to about $500 per worker annually; not bad, considering that the Cuban minimum wage is $10 per month. ..
The average per-capita calorie intake fell from 2,900 a day in 1989 to 1,800 calories in 1995. Protein consumption plummeted 40 per cent. As Cubans lost weight, cats disappeared from the streets of Havana, destined for family soup pots.
Then the Cubans went to work, proving that necessity is, in fact, the mother of invention. Without government direction or urging – an important point, given the state-run nature of Cuban society – people began to spontaneously grow their own food. In the cities, residents took over garbage dumps, parking lots, and abandoned corners, and started to plant gardens and build chicken coops In the countryside, the old-timers went back to the fields and showed people how they could make do with oxen and using their own hands to do the labour.
“We started this with no money,” said Vilda Figueroa, who built one of the first urban gardens in Havana and who now hosts a nutrition education programme on television with her husband, Pepe. “We knew that the most valuable thing was the support of the community. So we started training volunteers who could horizontally spread the knowledge among their neighbours. We wanted something grassroots so we could popularize this idea of small-scale production.” ..
(11 Apr 2007)
Apiculture
Sarah Rich and David Zaks, WorldChanging
If ever you needed a visual example of the value of ecosystem services, try envisioning an army of human laborers attempting to pollinate an orchard of fruit trees by hand, one blossom at a time. Absurdly enough, an alarming decrease of bee populations worldwide, known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), has some farmers hiring teams to do just that.
With much of our focus on bigger species as indications of environmental crisis — polar bears drowning, grizzly bears terminating hibernation early — we sometimes forget about the little creatures that keep things in balance. But bees are an important provider of the ecosystem service of pollination, and as calamity strikes it is all the more obvious how important they are in the agricultural economy. From a strictly financial perspective, pollination is an invaluable service, provided by bees at no cost. But the cost we’d incur if the buzzing workers disappeared has been estimated at anywhere between $14 billion and $92 billion in the U.S. alone.
There’s also speculation that genetic modification may be contributing to physiological dysfunctions in bees which lead to their decline.
(12 April 2007)
