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Foraging is green eating at its purest
Cara Smusiak, Los Angeles Times
When people think of eco-friendly foods, they often think of organic foods and family farms. But foraging for wild foods is perhaps the purest way to eat green.
Foraging is harvesting indigenous, wild plants and fungi, as well as fishing and hunting–it’s all about eating what the land provides. Because foraged plants are indigenous, they are best suited for the soil in your area, so they grow efficiently and in abundance, without the care, tending and treatments required of farming. And since most people forage close to home, the carbon footprint of your foraged foods is almost zero.
While many people think foraging is for people who live out in the country, nothing could be further from the truth. Urban dwellers can forage both in the city, and in outlying areas.
Journalist and urban forager Becky Lerner lived off foods she foraged for a week last May, chronicling her culinary adventure at CultureChange.org. Her mission was to eat only foods she foraged from along sidewalks, in parks and wilderness areas, and in yards (gardens were off limits) in Portland.
Lerner, who writes about foraging at FirstWays.com and teaches introductory urban foraging, writes that foraging isn’t just about finding sustenance during emergencies. “At its core, wild food offers you a deeper way to explore your relationship to the land outside your door, to recognize the gifts Gaia (the Greek goddess of the Earth) has left for you.”
Foraging might sound fun at first, but it isn’t as easy as swinging by the local market.
(20 November 2010)
Pointed out by Jan Lundberg of Culture Change. With his permission we posted selctions from the series: Living on foraged wild foods for a solid week in the city. -BA
Food in Uncertain Times: How to Grow and Store the 5 Crops You Need to Survive
Makenna Goodman and Carol Deppe, Alternet
Having food resiliency is as much about learning how to store and use food properly as it is about growing it. The key is learning interdependence not independence.
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In an age of erratic weather and instability, it’s increasingly important to develop a greater self-reliance when it comes to food. And because of this, more than ever before, farmers are developing new gardening techniques that help achieve a greater resilience. Longtime gardener and scientist Carol Deppe, in her new book The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times, offers a wealth of unique and expansive information for serious home gardeners and farmers who are seeking optimistic advice. Do you want to know more about the five crops you need to survive through the next thousand years? What about tips for drying summer squash, for your winter soups? Ever thought of keeping ducks on your land? Read on.
Makenna Goodman: Many gardeners (both beginners and more serious growers) come across obstacles they might not have planned for. In your new book, The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times, you talk about the need for real gardening techniques for both good times and bad. What is the first step toward achieving this kind of resilience?
Carol Deppe: The basic issues are getting more control over our food, getting lots higher quality and more delicious food, and enhancing the resilience of our food supply. There are three ways to do that. The first is through local buying patterns and trade. A second is through knowing how to store or process food that is available locally, whether we grow it ourselves or not. The third is gardening. In The Resilient Gardener, I talk as much about storing and using food as growing it. I love gardening, but not everyone is in a position to garden every year of their lives.
However the person who has learned to make spectacular applesauce or cider or apple butter or pies can often trade some of the processed products for all the apples needed. Buying local food supports local food resilience.
(21 October 2010)
Long article. -BA
Cities can feed themselves
Graham Brookman, InDaily (Australia)
MOST humans now live in cities, and the planet’s most productive land and most secure water sources are steadily being consumed by these concrete and bitumen behemoths.
Australians, once significant net food exporters, are increasingly eating food grown or manufactured overseas – to the detriment of our planet’s life support system. It is time for Australian cities to employ an ethical framework and intelligent design in our production of serious quantities of food.
Starting from the overarching aims of caring for the environment and for communities and lowering consumption, urban designers, engineers and politicians should reject energy-intensive shortcuts that assume endless growth and demand high use of non-renewable resources.
Plants begin the food production chain and need nutrients: water, sunlight and a growing medium. Simply by a city closing its water and nutrient cycles it can be made significantly more self-reliant in terms of its food.
A sustainable city catches its own domestic water from roofs and stores stormwater in aquifers or dams for public use. Even ‘arid Adelaide’ is capable of being significantly weaned from river systems without resorting to energy-intensive desalination plants, as demonstrated by excellent the study by Sustainable Focus.
Treating sewerage water and allowing it to run into the sea represents the hemorrhaging of both high-quality water and nutrients from the city’s life support system.
Of our capital cities Adelaide has the best record for sewerage water recycling at almost 25 per cent, but most nitrogen and phosphorus (the nutrients that really make plants grow) is unnecessarily lost in the treatment process.
Despite this low rate of re-utilisation it is no secret that much of the city’s fruit and vegetable supply – and a fair proportion of the superb wine from the Southern Vales – is already grown using recycled effluent water.
High volumes of waste food and green waste from the city are already composted outside the city, and most goes to peri-urban farms to grow food that is then returned to the city. But much more can be recovered before waste goes to landfill, and composting systems can be made far more efficient in retaining nutrients.
(9 November 2010)
Suggested by EB contributor Michael Lardelli. -BA
A Rapture of Humus and Human Aversion to Waste
Robert C. Koehler, Common Dreams
Short Essay on Our ‘Humble Piles’
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Day after the election and, wow, there it was, a story in my local paper that cried out that the world was changing in a sensible direction. I simply had to stare at it for a while before I could even read it.
The world-changing aspect was simply the fact that the paper – the Chicago Tribune, which I don’t expect to cross serious taboo lines – ran it at all, as a feature story in its Chicagoland section: “Taking the ‘waste’ out of human waste,” by Lauren R. Harrison.
It was a story, to put it indelicately, about the composting of human excrement for eventual use as garden manure. It was straightforward and informational, above the fold, with photos and graphics, 1,500 words, a jump to page 5. That’s all: a feature story about a small, innovative program with a cute name, Humble Pile, and a daunting mission to turn an aversion-shrouded waste product into what it really is, an extraordinary resource.
Critical as I am of the mainstream media for dumbing down or sensationalizing so much of the news and reporting it in a context that feels like a padded cell, I take a moment to applaud the Tribune for stepping out of its comfort zone and risking censure by the easily offended. We live in a society that has so many layers of euphemism protecting us from the realities of our bodily functions, this couldn’t have been easy.
If we are going to change our relationship with nature, which is the beginning of environmental sustainability, then addressing the aversion and shame surrounding this basic function of life is an important place to start. Only human beings create “waste” of any sort, and in so doing proceed to waste enormous resources futilely attempting to remove it from the circle of life.
(11 November 2010)
Good Things Come in Small Farming Practices
Helen Greenwood, The Age (Australia)
Fear and fertility are the two biggest stumbling blocks to Australian farmers shifting their agricultural model from industrial to artisan, writes Helen Greenwood.
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AUSTRALIAN farmers are looking for the same thing that American farmers need, and that is to farm profitably, and build soil and heal the land while farming.”
Joel Salatin, hailed by Time magazine for his prize-winning, pioneering work as a sustainable farmer, is in Sydney to convince farmers that small-scale food producers can be financially successful and rejuvenate the environment.
”That’s not happening for many farmers,” Salatin says. ”Many farmers are going out of business and there’s a lot of land degradation. The fact is that industrial agriculture has destroyed a lot of land and destroyed a lot of the food and a lot of the health of people around the world.”
Salatin, 53, the patriarch of Polyface farm in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, and well-known for his Oscar-nominated film Food Inc, knows his message about small farming is up against conventional wisdom and the deep pockets of international agribusinesses.
”Our conventional farming neighbours [in Virginia] really believe that if we don’t vaccinate and medicate, drug and corn-feed cows we are like Typhoid Mary, we are going to spread disease that will destroy the planet’s food supply,” he says. ”They’re being fed pseudo science.
(19 November 2010)
Design For Life – The Food Forest Story : Movie Trailer (video)
The Food Forest via Youtube
‘Design for Life –The Food Forest Story’ tells the compelling story of 2 young baby-boomers who travelled the world questing for a sustainable way for humans to live on the planet. They adopt the Permaculture design system and build an amazing organic home, farm and lifestyle. It is a pacy and inspirational film, rich with interviews, philosophy and practical examples drawn from homes, town and cities. The 70 minute version (plus 25 minute virtual tour of The Food Forest) is available for individual sale and community screenings via www.foodforest.com.au
(6 October 2010)
More information. Recommended by EB contributor Michael Lardelli. -BA
