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Survival Challenge:
Can a City Girl Live Off Wild Food For a Week in Portland?
Becky Lerner and Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
From May 24 through May 30, local “Wild Girl” Becky Lerner will be eating an entirely wild diet as she forages from sidewalks, parks, wilderness areas and yards in Portland. There will be no dumpster diving or mooching off gardens — Lerner will be surviving on wild edibles only.
“I’m interested in foraging as a way to connect with the land and explore a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human,” Lerner said. “It’s also a valuable survival skill: Should the trappings of modernity become unavailable to us one day, knowing how to find food without grocery stores or even farms will surely come in handy.”
Lerner readily admits that her pesco-vegetarianism is in question. She will face the decision of whether to endure a vegetable fast — or else eat insects, go fishing or even consider dining on roadkill.
Lerner will be blogging for the nonprofit web magazine CultureChange.org on a daily basis during the project, updating readers with photos, video and writings about the foods she finds, how she prepares it, how she is feeling (satisfied? starved? desperate for brownies?) and how it changes her life.
CultureChange.org is a nonprofit web magazine published by Jan Lundberg that explores issues of peak oil and sustainability. Lundberg is a California native and former oil-industry analyst who founded the Sail Transport Network.
“Wild plants, especially weeds, present exciting possibilities for sustainable post-oil living,” Lundberg said, “and for those interested in stretching their budget.”
Both the white and blue flowers in the photo above are camas. The white one will kill you, but the blue one is food. The native people of the Portland area considered blue camas root a staple. It took three days of cooking in underground fire pits to make it edible. The bulb is said to taste like a sugary, sweet potato.
A few of the local wild plants Lerner intends to forage are stinging nettles, dandelion, bull thistle, wapato (“duck potato”), cattail, plantain, Japanese knotweed, dock, clover, chickweed, chicory, miner’s lettuce and morel mushrooms.
Lerner is a 26-year-old freelance journalist living in northeast Portland who writes about primitive skills, wilderness survival and wild food on her blog, www.FirstWays.com. She began her studies in Ithaca, NY, in September 2007, where she lived in a tipi at the Turtle Dreams organic farm and did a nine-month apprenticeship in wilderness survival with the organization Primitive Pursuits (www.primitivepursuits.net). After moving to Portland in fall 2008, she has been studying with herbalist Emily Porter of TrackersNW and WildHeartsHealing. Lerner was born and raised in New Jersey.
“Before I started foraging, I viewed wild spaces as valuable in terms of beauty, but now I see them as nature’s pantries,” Lerner said. “It completely changed the way I look at plants — and especially the sidewalk.”
(20 May 2009)
The Lazy Farmer
Michael Mackenzie, Bush Telegraph, ABC (Australia)
Michael Mackenzie: Now conventional wisdom does suggest that to be an innovative farmer, you actually need to be working on the farm. But our guest today has a different theory. His philosophy is to use innovative practices on the farm to free up time to work off farm. But how can you be an innovative farmer if you’re spending half your time away from the business?
It’s something that cropping and cattle farmer Bruce Maynard, from Narromine, on the Central West Plains of New South Wales knows all about. Bruce not only runs a cattle and cropping property that’s almost sustaining itself, he also works three days a week for his local Landcare office and on top of that, he has a number of other offshoot businesses that help to fill the coffers. Some of his mates call him lazy; he sounds more like a genius to be, and Bruce Maynard has popped into our Dubbo studios to have a chat. Hi, Bruce.
Bruce Maynard: Hi, Michael how are you?
Michael Mackenzie: I’m well, thanks. Do you mind being called lazy?
Bruce Maynard: No, it’s a tag we’re fairly happy with.
… Michael Mackenzie: So in terms of farming innovation where you’re standing at the moment, future planning is vital then.
Bruce Maynard: Yes, we like to try and take the 50-year and the 100-year view on things really, and try and design our surroundings to not only serve our family interests, but serve the natural processes as well.
… Bruce Maynard: Yes, we were having difficulties at that time, and that continued pretty much through the 1980s and we got to the end of that stage and really had sat down as a family and decided Well why were we doing what we were doing, and what did we want to do in the future? And the end result of that was really coming to realise that we weren’t really there for the money in the long run. Yes, we did have to have enough to support ourselves in a decent standard, but really we were there for some bigger purpose as a family.
Michael Mackenzie: And what was that purpose?
Bruce Maynard: Really to hopefully hand things on in a better and better shape, as our generations went on. We really see ourselves now as just stewards and only land managers, even though we own the property, we’re only temporarily there, and in our lifetime we should be looking to try and do as best we can and get our farm as close to its natural state as possible, and natural functioning, while still making an economic return.
… Michael Mackenzie: To traditional farmers this must sound extraordinary. I mean you’re planting seed but without tilling the soil; do you water the seeds in?
Bruce Maynard: No we don’t, we actually place them in dry, which is a key to the advance sowing method, so in fact we’re just trying to mimic nature here, and we’re putting a seed in the ground and then when the seasonal conditions allow, that’s when the plant will germinate.
Michael Mackenzie: This sounds extraordinarily lackadaisical I’ve got to say, here Bruce. No wonder you got this maybe a misnomer of being a lazy farmer; you’re just chucking seeds all over the place and when it rains, it rains, and we’ll see what happens. I mean, how do you maximise output from that.
Bruce Maynard: That’s an excellent question and that’s exactly the question that farmers will put to you straight away. They’ll put it in a slightly different way because they’ll ask you about yield, which is exactly what you’ve just asked me about maximising output. And my reply to that is that we don’t care about yield, we care about profit, and natural processes.
Michael Mackenzie: Aren’t they the same thing though?
Bruce Maynard: No, not at all. Unfortunately it’s often confused and in fact this has been going on for decades, and worldwide. And if you can imagine since especially the Second World War, the amount of production that’s increased off agricultural land worldwide has been massive. It’s been quite phenomenal, the extra production. But at that same time, farming industry has become less and less profitable, we’ve lost more people out of our rural areas and our natural environment has been declining.
(2004)
Recommended by Michael Lardelli who was reminded of it by a recent essay by Gene Logsdon: The gentle art of non-gardening.
Ecological Economics and the Food System
Jason Bradford, The Oil Drum: Campfire
With another round of spring planting underway, we thought it might be helpful to bring back and update slightly a post I did over a year ago.
Not included in the article below is a new paper by Weber and Mathews of Carnegie Mellon University on the energy intensity of the U.S. food system. For those of you wanting to get into the details of life cycle analysis and food, that is the article to read. Mike Bomford of Kentucky State University recently reviewed it on his blog too. A key graphic from that paper is shown below.
This is a post that combines theory and practice. The first part is like a typical Oil Drum post with numbers and graphics. The second part is more like a Campfire post, and encourages you to get busy planting food.
“Can we rely on it that a ‘turning around’ will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but whatever answer is given to it will mislead. The answer “yes” would lead to complacency; the answer “no” to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work.”
E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful
(20 May 2009)
Slow Money (Audio)
Crop to Cuisine
In this episode of Crop To Cuisine, we connect the dots between out outdated and broken economic system and our food system. We speak with founder of the Slow Money Alliance, Woody Tasch. We also visit a local farm to see how Slow Money principles can take shape and sustain a farm well into the future. We also hear from Master Gardener Carol O’meara as the gardening season takes off. Aired on May 4, 2009.
(21 May 2009)
Art Eggertsen Speaks on Humanity, Good Food & Animal Welfare (Audio)
Crop to Cuisine
In this episode of Crop To Cuisine we speak with food activist, humanitarian, and animal welfare advocate, Art Eggertsen. Art has worn many hats during his long career in food and health. He joins us in the studio to discuss his accomplishments, his new projects, and his thoughts on the future of food in this country. We hear about lobbying for animal welfare, health, life in Utah, and the planned sustainable community called Entelechy.
(14 May 2009)
