RELIEF FOR STRESSED OUT BUDGETS

My apologies for all the repetition in the past few blogs. I am doing this, quite frankly, to conveniently save writings that I will want to use for various purposes over the next year or so, in a place where I can find them easily. In each, I present much of the same information, but expressed in different ways. My suggestion to those of you who have been following these writings over the past months is to quickly scan a new blog to see if it says something in a way that catches your attention, or imagination, in a different way than was done before. If you find something particularly good, please let me know in a comment. That will help me decide which wording to choose for the introductory chapter of the new book I am working on. Thanks.

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Here is a press release I prepared this morning for the Edible Wild Plant Workshop we will be conducting on Saturday, August 9 at Lucky Penny Farm in Garrettsville OH. For more information and/or to register for it, contact Abbe Turner at 330 527 0548, or at luckypennyfarm@verizon.net. Last year it attracted over 170 people, of which 50 had to be turned away for lack of space. This year, there will be three two hour sessions starting at 9:00 a.m., so we can hopefully accommodate all who want to participate. To make sure you are one of them, however, please get your reservation in within the next couple of weeks.

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Life goes in cycles. There are years of plenty—plenty of food, plenty of money, low gas prices—and years where all the negatives seem to line up in a row and threaten to crush us, like now. High oil prices help us realize, by all the things in our life that now cost more, how much we depend on oil.

The result of all these increases? More and more people are finding that they don’t have enough income to pay rent AND buy food! Realities we never thought we’d face are now here and changing our priorities. We are beginning to look for help and at least some of the solutions relate to buying our food from local growers to save on transportation costs.

“At least part of the answer for providing food locally lies right outside our back door,” says Dr. Peter Gail, Director of Goosefoot Acres Center for Resourceful Living, in Cleveland OH. “It’s organic, free and there’s absolutely nothing more local than food growing 6 feet from your kitchen door.”

These vegetables grow in cracks between your patio stones, in your flower beds, plant containers, around the corners of your garage or barn, in your vegetable garden and in unsprayed lawns. And they are real vegetables—plants brought here over the last 200 years by our ancestors as food and medicine, and still used by the cultural groups that brought them, both here and in their homeland.

Up until now, we have called these plants “weeds”, and spent lots of time and money trying to kill them. And up till now, attempts to get us to recognize these plants as vegetables have fallen on deaf ears, because we didn’t need them. There were plenty of vegetables and fruits at reasonable prices on grocer’s shelves, and we had plenty of money to buy them.

But that’s not necessarily true any more. Times are getting tighter all over. Unpredictable weather has reduced crop availability below demand for many commodities. Fuel costs and scarcity are driving prices up, and adding to the stress on all of our budgets.

Gail says “The time has come to begin familiarizing ourselves with the foods around us. The problem, however, is which weeds are the true vegetables? How do we recognize them, and what do we do with them to make them really tasty after we know what they are? “

On August 9, at Lucky Penny Farm in Garrettsville, you will have a chance to find out. Gail and his staff will introduce you to eight or ten of the best wild vegetables, give you a chance to taste them raw and cooked into delicious dishes, and send you home with recipes.

Paying the rent AND supplying food in an economic crisis

In the Mormon Church, all members are strongly urged to store at least three months ---and ultimately a full year's supply-- of staples to fortify ourselves against whatever crises might occur in our lives.

Right now, the crisis seems to be that fuel costs so much that people can't pay for the gas to get to work AND for food to feed their family.

Those families that heeded this counsel and planned ahead are at least partially protected from this economic crisis. However, most people, even in the Mormon Church, are unaware that an abundance of food--locally grown, organic and free-- is right under their feet, just waiting to be of service.

From time immemorial, staples people store as food supplies have been white stuff --- flour, sugar, rice, beans, lard (source of fat or oil), milk (used to be the cow, now it is dry milk), oats, wheat, and so on.

Other than the rice and beans, this isn’t dinner—it is foundation! Anyone who lives on just this for any period of time is going to be seriously berift of basic vitamins and many of the minerals, especially the trace ones.

It is important to remember that the pioneers loading their wagons with bags of this stuff, and the settlers planting their roots in the West, didn’t intend this to be their only food. It was the bread, the pie crusts, the starches, the proteins, the fats, into which they would sandwich the berries, greens, meats and fish that they would harvest along the way and grow in their gardens and forage from the wild lands around them once they got settled.

Today’s society has largely drifted –no, better to say “hastened” or “rapidly run” ---away from a lifestyle that forages, hunts and grows their own, and then cooks from scratch. From the time women went to work in the early 1950's and got out of the kitchen (and garden), the door has been opened for processed and fast food purveyors to enter, so that now, in 2008, those in the under-50 crowd who know how, and actually enjoy, cooking are becoming rarer and rarer. It is easier to open a box, add water, heat and serve.

This crowd is in for a rude awakening, and it seems to be coming sooner rather than later.

I was listening to NPR as I woke up to birds singing and the sun rising at my grandson’s scout camp in Central Ohio recently. The newscaster, who was probably no more than 30 or 35 herself, was reporting that, with the increase in fuel prices cutting deeply into everyone’s pocketbook, many families are having to choose between paying the rent and buying food for their families. There just isn’t enough money to do both. And, so many are in this situation that Hunger Centers and Food Pantries are unable to keep up with the demand, and are having to send families home hungry.

Now, back in my childhood days, this is where the Superhero—Batman, Superman, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman and the rest—would swoop in, eradicate the bad guys who were creating the problem, and return the system to the status quo.

So where are the superheros now? Frankly, we don’t need them. In Christian scripture, Matthew 6:24-34, Christ asks (paraphrased) “Why worry about what you will eat. Don’t I feed the sparrows and aren’t you more important than them. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and I will feed you”

So, if God is going to feed us, where is He hiding all that free food?

The answer is as simple as opening our eyes and looking around to see what has been invisible up to now. More specifically, stand on a proper untreated lawn—one that hasn't been treated with chemicals and still has all the plants in it —and look down at the ground beneath your feet. For, right there, in most cases, you will find between 4 and 6 vegetables that are tastier when prepared properly and more nutritious than anything you can buy in the store. During the Great Depression and World War II, when food was rationed or unavailable, many mothers fed their families very successfully on these plants.

Where did these vegetables come from? In most cases, they were brought to America by our ancestors, mostly at the behest of the emigration companies sponsoring them who would tell them to bring seeds of all the plants they valued for food and medicine with them, because who knew whether they would find them in this new land.

So dandelions, plantain, lambsquarters, red root pigweed, purslane and many other plants came with every shipload of immigrants. Plantain was so valuable that it traveled with them to every early English and Scottish settlement. Before they arrived, there had been no plantain. After, they were so common that the Natives called the plant “White Man’s Foot”.

The bottom line is that 80% of the plants we call weeds and pay millions for chemicals to eradicate each year are really the vegetables and medicines our ancestors made great sacrifices to bring here for us to have. Each group had different ones, however, and as the seeds escaped from their gardens, they entered other gardens in which the inhabitants didn’t know their value, and so to them they were a nuisance, and had to be eliminated.

Today, people walk by veritable patches of delicious produce and DON'T EVEN SEE THEM. They are totally invisible, just a mass of green. To test this recently, I found a patch containing jewelweed, plantain, violets, dandelions, oxalis and poke mingled together and asked a bunch of scouts and their leaders to look at the patch and tell me what they saw. Many couldn't even distinguish differences-- they all looked the same to them--- and none had any idea that any of them were actually food. (After all, none of them were wrapped in plastic!) What a surprise they had when they tasted the sour grass (Oxalis) and found out how good it was.

This is the sad situation we are currently in—not only don’t we know how to grow gardens or to cook from scratch and preserve foods for winter anymore, we don’t even know what is food and what isn’t!! Seems we have a lot of work in front of us.

The first thing we need to do is identify in our community all the old folks, especially the ethnics, for whom wild plants were important in their early years, and who still remember some or all of them. This isn’t hard to do. Just hop on a bus of seniors on a tour and ask ”How many of you have ever eaten dandelions?” Half the hands will go up. There you are—at least half of those will remember how to prepare them so they are tasty.

And I’ll guarantee you that most of those will jump at the chance to teach what they know if given an appreciative audience.

On August 9, 2008 at the Lucky Penny Farm in Garrettsville OH, we will be introducing people to this delicious produce. If you want to be one of the beneficiaries of this experience, call Abbe Turner at 330 527-0548 or email her at luckypennyfarm@verizon.net.