Growing your own Frankenfood

Week 14 notes

There is considerable appeal to growing your own food. I have to say I’ve tried it some and its great fun. I’m worried, however, about whether I could grow enough on my property to sustain anything, let alone feed my family of 5 (including me). As PeakProphet showed in one of his great posts, there are a lot of things that just grow in your back yard (or front yard for me!) that are edible, and the Internet offers a lot of resources for discovering how to actually identify these things. Some time ago I used to use GardenForum a lot – you could post a picture of some weed or native plant growing in your yard, ask “what is this”, and BAM! In a few hours someone would tell you what it was. And, of course, reference books are great too. One of my favorites is a 1950s Army survival book I got at Amazon. Another great one is “Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places” by Steve Brill. There are tons of resources on wild edibles you can find at your favorite bookstore. And I think learning this is a very positive thing. I remember another great book, “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond, where he told you if you met a guy from New Guinea, he would likely ask you what kind of plants were good to eat where you live. I’m afraid most of us would look like morons to this gentleman, since we don’t really have much concept of what grows wild around us, let alone whats good to eat. (There’s a dark side to meeting this fellow from New Guinea, too, and I’ll talk about that in the future.)

Other great books are concerned with growing food in small places. Things like the permaculture handbook “Gaia’s Garden” by Hemingway…”Lasagna Gardening” by Patricia Lanza…the list goes on and on. Again, I think it’s a positive thing to know about these methods and learn, and above all to plant green growing things and get back to nature, however you can. And above all, start planting! Don’t worry if its too late in the season. This year I started planting, even though I didn’t have my raised beds ready. The stuff I planted may not amount to anything, but its growing now, and it will be interesting to see what happens. Another great source and inspiration is ediblelandscaping.com which sells plants that are great for landscaping any home. They look good, grow well, and are edible to boot.

But sadly, I worry whether this type of agriculture can produce the food we need to truly survive and thrive. Even victory gardens in WWII were not intended to provide all a family’s needs, they were intended to reduce pressure on the food supply and increase morale (you could feel empowered that you were doing SOMETHING). I suspect it also helped people think about nature and the circle of life, etc, which is terribly poignant during such tragic times. A world without oil would be in the same position.

Although I’m a techie, I’m not a believer in Deus ex machina of science, that somehow something great will be invented somewhere and deployed to Save Us All.
But let’s give our imaginations a trial, here. In a past post I posited that if local food production became super vital, the Government could very well seize under utilized land and start producing vegetables. I’d prefer that they let the Free Market do its magic in its own odd way, because I believe somewhat in the product and services evolution that comes from capitalism, but in reality I suspect they’d take the land, bid it out to someone like ADM so they could say they used the market, and they’d set to work on it with underpaid, underinsured serfs to Feed Us. But let’s continue on. Supposed we truly wanted to empower people to grow their own gardens in places that are currently small and underutilized. While I am not a fan of genetic engineering but if we truly face a World Without Oil and food shortages are critical, don’t be surprised at what kind of compromises the world may make. Think about oak trees that were genetically enhanced to produce sweet acorns. Supposedly such a thing exits – there are sometimes oak trees whose acorns don’t have the usual amount of tannins in them. Oak trees take a LONG time to grow, but suppose modern genetics could create these things by simply inoculating existing stands of trees. (I’m not a biologist, but isn’t this what we do with genetic therapies?) You get someone to stand there with a gun and shoot the squirrels and birds that would be drawn to such a thing (and eat them, of course), then come harvest time you get a bounty of non-tannic acorns. Is it possible? Or think about kudzu. Its invasive around here, but it IS edible. What if some FrankenKudzu could also produce better tasting flowers, roots and leaves? The possibilities are endless, though clearly it would take a major R&D effort by a bunch of underpaid scientists working on a great Manhattan Project style undertaking. Sounds like something that would happen during a great world crisis…if there is time…

(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment.)

Eminent Domain for local food???

Week 10 notes
We had a "water cooler" conversation at work the other day and one guy said he wasn't worried about food shortages because he had enough land (70 acres) to hole up with his family. He thought he could forage & hunt. I told him he may be right but if the government needed his land for local food production they'd take it. "Over my dead body!" he said smiling. I told him I wonder how many people said the same thing when TVA said they'd dam up the rivers and flood their family properties, or when the Dept of the Interior (or whatever it was at the time) told folks to move so their land could become a National Park. He stopped smiling then. I would think if things got bad (well worse, as far as shortages) innovative people would start to farm their land for crop production - most of the land around here that's not being turned into subdivisions simply supports a few cattle - but I know our topsoil isn't as desirable as, say, Iowa or the Dakotas. I need to do some research on whether current food production in E. Tennessee could actually feed its population.

The rising diesel prices has our coop worried. We'll have to run the numbers again and see where we are going.

My project (the one that's supporting me 90% of the time at work) was supposed to have a review in DC this week but we decided to have a conference call instead. We'll ask for funding for next year to continue with Phase II of the project, but with things the way they are I don't know if we (or anybody) has a chance in hell of getting funded.