September 24, 2021 • 37 mins
The team talks with Bea and Elaine about how to get cheap produce and how to make that food last longer via preservation including the process of canning, dehydrating, and freezing.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
What's avoiding starvation my autonomous neighborhood collectives. Uh, this is
it could happen here a podcast about things not being
as good as they are and trying to make them better.
I'm Robert Evans my co host today as many days
Garrison Davis Garrison say hello to the people, high people, Garrison.
(00:27):
What are we? What are we? What do we? What
do we? What do we? What do we? What do
we do? What do we? What are we doing today?
Thank you of We are going to be having a
discussion on um food and food preservation and finding. Do
(00:49):
you mean like putting in the freezer? Well, what if
the freezer is not working? The freezer is always working.
This is America. When the power goes out for two weeks,
aren't you Well that's one of our guests for today.
My friends be in a lane um who who you've
heard earlier this week and who We're going to talk
(01:10):
about food storage and particularly again our focus this week
is like we keep getting a lot of people being
like I have no money or very little money or
very little space. I'm not gonna be able to grow things.
How can I possibly you know, gather food store food,
like build resiliency. I don't have any any kind of farmland.
And the good news is, no matter where you live,
(01:32):
things that are edible grow, and you can get those
things and you can find ways to make them last
longer than they would if you just kept them in
a sack. And that's a pretty cool thing to do.
So I'm going to hand it over to be in
a lane. I love for that. Okay, I don't have
much space. I don't have much money. Was kind of
how I got into doing canning in the first place.
(01:52):
For myself, I used to be very, very poor. I
was on food stamps, I had no money. I was
a broke punk. And one of my friends was like, oh, man,
there's this farmer at the farmer's market and if you
help them clean up, they'll let you take away whatever
leftover produce they have that they don't want, So you
(02:13):
can just load up a bag with produce. All you
gotta do is help them load the truck at the
end of the day. So that's what I did every
single Wednesday for the next five years, no matter what come,
hell or high water. But with that that also came
there's you started realizing that there's gluts and then lacks
(02:34):
of things. Um, much like you know, everything that's happening
in society now, just in general, there was seasons when
there was nothing but you were It was easy to
at the end of a farmer's market day walk home
with a fifty pound flat of tomatoes, and you know
times of the year where it was nothing but cabbage,
(02:56):
and you might have wanted tomatoes a lot. And canning
was great because it helped to will out when I
could get things without having to dive into the you know,
sixty books a month, I got in food stamps and
spend it at the farmer's market. On that instead, I
could use it to have a variety of vegetables or
canned goods or other things in order to flavor my raman. Yeah.
(03:16):
I first came at this kind of from working on farms,
where similarly there are gluts. There are times of year
where you literally cannot eat melons fast enough, and everybody
who works on farms talked about getting the melon ships
because you're eating as many melons as you possibly can,
and it turns out that doesn't always agree with you.
(03:37):
Um and uh. And then you know there's the time
of year where, well, if you want to eat some
month old potatoes and some two month old squash and
maybe some storage cabbage. Great, and otherwise there's no produce
to be had. So preserving food is well, there's a
(03:58):
lot of different ways to do it, and it seems
really intense a lot of the time because people talk
about like batchuli is um, you're going to die of
botulism if you have home canned food. And so first off,
there's just to dispel a lot of myths about things.
There's actually really really really low instances of bautual is
(04:18):
um um. I'm not going to say it doesn't happen,
but there's actually very few cases of bauchuli is um
per year, and a lot of them are from industrial
canned goods. Don't eat a can if it's bowing out
in the sides of the top, throw the can, well,
bury the can, bury it in the woods far away.
(04:39):
But then also beyond canning, there's a lot of different
ways of food preservation. You know, you were joking about, like,
but don't toss it in the freezer. I don't know.
I toss a lot of things in the freezer. Shouldn't
not a bad idea? Yeah, I mean, we got all
sorts of animals from the farm in the freezer. Right now,
we've got a lot of blueberries because a couple of squirrels.
(05:00):
Yeah that was a random thing. Um, just just some
squirrels on the side for squirrel for heat is but yeah,
they were. Not having a freezer is a bad idea.
It's just that the freezer depends on you know, having
our or at least having a backup power source or
(05:20):
generator or a generator or or or um. And in
the case that you don't have access to those things
or can't afford to get a whole extra freezer, and
that fills up a substantial part of your power the
free or I can't afford the power the freezer. Um.
You know, we we definitely saw this past winter with
(05:41):
the power outages that were caused by um, you know,
inclement weather, and it suddenly became very hard to acquire
dry ice because dry ice will keep stuff cold for longer.
But everybody who's gone camping and used dry and they're
cooler knows that. So as soon as there's an interruption
(06:03):
in people's ability to refrigerate their food, the entire regional
stock of dry ice is going to disappear. So what
we're looking at more in what we're talking about today
is a little bit more like the things that you
don't need to keep anywhere, but like a cabinet that
maybe doesn't get boiling hot, and if it's sort of
a room temperature cabinet, you can store a lot of stuff.
(06:27):
I've personally found the backs of closets, like think about
all of the areas that you don't clean. You're like,
I just shove things back here and hope that they
disappear because I don't actually care about them, or like
the backs of broom closets. UM that actually, for a
long time was my place where I would store canned
goods because you can just stack the palettes of jars,
(06:47):
the flats of them. Because if you buy jars from
this supermarket, UM buy mar Canning stores anywhere, Safeway has them,
Walmart has them, you can They're not expensive. You can
just they come in a little square flat. And so
after I would fill them, I just put them all
back in there and then I could just stack those
as a little tower and then you know, hand them
(07:09):
out as gifts for the rest of the year, which
was also definitely saying that you do when you have
absolutely no money and people are like, oh, we're having
a New Year's Eve party and you're like, I brought
you jam, and they're like, oh, great, blueberry lovely. But
it's nice as something to be you can give people
beyond canning because sometimes, like right now, it's incredibly hard
(07:30):
to find the metal lids that go on canning jars
or in some cases the jars. That's actually was recently
looking for more jar lids and ended up buying flats
of jars instead because as four different stores told me,
there's a supply chain disruption in getting jar lids. There's
also a lot of ways that you can preserve stuff
(07:51):
with drying. You can also do a lot with salt,
vinegar and sugar preserving as well, so that you don't
necessarily need the resealable jars or like new lids for that.
So there's a bunch of different methods um lact of
fermentation as well, like fermenting things. So what would you
like to talk about first? Let's start with just like
(08:13):
what is what is the actual process of canning beyond
like just dumping stuff into a can and sealing it. Um.
So there's canning by itself is ceiling jars with heat.
So that was, oh God, really really came into its
own around like World War two was like industrial canning.
(08:34):
And the thing about it is even within canning, there's
two different types. There's low heat and high heat canning.
Low heat is actually just boiling water temperature, and high
heat you actually need to go above the temperature of
boiling water so you can pressure can. Um you need
(08:54):
a pressure cooker. They terrify me. I don't pressure can
because I haven't quite gotten over the images of when
they explode and give people steam burns. I know plenty
of people who do pressure can, and it's great for them.
You can pressure can at high heat anything. You can
toss raw fish or raw meat in oil and jars
or in water in jars, and you can pressure can
(09:16):
it and it will cook and seal the jars and
it is very safe. Low temperature canning is still relying
on one of the other methods, like salt, sugar, acid
for the to keep down bacteria. So all it does,
though is it makes the same so you can do
this with or without canning. It just makes the jars
keep a lot longer because it preserves them so it's
(09:39):
the process of you take a jar and then you
either use a clean ring. If you're using those latching
reusable jars with these nice rings on them that you
can use over and over again, really handy when there
are supply chain disruptions to know that you can re
use your jar and ring. We're talking about like the
Mason jars that you you you would get in uh
bars that are too expense of five years ago. They
(10:00):
would pour your terrible I P A in them. Yeah,
but you can use them for other things too. These
are the well there's two. There's big jars that have
a lid that is attached and it laughs the yea
and so those have a those have a rubbers that
you can and as long as you keep those oiled
and clean, you can reuse those for years. They do
(10:22):
eventually wear out, but they use a long time. Others
is Mason or ball canning jars, and those actually have
a two piece top. They have a middle ring that
you just need to make sure it's not like horrifically
dented or rusted through. It's reusable for a very long time.
And then you have a lid and the lid can
only really they are recommended to only use once I've
(10:43):
re used them like twice. Can once you can like
once it's canned and you you can take stuff out
put it back on. You don't have to like replace
the lid every time you get some preserves out. Yeah,
but the tiny piece of rubber that is what steals
it is very thin, and so it's not very reusable
for more to pull can't batches of food and and
true to farm. You know, if you go looking around
(11:07):
in you know, rummage sales, vintage stores, whatever, you will
probably find either very cheap or very overpriced some of
those old hinged jars and tons of Mason jars and
tons of Mason jars. You will often need to replace
either the lids or the rubber gaskets in order to
(11:28):
make them safe to star food in. But in either case,
whether you're using the little the mason or ball jars
that you'll find in lots of stores or the big
latching ones, um, the jars are the more expensive spots. Things.
The lids and the rubber rings are more inexpensive to replace.
So if you can find them at Goodwill, if you
(11:49):
can find them at Goodwill bins or all the places
it's great. You should always grab them. Jars are never
a bad idea. Yeah, so canning there's a million different
(12:13):
ways to can. I do a lot of jams, jellies, pickles,
and tomatoes, which are all things that are canned that
are preserved either with acid or sugar in either case, Um,
jams and jellies being sugar and pickles and stuff being acid. Yes,
those are my two favorites. They're very simple to learn.
(12:33):
And then you can always expand recipes and everything else. Um.
But with pickles and tomatoes and other things, having the
PHB very acidic is what actually does the preservation of
the food and keeps down fungus is molds, bacterias, and stuff.
And with jams and jellies, the natural acidity of the
fruit mixed with a lot of sugar is what keeps
(12:57):
the fruits from going bad or anything. And the great
thing about canning fruit is that, like when you're when
you're thinking about what is the greatest number of free
calories available to most people in a city during the
seasons where fruit grows, it's often going to be fruit,
And like you you'd be surprised, like where you could
do like Los Angeles, where I used to live, there
was much of the year like seven eight months you
(13:19):
could fill your arms with fruit if you knew where
to go. And there's an app called Falling Fruit that
you can use to find people mark like where different
trees are a lot of like you'll be surprised even
if you think, like, well, there's no fruit in my area,
go try falling Fruit. You you may find that out.
Actually there's a shipload of fruit. And I just was
not looking or as you often find, I didn't realize
that was an edible plant. I assume those berries were.
(13:40):
We're not food and and they can be. And and
that's a lot of like free you know when you
especially when you're inking pserve that's really calorically dense. And
and that also ties in with in the sort of
survival utility aspect of this, because like canning is fun,
and harvesting fruit is fun, and having stuff you made
(14:01):
to give pomegranates from rich people's houses do it, sure, absolutely,
I mean, but part of part of the other thing
to think about here is that like providing yourself with
a reserve of different kinds of nutrition and different like
there's you get an assortment of stuff. So you know
you aren't having to constantly buy it because honestly, the
(14:22):
most expensive in terms of carbon output, the most expensive
in terms of cost per calorie in grocery stores tends
to come from the stuff that's you know, been shipped
up from Argentina because it's not in season up here,
or while you're getting grapes in January, right and blueberries,
you can actually watch them move all the way down
the northern hemisphere over the course of the growing season
(14:45):
until they're like growing them down in Chile right before
they start being able to grow them again. So yeah,
So just thinking about like the things that are available
when they are available, um. And you'll see this all
the time, like the good forage spots. When they're available,
there will be c of people all they're all collecting stuff, um.
And getting to know some of the things that you
(15:08):
like and that grow near you and what time of
year they come into season, and maybe forming some relationships
with people and being like, hey, I noticed you have
a chestnut tree in your backyard. Can I come and
harvest chestnuts? Hey, you have this kind of oak, Can
I come and get acorns from you? Because I want
(15:30):
to do a leeching project. Hey, I was grabbing apples
and I noticed that you're harvesting all these acorns. I
didn't know that you could do anything with acorns. What
is what are you doing with all those acorns? And
one of the greatest things, too, is that a good
fruit tree makes a lot of fruit. So much so.
You know, we have a little plum that's near our house.
It's a little plum tree. And since this year we
(15:53):
managed to get to it before the raccoon did that
likes to clamber over the roof. We got about two
fifty pounds of plums off of the small fruit tree.
And it is not very big. It has a footprint
of maybe about ten ft in diameter of the widest
part of the tree. But it drops quite a bit
of fruit, especially if we get to it before it
(16:15):
all drops on the ground and our cars and the
driveway and the walkway and the cat and the cat.
But if we get to it, it's a lot. So honestly,
I set aside about a fifty pound tub that was like, Okay,
we're gonna make some jam. We're gonna dry some of these,
we're gonna do things with it, and the rest we're
able to give to friends. We tossed some of the
free fridges. We toss some all, you know, we handed
(16:36):
out because one good fruit tree makes a lot. So
when you see fruit trees around town, when you walk
under someone's cherry tree, it's okay to ask for fruit too,
because I don't know anyone that uses every single piece
of fruit off of any of their fruit trees. And
you know, one of the things that you will see
is that um a lot of cities try to discourage
(16:59):
people from planting fruit trees along roads precisely because when
they come into fruit, they produce so much fruit that
it causes a problem. Also, it's a good way to
form relationships in your neighborhood. You say like, hey, we
have a whole bunch of plums, we have a ton
of whatever is dropping all over your front yard. And
(17:21):
then your neighbors may be like, oh, those weirdos who
were collecting fruit that one time. This tree in my
backyard that's about to drop all this stuff. I'll let
them know and maybe they'll come so I don't have
to clean it up afterwards. Yeah, which is again, like people,
we talk a lot about the importance of building like
community resiliency and community self defense, and folks act like, well,
how do I actually do that? Well, that's maybe that's
(17:43):
a start for you. Maybe the start is like you
get to know what do they have? What do I have?
And then you start talking about like, well, I'm gonta
can some stuff. Do you want to learn how to can?
You're like, oh, well, I was going to dry at ease.
Do you want to learn it? Like? Or do you
want to borrow a dehydrator? And then you're making connections
that are very practical and also social in your area.
I'll some one plug. We've talked a little bit about
the process of canning. Dehydrators are great and are pretty affordable,
(18:08):
and they're not expensive. Yeah, like I think you know,
for sixty eight bucks, you can usually get a decent dehydrator.
And if you don't have one, but you have an oven,
if you put things on a baking rack very low heat,
you can just put it. I would just turn my
oven onto warm and you can lay out things in
your oven. I have a nicer oven now that won't
(18:30):
let me do this. But when I used to live
in like my first junkie apartment, I would literally just
stick a metal spoon like a one of my big
cooking spoons in the door of the ovens so that
it would open and that would just vent all of
the steam of whatever I was drying in the oven.
So and meanwhile, if you live in say a really
dry climate or a climate where you have a really
(18:52):
dry stretch of time when fruit is in season and
you have windows, screens and an area where you can
make or there's a steady breeze flowing across your your fruit,
cut it thin, lay it out in the sun. And
that's why there's so much sun dried X, Y and Z.
That's really expensive when you go to drin Joe's or whatever,
and it's you know, it's not just a matter. We
(19:14):
shouldn't just say that like this is you have to
forage for all this stuff, like it can be a
matter of like, well, during these months, beef is is
much cheaper. It's half as much as it will be later.
I'm going to buy beef when it's cheap, and I'm
going to make jerky now and then I will have
protein when I can't afford to purchase protein or as
much protein later. In the air. Speaking of jerky, I
(19:34):
mean like one of the just in the vein of
you know, building your own dehydrat or something. One other
thing that that that I've done is you can just
get a you know, a decent box fan and some
furnace filters and strap them all together, and that can
very successfully dry out jerky um so d dehydrators. There's
a lot of different ways to y It is literally
(19:56):
just kind of warm dry threes or less in some cases,
and air that is moving, and it's it's like everything
we've been talking about. There's the you can buy very
expensivety hydrators if you want to. If you want to
get a primo jerky making together, you can you can
make that a real expensive thing, or you can do
(20:16):
it for like trash, like with with discarded crap that
you find around in people's like take piles. And I
think also the other thing to think about we're talking
about it's not all foraging, is to think about we've
been talking about supply chain disruptions, but also one of
the things in our current circumstances is the weird gluts
(20:37):
and excesses and surpluses that are produced by our supply chains.
And again, one of the big ways that I learned
about food preservation was food not bombs and food preservation
and also just food preparation. Was food not bombs way
back in the day, like you need a special sound
every time on specifically it could happen here someone mentions
(20:58):
food not bombs. That was That was my entry back
when I was just kind of a liberally journalist guy
to like anarchist practice was like every protest I go to,
there's these like krusty punks handing out sandwiches, um, and
then they have neat stickers. I wonder what's going on here?
And well, And one of the important things about food
(21:19):
not bombs is that food not bombs has sort of
two different ways that you obtain food for food not bombs.
One is you form relationships with sts, farmers, people who
are going to have a lot of food, a lot
of supply coming in and there's stuff they're not going
to be able to use, either because it's ugly or
(21:42):
you know, it's carrots that look like dicks and they
don't feel comfortable putting the carrots that look like dicks
on the sidcause it's just it's just too hot or yeah.
So you have your relationships with like local businesses and
local suppliers who aren't going to be able to sell
or use some of their stuff, and they're like great bread, right,
day old bread. We are a bakery and we pride
(22:03):
ourselves on fresh bread, so we're gonna give our day
olds and it makes us feel good as liberals to
give it to food, not bombs. And then on the
flip side, there's the the fact that the supply chain
is designed to produce these excesses, but then if it
can't make money off of them, dispose of them. That's
where you end up with, you know, cop scarting, copscarding
(22:23):
dumpsters for example, don't dumpster from the cops that the
cop guarded dumpsters. Those are the other dumpsters go to
other dumpsters. It's infuriating, it's very frustrating. I get the
desire to yell at the cop, but there will you
can find dumpsters that are started. If you are a
store or restaurant, you're legally protected to let people go
(22:45):
through your dumpster. Yeah, not to you. Yeah. During the
Clinton administration, there is legislation that was passed that straight
up said like at a federal level, if you present
I think the wording is seemingly wholesome and healthful food
two people for free, even if it has plastic expiration
date that you are legally protected because it's dumb to
(23:09):
throw out food just because the thing that stamped on
the package has expired. Now that does mean if you
pick up some meat that's expired and the package is puffy,
don't eat that. And it also there are also local
ordinances and local laws that do restrict that more because
there are places where people get arrested for handing out
food to like, you know, homeless people and whatnot. But
you know, check your local laws before doing anything. Is
(23:31):
radical and violence is giving out as giving out free
food to poor people. Yeah, there are these gluts um
and there are these points where the supply chain is
going to dump huge amounts of stuff into the system.
(23:55):
For example, right now, we just talked about how canning
supplies are kind of in short supply right now, which
is weird. I guarantee you that that means in a
couple of months there's going to be tons of canning
supplies everywhere. Or you know, when there were power outages
in Portland, then there was a bunch of stuff, even
stuff that doesn't need to be refrigerated was getting thrown out.
(24:17):
If it was stored in the refrigerated section, because stores
have their specific protocols about like, oh well, if this
is left, if this freezer is unplugged, we have to
throw out everything in the freezer. Never Mind that a
bunch of stuff in the freezer straight up says right
there on it does not require refrigeration, or only refrigerate
after opening, or refrigerate after opening. So think about, like
(24:38):
where are your local systems going to produce these huge blots,
Or maybe it's super cheap at certain times of year.
You know, you maybe corn goes down to like fifteen
cents an ear or five cents an ear at the
end of at the at the end of August, right,
so maybe you can get a whole ton of corn
(25:00):
then you can dry it. Like you know, when I
was a kid, we lived in California, and we were
not doing a ton of canning. I did not grow
up canning. I didn't grow up preserving food. I didn't
in that type of way. But one thing that my
mom would do is when our little Mira lemon tree
was covered in lemons, she would just juice a whole
(25:22):
pile of them and then poured into ice cube trays
and then empty the ice cube trays into gallon bags,
and then we had lemon you know, we would make
lemonade all year round. And her recipe literally called for
three lemon cubes to how much sugar and stuff that
she had it measured out, and so she would just
pop those in and that would just live in the
refrigerator all year round. Was just constant lemonade. One other
(25:44):
plug in terms of preserving stuff that I want to
talk a little bit about, but with the disclaimer that
I am by no means an expert. Um One of
the other things that you know, the punks of Yesteryear
with their food not bombs houses got really excited out
with things like crowd and kombucha UM. And there are
some really great resources out there, specifically um wild Fermentation
(26:08):
and the Art of Fermentation, which are both by a
guy named Sander Cats on how to ferment food without
you you know, you're using naturally occurring bacteria and fermentation
as a means of preservation is possibly the oldest means
of deliberate food storage that human beings have, and you
(26:29):
can do it with a wide variety of things. And
so again, if you're faced with one of those gluts
where you have a ton of stuff and nowhere you
can store it in your refrigerated storage areas, there's probably
a way you can jam it, you can dry it,
you can ferment it, you can you know, make vinegar
out of it. And you can find guides for all
(26:52):
of this for free online. Like all of this is
accessible if you have a phone. There are people in
people putting up videos on YouTube where you can watch
them do it too. To makets, you do not have
to purchase books in order to learn. There's also a
lot of ways you know, you can make cold storages
in your backyard. You can definitely, like I have a
lot of guides on how to make your own roots
sellers then very small spaces and do things. Because as
(27:15):
long as you're not having your food produce the thing
that makes it that makes your food go bad, there's
a lot of different ways that you can prevent food
spoilage but that you can learn from. But honestly, crowd
and canning are probably some of the quickest and easiest
and as a general rule, um you know, similarly, if
you don't have access to building a garden, you probably
(27:37):
also don't have access to like digging a root seller.
That being said, if you have a room or a
space in your house where you can reliably keep it
cool and dark like below I don't know, seventy degrees dark,
like closets, there's probably a spot in your basement if
(27:57):
you live in a house where you have a basement,
or if you live in a base because you situation. Yeah, um,
it's pretty easy. And for that matter, when we talk
about like root sellers, there are totally some d i
y schematics for literally digging a like three foot cube
hole in your yard and sinking in something to line it,
(28:21):
and then that's where you store stuff because if you
dig down a few feet below ground, it stays fifty
degrees year round. And I get like when you hear again,
we keep coming back to this, Like, I think a
lot of people get overwhelmed or get very anxious when
they think about trying to build resiliency because they live
in a tiny apartment, they don't have much in the
(28:41):
way of money. The important one of the most important
things to understand that like a lot of people, no
matter how poor you are, poorer than you have been
doing this kind of stuff for generations. Like, it's why
most of our grandparents survived the thirties. Yeah, And I
think one thing that people have a misinterpretation of with
canning and stuff is that they are going to put
stuff up, and they're gonna like put up their cans
(29:02):
and their jars and then they will eventually build this.
You know, I have food for twelve years buried here.
Nothing has that great of a shelf life. I mean,
I've definitely pulled out some jam that was from definitely
didn't do that this year that I had forgotten in
the back of a cupboard and eating it and it's fine.
(29:24):
It's fine, but usually a couple three years couple. But
the idea of canning and preserving was not that you
are saving food in case the sky falls in and
everyone is doomed. The reason that people preserve food was
to extend the bounty of a harvest season for a
few additional weeks or months. And if you think about
(29:46):
it that way, you're extending what you have two times
when it would be more enjoyable to eat it when
it feels special. No, I mean, it's like jam. A
big part of the reason for jam is there's really
important nutrients in fruit that maybe you can't get in
the dead of winter, but you can if you have
jamp Just to be a farm nerd for a minute,
because Robert, I know that you are a huge fan
of pumpkin spice. Oh. The reason that my first cup
(30:10):
of the season today amazing monster. The reason that pumpkins
and cinnamon and apples and baking goods, baked goods with
raisins in them are all like a big deal and
are all like apples are a fruit that if you
put apples in, say a barrel, there's the saying about
(30:31):
one bad apple. Because if you make sure that an
apple isn't rotting and you put it in a cool,
dark space with decent ventilation, apples will keep for a
very long time. Squash are a big deal. Pumpkins are
a big deal around this time of year because buttercup squash,
for example, and butternut squash are both storage squash. They
(30:53):
taste better if they have been sitting in a dark
storage area for like two months. Then they metabolized more
of their starches into sugars, and they're tastier. A lot
of a lot of like squash, root, vegetables, all of
that sort of stuff that you associate with. You know,
all harvest season is specifically storage crops, because I'm originally
(31:15):
from New England. That's the time of year where you
stop being able to get food out of the ground
and everything freezes and dies, and then it doesn't start
up again until April, and you need a way to
keep eating in the meantime. And also, though, let's just
remember that a lot of preserved foods are also neat,
(31:36):
not just because they are a substitutor because they're saying
the harvest, but because in order to preserve the food
and keep the nutrients, you have to go through a process.
You want to have the salt be too high, or
the acidity be too high, or the sugar content be
too high, or the water content be too low to
enable bacterial growth, and so that the fruits and vegetables
(31:58):
and meats or whatever don't rot. But that means that
you get so many awesome and different flavors that you
would never you know, grapes, grapes are great. Whatever grapes
preserved in wine vinegar. That sounds really cool. You can
do that, and then you have a completely different thing
that you normally don't eat, you know, dried dried figs,
apple chips, like, you also get a whole new variety
(32:19):
of foods that are not just extending in harvest, but
are also other things to eat. You know, my kids
are not going to toss a whole pile of fresh
fruit in their backpacks sometimes because it squishes at the
bottom of their backpacks and I find it weeks later,
and it's absolutely terrifying. On the other hand, a bunch
of you know, dried dried prunes, plums and stuff from
(32:42):
the garden that dried out. They'll take baggies of those,
and if I find them a month later because they
didn't eat them, it isn't the end of the world either.
And and again like there's a lot of fun stuff
like you know, yeah, grapes by themselves are are fine.
You can also turn gray. It's into stuff that will
help you preserve other stuff. And raisins in baked goods.
(33:06):
If you've ever had a loaf of raisin bread and
a loaf of white bread in the same bread box,
the white bread will mold first. Raisins are actually a preservative.
It's why people started putting raisins in bread. Yeah, and
I think we should we should close out, but I
kind of wanted to do that by circling back to
the overall topic of this week, which is like building
(33:27):
resiliency when you don't have much in the way of
money or resources. And one of the things that you
may not think of as building resiliency is exactly what
you were talking about being in eu Elaine, paying attention
to what is available, what time of the year, what
is cheap, what time of the year, what is like,
when do the gluts happen, and when do the shortages happen.
Because that doesn't actually cost any money. You don't even
have to buy things like you're already you're all always
(33:50):
going to be going out to the store to get
food occasionally. It's it's it's keeping an eye on understanding
what is available growing naturally and what is available in
the economy, because that connects you more to the environment
you live in, to the climate as it changes um
into your community, all of which make you more resilient,
and then of which costs you a dime. It just
cost you attention. Also just a plug for you know,
(34:13):
people who have access to the ecosystems where this is relevant.
Things like shellfish licenses are great I'm not going to
tell anyone that they should, you know, seek out sport
fishing as a means of obtaining calories. On the other hand,
in Oregon, at least for I think it's five five bucks,
(34:33):
nine bucks. It's up to ten bucks now. But so
for ten bucks get a shellfish license. You go down
to a cove and you rape cockles for an hour
and then you have, you know, an enormous amount of
food that you can do all of the preservation that
we've talked about. You can also just make chowder and
freeze it, you know whatever. But there's a lot of
(34:55):
ways to to cheaply obtain calories from out in the world. Yeah,
all right, well that's going to do it for us today. Um,
until next time, remember experiment on your friends with different
medical care treatments. So don't do that. Although on the
other hand, look up the if you are in the
Pacific Northwest, there is the Portland Fruit Tree Project up
(35:18):
here which goes around and connects gleaners with fruit trees
that need to be gleaned. Um, so people who have
over abundant trees that they don't want all the stuff.
That's a really great resource. In other cities. I'm sure
there's other things, and also the Falling Fruit map, so
you can go online and if there's not already one
(35:39):
in your area. They also make it really easy to
be able to chart and put in trees in your area.
So if it's saying that you're excited about and you
love identifying trees, you can go in and actually start
charting your neighborhood. Also figure out how to identify, you know,
five wild plants that grow in your area that you
can eat, because it's always nice to have more variety
(36:03):
and it's fun to be out on a walk and
be like, oh cool, now I have a thing that
I can toss in with dinner when I get back. Yeah,
And we've talked about how there's like the poor version
of the cheap version, there's also like the centrist version
and the radical version of that. The centrist version is
like I just want to know, like what kind of
edible fruits grow naturally in my area. The more radical
version is I'm going to start guerrilla grows of edible
(36:23):
foods on like available in my area. I'm gonna seedball
some ship. I'm gonna like very get a surgeon with
my yeah to prepare food. Yeah, things that grow rise
only take root real easy in the ecosystems they like,
and are real hard to get rid of once they
get crime gardens. I'm not going to say people should
tear out the random trees that cities plant and then
(36:45):
replace if you were, but it's possible to do trees
didn't make food with trees that did make food in
the same spot, probably nobody would notice except the people
who got food, and there would be more or free
calories in your area. If you know, the kind of
things that have been happening in the last several years
continue to happen. All right, that's the episode. That's the episode.
What's avoiding starvation my autonomous neighborhood collectives. Uh, this is
it could happen here a podcast about things not being
as good as they are and trying to make them better.
I'm Robert Evans my co host today as many days
Garrison Davis Garrison say hello to the people, high people, Garrison.
(00:27):
What are we? What are we? What do we? What
do we? What do we? What do we? What do
we do? What do we? What are we doing today?
Thank you of We are going to be having a
discussion on um food and food preservation and finding. Do
(00:49):
you mean like putting in the freezer? Well, what if
the freezer is not working? The freezer is always working.
This is America. When the power goes out for two weeks,
aren't you Well that's one of our guests for today.
My friends be in a lane um who who you've
heard earlier this week and who We're going to talk
(01:10):
about food storage and particularly again our focus this week
is like we keep getting a lot of people being
like I have no money or very little money or
very little space. I'm not gonna be able to grow things.
How can I possibly you know, gather food store food,
like build resiliency. I don't have any any kind of farmland.
And the good news is, no matter where you live,
(01:32):
things that are edible grow, and you can get those
things and you can find ways to make them last
longer than they would if you just kept them in
a sack. And that's a pretty cool thing to do.
So I'm going to hand it over to be in
a lane. I love for that. Okay, I don't have
much space. I don't have much money. Was kind of
how I got into doing canning in the first place.
(01:52):
For myself, I used to be very, very poor. I
was on food stamps, I had no money. I was
a broke punk. And one of my friends was like, oh, man,
there's this farmer at the farmer's market and if you
help them clean up, they'll let you take away whatever
leftover produce they have that they don't want, So you
(02:13):
can just load up a bag with produce. All you
gotta do is help them load the truck at the
end of the day. So that's what I did every
single Wednesday for the next five years, no matter what come,
hell or high water. But with that that also came
there's you started realizing that there's gluts and then lacks
(02:34):
of things. Um, much like you know, everything that's happening
in society now, just in general, there was seasons when
there was nothing but you were It was easy to
at the end of a farmer's market day walk home
with a fifty pound flat of tomatoes, and you know
times of the year where it was nothing but cabbage,
(02:56):
and you might have wanted tomatoes a lot. And canning
was great because it helped to will out when I
could get things without having to dive into the you know,
sixty books a month, I got in food stamps and
spend it at the farmer's market. On that instead, I
could use it to have a variety of vegetables or
canned goods or other things in order to flavor my raman. Yeah.
(03:16):
I first came at this kind of from working on farms,
where similarly there are gluts. There are times of year
where you literally cannot eat melons fast enough, and everybody
who works on farms talked about getting the melon ships
because you're eating as many melons as you possibly can,
and it turns out that doesn't always agree with you.
(03:37):
Um and uh. And then you know there's the time
of year where, well, if you want to eat some
month old potatoes and some two month old squash and
maybe some storage cabbage. Great, and otherwise there's no produce
to be had. So preserving food is well, there's a
(03:58):
lot of different ways to do it, and it seems
really intense a lot of the time because people talk
about like batchuli is um, you're going to die of
botulism if you have home canned food. And so first off,
there's just to dispel a lot of myths about things.
There's actually really really really low instances of bautual is
(04:18):
um um. I'm not going to say it doesn't happen,
but there's actually very few cases of bauchuli is um
per year, and a lot of them are from industrial
canned goods. Don't eat a can if it's bowing out
in the sides of the top, throw the can, well,
bury the can, bury it in the woods far away.
(04:39):
But then also beyond canning, there's a lot of different
ways of food preservation. You know, you were joking about, like,
but don't toss it in the freezer. I don't know.
I toss a lot of things in the freezer. Shouldn't
not a bad idea? Yeah, I mean, we got all
sorts of animals from the farm in the freezer. Right now,
we've got a lot of blueberries because a couple of squirrels.
(05:00):
Yeah that was a random thing. Um, just just some
squirrels on the side for squirrel for heat is but yeah,
they were. Not having a freezer is a bad idea.
It's just that the freezer depends on you know, having
our or at least having a backup power source or
(05:20):
generator or a generator or or or um. And in
the case that you don't have access to those things
or can't afford to get a whole extra freezer, and
that fills up a substantial part of your power the
free or I can't afford the power the freezer. Um.
You know, we we definitely saw this past winter with
(05:41):
the power outages that were caused by um, you know,
inclement weather, and it suddenly became very hard to acquire
dry ice because dry ice will keep stuff cold for longer.
But everybody who's gone camping and used dry and they're
cooler knows that. So as soon as there's an interruption
(06:03):
in people's ability to refrigerate their food, the entire regional
stock of dry ice is going to disappear. So what
we're looking at more in what we're talking about today
is a little bit more like the things that you
don't need to keep anywhere, but like a cabinet that
maybe doesn't get boiling hot, and if it's sort of
a room temperature cabinet, you can store a lot of stuff.
(06:27):
I've personally found the backs of closets, like think about
all of the areas that you don't clean. You're like,
I just shove things back here and hope that they
disappear because I don't actually care about them, or like
the backs of broom closets. UM that actually, for a
long time was my place where I would store canned
goods because you can just stack the palettes of jars,
(06:47):
the flats of them. Because if you buy jars from
this supermarket, UM buy mar Canning stores anywhere, Safeway has them,
Walmart has them, you can They're not expensive. You can
just they come in a little square flat. And so
after I would fill them, I just put them all
back in there and then I could just stack those
as a little tower and then you know, hand them
(07:09):
out as gifts for the rest of the year, which
was also definitely saying that you do when you have
absolutely no money and people are like, oh, we're having
a New Year's Eve party and you're like, I brought
you jam, and they're like, oh, great, blueberry lovely. But
it's nice as something to be you can give people
beyond canning because sometimes, like right now, it's incredibly hard
(07:30):
to find the metal lids that go on canning jars
or in some cases the jars. That's actually was recently
looking for more jar lids and ended up buying flats
of jars instead because as four different stores told me,
there's a supply chain disruption in getting jar lids. There's
also a lot of ways that you can preserve stuff
(07:51):
with drying. You can also do a lot with salt,
vinegar and sugar preserving as well, so that you don't
necessarily need the resealable jars or like new lids for that.
So there's a bunch of different methods um lact of
fermentation as well, like fermenting things. So what would you
like to talk about first? Let's start with just like
(08:13):
what is what is the actual process of canning beyond
like just dumping stuff into a can and sealing it. Um.
So there's canning by itself is ceiling jars with heat.
So that was, oh God, really really came into its
own around like World War two was like industrial canning.
(08:34):
And the thing about it is even within canning, there's
two different types. There's low heat and high heat canning.
Low heat is actually just boiling water temperature, and high
heat you actually need to go above the temperature of
boiling water so you can pressure can. Um you need
(08:54):
a pressure cooker. They terrify me. I don't pressure can
because I haven't quite gotten over the images of when
they explode and give people steam burns. I know plenty
of people who do pressure can, and it's great for them.
You can pressure can at high heat anything. You can
toss raw fish or raw meat in oil and jars
or in water in jars, and you can pressure can
(09:16):
it and it will cook and seal the jars and
it is very safe. Low temperature canning is still relying
on one of the other methods, like salt, sugar, acid
for the to keep down bacteria. So all it does,
though is it makes the same so you can do
this with or without canning. It just makes the jars
keep a lot longer because it preserves them so it's
(09:39):
the process of you take a jar and then you
either use a clean ring. If you're using those latching
reusable jars with these nice rings on them that you
can use over and over again, really handy when there
are supply chain disruptions to know that you can re
use your jar and ring. We're talking about like the
Mason jars that you you you would get in uh
bars that are too expense of five years ago. They
(10:00):
would pour your terrible I P A in them. Yeah,
but you can use them for other things too. These
are the well there's two. There's big jars that have
a lid that is attached and it laughs the yea
and so those have a those have a rubbers that
you can and as long as you keep those oiled
and clean, you can reuse those for years. They do
(10:22):
eventually wear out, but they use a long time. Others
is Mason or ball canning jars, and those actually have
a two piece top. They have a middle ring that
you just need to make sure it's not like horrifically
dented or rusted through. It's reusable for a very long time.
And then you have a lid and the lid can
only really they are recommended to only use once I've
(10:43):
re used them like twice. Can once you can like
once it's canned and you you can take stuff out
put it back on. You don't have to like replace
the lid every time you get some preserves out. Yeah,
but the tiny piece of rubber that is what steals
it is very thin, and so it's not very reusable
for more to pull can't batches of food and and
true to farm. You know, if you go looking around
(11:07):
in you know, rummage sales, vintage stores, whatever, you will
probably find either very cheap or very overpriced some of
those old hinged jars and tons of Mason jars and
tons of Mason jars. You will often need to replace
either the lids or the rubber gaskets in order to
(11:28):
make them safe to star food in. But in either case,
whether you're using the little the mason or ball jars
that you'll find in lots of stores or the big
latching ones, um, the jars are the more expensive spots. Things.
The lids and the rubber rings are more inexpensive to replace.
So if you can find them at Goodwill, if you
(11:49):
can find them at Goodwill bins or all the places
it's great. You should always grab them. Jars are never
a bad idea. Yeah, so canning there's a million different
(12:13):
ways to can. I do a lot of jams, jellies, pickles,
and tomatoes, which are all things that are canned that
are preserved either with acid or sugar in either case, Um,
jams and jellies being sugar and pickles and stuff being acid. Yes,
those are my two favorites. They're very simple to learn.
(12:33):
And then you can always expand recipes and everything else. Um.
But with pickles and tomatoes and other things, having the
PHB very acidic is what actually does the preservation of
the food and keeps down fungus is molds, bacterias, and stuff.
And with jams and jellies, the natural acidity of the
fruit mixed with a lot of sugar is what keeps
(12:57):
the fruits from going bad or anything. And the great
thing about canning fruit is that, like when you're when
you're thinking about what is the greatest number of free
calories available to most people in a city during the
seasons where fruit grows, it's often going to be fruit,
And like you you'd be surprised, like where you could
do like Los Angeles, where I used to live, there
was much of the year like seven eight months you
(13:19):
could fill your arms with fruit if you knew where
to go. And there's an app called Falling Fruit that
you can use to find people mark like where different
trees are a lot of like you'll be surprised even
if you think, like, well, there's no fruit in my area,
go try falling Fruit. You you may find that out.
Actually there's a shipload of fruit. And I just was
not looking or as you often find, I didn't realize
that was an edible plant. I assume those berries were.
(13:40):
We're not food and and they can be. And and
that's a lot of like free you know when you
especially when you're inking pserve that's really calorically dense. And
and that also ties in with in the sort of
survival utility aspect of this, because like canning is fun,
and harvesting fruit is fun, and having stuff you made
(14:01):
to give pomegranates from rich people's houses do it, sure, absolutely,
I mean, but part of part of the other thing
to think about here is that like providing yourself with
a reserve of different kinds of nutrition and different like
there's you get an assortment of stuff. So you know
you aren't having to constantly buy it because honestly, the
(14:22):
most expensive in terms of carbon output, the most expensive
in terms of cost per calorie in grocery stores tends
to come from the stuff that's you know, been shipped
up from Argentina because it's not in season up here,
or while you're getting grapes in January, right and blueberries,
you can actually watch them move all the way down
the northern hemisphere over the course of the growing season
(14:45):
until they're like growing them down in Chile right before
they start being able to grow them again. So yeah,
So just thinking about like the things that are available
when they are available, um. And you'll see this all
the time, like the good forage spots. When they're available,
there will be c of people all they're all collecting stuff, um.
And getting to know some of the things that you
(15:08):
like and that grow near you and what time of
year they come into season, and maybe forming some relationships
with people and being like, hey, I noticed you have
a chestnut tree in your backyard. Can I come and
harvest chestnuts? Hey, you have this kind of oak, Can
I come and get acorns from you? Because I want
(15:30):
to do a leeching project. Hey, I was grabbing apples
and I noticed that you're harvesting all these acorns. I
didn't know that you could do anything with acorns. What
is what are you doing with all those acorns? And
one of the greatest things, too, is that a good
fruit tree makes a lot of fruit. So much so.
You know, we have a little plum that's near our house.
It's a little plum tree. And since this year we
(15:53):
managed to get to it before the raccoon did that
likes to clamber over the roof. We got about two
fifty pounds of plums off of the small fruit tree.
And it is not very big. It has a footprint
of maybe about ten ft in diameter of the widest
part of the tree. But it drops quite a bit
of fruit, especially if we get to it before it
(16:15):
all drops on the ground and our cars and the
driveway and the walkway and the cat and the cat.
But if we get to it, it's a lot. So honestly,
I set aside about a fifty pound tub that was like, Okay,
we're gonna make some jam. We're gonna dry some of these,
we're gonna do things with it, and the rest we're
able to give to friends. We tossed some of the
free fridges. We toss some all, you know, we handed
(16:36):
out because one good fruit tree makes a lot. So
when you see fruit trees around town, when you walk
under someone's cherry tree, it's okay to ask for fruit too,
because I don't know anyone that uses every single piece
of fruit off of any of their fruit trees. And
you know, one of the things that you will see
is that um a lot of cities try to discourage
(16:59):
people from planting fruit trees along roads precisely because when
they come into fruit, they produce so much fruit that
it causes a problem. Also, it's a good way to
form relationships in your neighborhood. You say like, hey, we
have a whole bunch of plums, we have a ton
of whatever is dropping all over your front yard. And
(17:21):
then your neighbors may be like, oh, those weirdos who
were collecting fruit that one time. This tree in my
backyard that's about to drop all this stuff. I'll let
them know and maybe they'll come so I don't have
to clean it up afterwards. Yeah, which is again, like people,
we talk a lot about the importance of building like
community resiliency and community self defense, and folks act like, well,
how do I actually do that? Well, that's maybe that's
(17:43):
a start for you. Maybe the start is like you
get to know what do they have? What do I have?
And then you start talking about like, well, I'm gonta
can some stuff. Do you want to learn how to can?
You're like, oh, well, I was going to dry at ease.
Do you want to learn it? Like? Or do you
want to borrow a dehydrator? And then you're making connections
that are very practical and also social in your area.
I'll some one plug. We've talked a little bit about
the process of canning. Dehydrators are great and are pretty affordable,
(18:08):
and they're not expensive. Yeah, like I think you know,
for sixty eight bucks, you can usually get a decent dehydrator.
And if you don't have one, but you have an oven,
if you put things on a baking rack very low heat,
you can just put it. I would just turn my
oven onto warm and you can lay out things in
your oven. I have a nicer oven now that won't
(18:30):
let me do this. But when I used to live
in like my first junkie apartment, I would literally just
stick a metal spoon like a one of my big
cooking spoons in the door of the ovens so that
it would open and that would just vent all of
the steam of whatever I was drying in the oven.
So and meanwhile, if you live in say a really
dry climate or a climate where you have a really
(18:52):
dry stretch of time when fruit is in season and
you have windows, screens and an area where you can
make or there's a steady breeze flowing across your your fruit,
cut it thin, lay it out in the sun. And
that's why there's so much sun dried X, Y and Z.
That's really expensive when you go to drin Joe's or whatever,
and it's you know, it's not just a matter. We
(19:14):
shouldn't just say that like this is you have to
forage for all this stuff, like it can be a
matter of like, well, during these months, beef is is
much cheaper. It's half as much as it will be later.
I'm going to buy beef when it's cheap, and I'm
going to make jerky now and then I will have
protein when I can't afford to purchase protein or as
much protein later. In the air. Speaking of jerky, I
(19:34):
mean like one of the just in the vein of
you know, building your own dehydrat or something. One other
thing that that that I've done is you can just
get a you know, a decent box fan and some
furnace filters and strap them all together, and that can
very successfully dry out jerky um so d dehydrators. There's
a lot of different ways to y It is literally
(19:56):
just kind of warm dry threes or less in some cases,
and air that is moving, and it's it's like everything
we've been talking about. There's the you can buy very
expensivety hydrators if you want to. If you want to
get a primo jerky making together, you can you can
make that a real expensive thing, or you can do
(20:16):
it for like trash, like with with discarded crap that
you find around in people's like take piles. And I
think also the other thing to think about we're talking
about it's not all foraging, is to think about we've
been talking about supply chain disruptions, but also one of
the things in our current circumstances is the weird gluts
(20:37):
and excesses and surpluses that are produced by our supply chains.
And again, one of the big ways that I learned
about food preservation was food not bombs and food preservation
and also just food preparation. Was food not bombs way
back in the day, like you need a special sound
every time on specifically it could happen here someone mentions
(20:58):
food not bombs. That was That was my entry back
when I was just kind of a liberally journalist guy
to like anarchist practice was like every protest I go to,
there's these like krusty punks handing out sandwiches, um, and
then they have neat stickers. I wonder what's going on here?
And well, And one of the important things about food
(21:19):
not bombs is that food not bombs has sort of
two different ways that you obtain food for food not bombs.
One is you form relationships with sts, farmers, people who
are going to have a lot of food, a lot
of supply coming in and there's stuff they're not going
to be able to use, either because it's ugly or
(21:42):
you know, it's carrots that look like dicks and they
don't feel comfortable putting the carrots that look like dicks
on the sidcause it's just it's just too hot or yeah.
So you have your relationships with like local businesses and
local suppliers who aren't going to be able to sell
or use some of their stuff, and they're like great bread, right,
day old bread. We are a bakery and we pride
(22:03):
ourselves on fresh bread, so we're gonna give our day
olds and it makes us feel good as liberals to
give it to food, not bombs. And then on the
flip side, there's the the fact that the supply chain
is designed to produce these excesses, but then if it
can't make money off of them, dispose of them. That's
where you end up with, you know, cop scarting, copscarding
(22:23):
dumpsters for example, don't dumpster from the cops that the
cop guarded dumpsters. Those are the other dumpsters go to
other dumpsters. It's infuriating, it's very frustrating. I get the
desire to yell at the cop, but there will you
can find dumpsters that are started. If you are a
store or restaurant, you're legally protected to let people go
(22:45):
through your dumpster. Yeah, not to you. Yeah. During the
Clinton administration, there is legislation that was passed that straight
up said like at a federal level, if you present
I think the wording is seemingly wholesome and healthful food
two people for free, even if it has plastic expiration
date that you are legally protected because it's dumb to
(23:09):
throw out food just because the thing that stamped on
the package has expired. Now that does mean if you
pick up some meat that's expired and the package is puffy,
don't eat that. And it also there are also local
ordinances and local laws that do restrict that more because
there are places where people get arrested for handing out
food to like, you know, homeless people and whatnot. But
you know, check your local laws before doing anything. Is
(23:31):
radical and violence is giving out as giving out free
food to poor people. Yeah, there are these gluts um
and there are these points where the supply chain is
going to dump huge amounts of stuff into the system.
(23:55):
For example, right now, we just talked about how canning
supplies are kind of in short supply right now, which
is weird. I guarantee you that that means in a
couple of months there's going to be tons of canning
supplies everywhere. Or you know, when there were power outages
in Portland, then there was a bunch of stuff, even
stuff that doesn't need to be refrigerated was getting thrown out.
(24:17):
If it was stored in the refrigerated section, because stores
have their specific protocols about like, oh well, if this
is left, if this freezer is unplugged, we have to
throw out everything in the freezer. Never Mind that a
bunch of stuff in the freezer straight up says right
there on it does not require refrigeration, or only refrigerate
after opening, or refrigerate after opening. So think about, like
(24:38):
where are your local systems going to produce these huge blots,
Or maybe it's super cheap at certain times of year.
You know, you maybe corn goes down to like fifteen
cents an ear or five cents an ear at the
end of at the at the end of August, right,
so maybe you can get a whole ton of corn
(25:00):
then you can dry it. Like you know, when I
was a kid, we lived in California, and we were
not doing a ton of canning. I did not grow
up canning. I didn't grow up preserving food. I didn't
in that type of way. But one thing that my
mom would do is when our little Mira lemon tree
was covered in lemons, she would just juice a whole
(25:22):
pile of them and then poured into ice cube trays
and then empty the ice cube trays into gallon bags,
and then we had lemon you know, we would make
lemonade all year round. And her recipe literally called for
three lemon cubes to how much sugar and stuff that
she had it measured out, and so she would just
pop those in and that would just live in the
refrigerator all year round. Was just constant lemonade. One other
(25:44):
plug in terms of preserving stuff that I want to
talk a little bit about, but with the disclaimer that
I am by no means an expert. Um One of
the other things that you know, the punks of Yesteryear
with their food not bombs houses got really excited out
with things like crowd and kombucha UM. And there are
some really great resources out there, specifically um wild Fermentation
(26:08):
and the Art of Fermentation, which are both by a
guy named Sander Cats on how to ferment food without
you you know, you're using naturally occurring bacteria and fermentation
as a means of preservation is possibly the oldest means
of deliberate food storage that human beings have, and you
(26:29):
can do it with a wide variety of things. And
so again, if you're faced with one of those gluts
where you have a ton of stuff and nowhere you
can store it in your refrigerated storage areas, there's probably
a way you can jam it, you can dry it,
you can ferment it, you can you know, make vinegar
out of it. And you can find guides for all
(26:52):
of this for free online. Like all of this is
accessible if you have a phone. There are people in
people putting up videos on YouTube where you can watch
them do it too. To makets, you do not have
to purchase books in order to learn. There's also a
lot of ways you know, you can make cold storages
in your backyard. You can definitely, like I have a
lot of guides on how to make your own roots
sellers then very small spaces and do things. Because as
(27:15):
long as you're not having your food produce the thing
that makes it that makes your food go bad, there's
a lot of different ways that you can prevent food
spoilage but that you can learn from. But honestly, crowd
and canning are probably some of the quickest and easiest
and as a general rule, um you know, similarly, if
you don't have access to building a garden, you probably
(27:37):
also don't have access to like digging a root seller.
That being said, if you have a room or a
space in your house where you can reliably keep it
cool and dark like below I don't know, seventy degrees dark,
like closets, there's probably a spot in your basement if
(27:57):
you live in a house where you have a basement,
or if you live in a base because you situation. Yeah, um,
it's pretty easy. And for that matter, when we talk
about like root sellers, there are totally some d i
y schematics for literally digging a like three foot cube
hole in your yard and sinking in something to line it,
(28:21):
and then that's where you store stuff because if you
dig down a few feet below ground, it stays fifty
degrees year round. And I get like when you hear again,
we keep coming back to this, Like, I think a
lot of people get overwhelmed or get very anxious when
they think about trying to build resiliency because they live
in a tiny apartment, they don't have much in the
(28:41):
way of money. The important one of the most important
things to understand that like a lot of people, no
matter how poor you are, poorer than you have been
doing this kind of stuff for generations. Like, it's why
most of our grandparents survived the thirties. Yeah, And I
think one thing that people have a misinterpretation of with
canning and stuff is that they are going to put
stuff up, and they're gonna like put up their cans
(29:02):
and their jars and then they will eventually build this.
You know, I have food for twelve years buried here.
Nothing has that great of a shelf life. I mean,
I've definitely pulled out some jam that was from definitely
didn't do that this year that I had forgotten in
the back of a cupboard and eating it and it's fine.
(29:24):
It's fine, but usually a couple three years couple. But
the idea of canning and preserving was not that you
are saving food in case the sky falls in and
everyone is doomed. The reason that people preserve food was
to extend the bounty of a harvest season for a
few additional weeks or months. And if you think about
(29:46):
it that way, you're extending what you have two times
when it would be more enjoyable to eat it when
it feels special. No, I mean, it's like jam. A
big part of the reason for jam is there's really
important nutrients in fruit that maybe you can't get in
the dead of winter, but you can if you have
jamp Just to be a farm nerd for a minute,
because Robert, I know that you are a huge fan
of pumpkin spice. Oh. The reason that my first cup
(30:10):
of the season today amazing monster. The reason that pumpkins
and cinnamon and apples and baking goods, baked goods with
raisins in them are all like a big deal and
are all like apples are a fruit that if you
put apples in, say a barrel, there's the saying about
(30:31):
one bad apple. Because if you make sure that an
apple isn't rotting and you put it in a cool,
dark space with decent ventilation, apples will keep for a
very long time. Squash are a big deal. Pumpkins are
a big deal around this time of year because buttercup squash,
for example, and butternut squash are both storage squash. They
(30:53):
taste better if they have been sitting in a dark
storage area for like two months. Then they metabolized more
of their starches into sugars, and they're tastier. A lot
of a lot of like squash, root, vegetables, all of
that sort of stuff that you associate with. You know,
all harvest season is specifically storage crops, because I'm originally
(31:15):
from New England. That's the time of year where you
stop being able to get food out of the ground
and everything freezes and dies, and then it doesn't start
up again until April, and you need a way to
keep eating in the meantime. And also, though, let's just
remember that a lot of preserved foods are also neat,
(31:36):
not just because they are a substitutor because they're saying
the harvest, but because in order to preserve the food
and keep the nutrients, you have to go through a process.
You want to have the salt be too high, or
the acidity be too high, or the sugar content be
too high, or the water content be too low to
enable bacterial growth, and so that the fruits and vegetables
(31:58):
and meats or whatever don't rot. But that means that
you get so many awesome and different flavors that you
would never you know, grapes, grapes are great. Whatever grapes
preserved in wine vinegar. That sounds really cool. You can
do that, and then you have a completely different thing
that you normally don't eat, you know, dried dried figs,
apple chips, like, you also get a whole new variety
(32:19):
of foods that are not just extending in harvest, but
are also other things to eat. You know, my kids
are not going to toss a whole pile of fresh
fruit in their backpacks sometimes because it squishes at the
bottom of their backpacks and I find it weeks later,
and it's absolutely terrifying. On the other hand, a bunch
of you know, dried dried prunes, plums and stuff from
(32:42):
the garden that dried out. They'll take baggies of those,
and if I find them a month later because they
didn't eat them, it isn't the end of the world either.
And and again like there's a lot of fun stuff
like you know, yeah, grapes by themselves are are fine.
You can also turn gray. It's into stuff that will
help you preserve other stuff. And raisins in baked goods.
(33:06):
If you've ever had a loaf of raisin bread and
a loaf of white bread in the same bread box,
the white bread will mold first. Raisins are actually a preservative.
It's why people started putting raisins in bread. Yeah, and
I think we should we should close out, but I
kind of wanted to do that by circling back to
the overall topic of this week, which is like building
(33:27):
resiliency when you don't have much in the way of
money or resources. And one of the things that you
may not think of as building resiliency is exactly what
you were talking about being in eu Elaine, paying attention
to what is available, what time of the year, what
is cheap, what time of the year, what is like,
when do the gluts happen, and when do the shortages happen.
Because that doesn't actually cost any money. You don't even
have to buy things like you're already you're all always
(33:50):
going to be going out to the store to get
food occasionally. It's it's it's keeping an eye on understanding
what is available growing naturally and what is available in
the economy, because that connects you more to the environment
you live in, to the climate as it changes um
into your community, all of which make you more resilient,
and then of which costs you a dime. It just
cost you attention. Also just a plug for you know,
(34:13):
people who have access to the ecosystems where this is relevant.
Things like shellfish licenses are great I'm not going to
tell anyone that they should, you know, seek out sport
fishing as a means of obtaining calories. On the other hand,
in Oregon, at least for I think it's five five bucks,
(34:33):
nine bucks. It's up to ten bucks now. But so
for ten bucks get a shellfish license. You go down
to a cove and you rape cockles for an hour
and then you have, you know, an enormous amount of
food that you can do all of the preservation that
we've talked about. You can also just make chowder and
freeze it, you know whatever. But there's a lot of
(34:55):
ways to to cheaply obtain calories from out in the world. Yeah,
all right, well that's going to do it for us today. Um,
until next time, remember experiment on your friends with different
medical care treatments. So don't do that. Although on the
other hand, look up the if you are in the
Pacific Northwest, there is the Portland Fruit Tree Project up
(35:18):
here which goes around and connects gleaners with fruit trees
that need to be gleaned. Um, so people who have
over abundant trees that they don't want all the stuff.
That's a really great resource. In other cities. I'm sure
there's other things, and also the Falling Fruit map, so
you can go online and if there's not already one
(35:39):
in your area. They also make it really easy to
be able to chart and put in trees in your area.
So if it's saying that you're excited about and you
love identifying trees, you can go in and actually start
charting your neighborhood. Also figure out how to identify, you know,
five wild plants that grow in your area that you
can eat, because it's always nice to have more variety
(36:03):
and it's fun to be out on a walk and
be like, oh cool, now I have a thing that
I can toss in with dinner when I get back. Yeah,
And we've talked about how there's like the poor version
of the cheap version, there's also like the centrist version
and the radical version of that. The centrist version is
like I just want to know, like what kind of
edible fruits grow naturally in my area. The more radical
version is I'm going to start guerrilla grows of edible
(36:23):
foods on like available in my area. I'm gonna seedball
some ship. I'm gonna like very get a surgeon with
my yeah to prepare food. Yeah, things that grow rise
only take root real easy in the ecosystems they like,
and are real hard to get rid of once they
get crime gardens. I'm not going to say people should
tear out the random trees that cities plant and then
(36:45):
replace if you were, but it's possible to do trees
didn't make food with trees that did make food in
the same spot, probably nobody would notice except the people
who got food, and there would be more or free
calories in your area. If you know, the kind of
things that have been happening in the last several years
continue to happen. All right, that's the episode. That's the episode.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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