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Late Spring Bounty: Free Food!
June 15th, 2009
photo: wide eyed lib
Later this week we’ll mark the Summer Solstice, when the sun turns from its annual march toward the north and the days start getting shorter. The first day of summer, when our Victory Gardens start producing real food, the swimming hole looks very inviting, and families start heading for the hills to enjoy cool nights and summer fun.
If you live somewhere outside the inner city – or are just planning a vacation somewhere near the fields and forests, there are some wild foods you may wish to try that are now at the peak of their flavor and nutritional value. In addition to other installments here on wild and/or otherwise free foods [], knowing something about how to obtain necessary nutrition when available never hurt anybody.
First off, those of us who live south of the Mason-Dixon line are only too familiar with an introduced Japanese legume so invasive that it’s taken over 12,000 square miles of territory. We call it Kudzu, and it’s everywhere. It was introduced by the railroads to control erosion on steep banks, and quickly overtook everything in its path. It grows a foot a day, covering hillsides, fields, forests and telephone poles, abandoned houses and cars, and even (as is a joke around here) late-sleeping campers and slow-moving cows.
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Filed under Alternatives, Foraging, Nutrition, Surviving | Comment (0)The Next Mortgage Meltdown
June 4th, 2009
The subprime mortgage crisis in just about over. Those whose loans came with usurious interest rates have, if they got behind or lost their jobs, already been foreclosed upon. Now the issue is negative equity, the fact that real estate is depreciating so fast that homes are no longer worth the price paid, even with prime interest rates. Being “upside down” and expecting a higher rate to kick in on the original price is causing more and more people to simply walk away from their mortgages.
And indeed, walking away from the debt may be the best option for people who purchased during the “bubble” of inflated valuation. Because the underlying problem the bubble was based upon – ever-increasing wages for the working classes – has dismally failed to materialize.
We’re all paying for the bubble and the ridiculous amount of side-bets that got made by financial pyramid schemers who artificially produced and inflated that bubble. When the “average” price of a below “average” home (say, 50 years old, in need of repair, in a bad neighborhood and too small for a family) rises above $120,000 in one of America’s “Officially Depressed Regions” where a majority of citizens are chronically out of work and wages hover right around minimum, you know something’s got to give. That’s how it is in my nearest county with an actual city in it – Buncombe County, NC, home to the city of Asheville (pop. less than 100,000).
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Filed under Bankruptcy, Debt, Economic Depression, Housing | Comment (0)