Those of us attempting to live on what was a shoestring budget even before the Great Unending Recession/Depression have probably been watching the large insanity of vacationing Congresscritters attempting to hold Town Hall meetings with their constituents back home with some bemusement. It’s no secret that the WingNut Network [a.k.a. Fox] and Hate Radio pundits have been inciting their faithful dummies to riot, since this has been ongoing ever since they lost the election last November in a big way. Between the clueless idiots who can’t believe a black man is a real American citizen (or that exotic Hawaii is actually a state) and the Bermuda shorts and gray hair crowd shouting “Keep the government OUT of my Medicare!” one really does have to wonder if maybe there’s something in the water making people lose what few IQ points they might have had back in kindergarten.

Some of us also know that going to a doctor regularly if you aren’t actually sick is not wise, thus are probably better off if we don’t suffer some chronic condition with our very limited access to the health care system than we might be if we had annual check-ups and the ability to demand whatever drug is advertised on television nightly. While it’s a sad truth that ~50 million Americans have no access to the health care system – and that’s an insurance issue – I haven’t seen anybody talking much lately about the health care system itself, which just happens to be the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Thus they’re fighting about “Health Insurance Reform” while the dismal failure of doctors and hospitals to confront the outrageous error rate, hospital-acquired infection rate, etc. that KILLS at least 195,000 Americans every year. Americans who DO have access to the system! The U.S. pays more per capita of our GDP on health care than any other industrialized nation – most of which have universal, single-payer health care systems – and are at the very bottom of the list on all measures of health care outcome. Life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality (tied to our ridiculous C-section rate and lack of prenatal care), general health, number of chronic diseases, etc., etc.

We’d all like to see universal access to health care. We’d like for insurance companies to be barred from canceling policies if the person gets sick, from refusing to cover those with pre-existing conditions, and from raising the rates at five times the rate of inflation every year just because they can. We’d like for the poor and working poor to be able to get health care even if they don’t work for a company that offers it, or don’t earn enough to participate. We’d really like to get our bones set and our cuts stitched when we need to without going bankrupt, and we’d like to get treatment for our cancers and our other serious ailments instead of simply dying of them because health care is beyond our reach.

But because something must be done about the current situation in this country no matter how loudly the idiots yell about not offering their government health care to others who need health care, we can expect that something minimal will indeed be done. Best advice to those who have managed to get this far in life without being regular users of the health care system or the drug companies’ medicine chest is to approach new access with caution. Nothing is being done to cure the rate of iatrogenic disease and death (iagrogenic means “doctor-caused”) in any of this political maneuvering, so increased access only means that the delivery system will be able to harm or kill even more Americans every year.

Make use of your intelligence and your access to the internet, go looking for reliable information if you or someone you love gets sick. Merck has their entire medical manual on-line, the Physician’s Desk Reference is available as well with good information about drugs and which ones may conflict with others – something too many doctors don’t keep track of, and a large contributor to deaths from prescription errors. There are lots of physician websites offering information about various conditions, as well as patient associations that often have collected information from people who have or have dealt with particular conditions with even better information. Always be careful of information, make sure it’s good and not just another quack selling the magical ‘cure’ for AIDS or cancer or whatever, because those are out there too.

And if you’ve got questions, write them down, collect the good information you’ve gathered, THEN take it to your primary care provider and ask. Don’t tolerate a physician or practitioner who gets his or her nose bent out of shape because you’ve done your homework, and never put up with a doctor who balks if you ask for a second opinion. If you’re in line for surgery or some other serious treatment, go to the website of your state government’s medical regulatory agency and search until you find a list of the physicians and other practitioners who have been disciplined by the agency for gross or repeated malpractice or errors. If your doctor’s on the list, get a new one.

And most of all, keep always in your mind the fact that your personal choices affect your health for the better more acutely than anything an insurance company or doctor or hospital can. No one else can “heal” you – people’s own bodies do the healing, health care providers can only help it along. Best not to get sick in the first place, and we’ve no excuse not to know that our diets greatly affect our health. Eating well, getting exercise, maintaining our environment, etc. will stave off many a nasty illness or condition – avoiding the plagues that come with obesity is much better than treating this plague or that plague after they’ve developed.

Now, sit back and enjoy the street theater spectacle of the ‘haves’ trying most desperately to prevent the ‘have-nots’ from getting anything! It’s black comedy at its most absurd, something we’ll probably never see again in our lifetimes. Laugh, because that’s the best medicine in the world!

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.

Kudzu is a soil-enriching, fine compost producing legume that could be very high quality animal feed if it weren’t a vine that binds almost every machine that could possibly harvest it. Goats love it and will keep it under tight control, but fire just makes it meaner. Its deep taproots provide a medicinal and nutritional starch and its pretty wisteria-like flowers make a nice jelly. But it’s the high-protein leaves that are most useful as food. If you harvest, take the smaller, new leaves at the ends of vines. They’re very tender, so steaming is much better than boiling. They make a tasty mess of greens to go with corbread. They aren’t particularly tasty steamed, but flavor is much improved by simmering about 5 minutes in broth. We like kudzu much better than poke, which has to be cooked twice and is as mushy as spinach, not nearly as tasty as collards, kale or turnip greens. But it’ll definitely keep you going, has more protein and vital nutrients than most any other wild green you could cook, and nobody will ever miss the leaves you gather.

If you harvest roots, roast them like potatoes, slice or cube them for stews. They’ll pick up the flavors of the other ingredients. The dandelions are pretty tough and bitter by now, but are still an excellent source of nutrients and can be mixed into stews or pot-greens with that are not bitter and things will even out. Other wild greens are best eaten raw, as in salads or added atop a sandwich. And many of these are more packed with nutrients than anything that grows in a domesticated garden. The delicate foliage of sourgrass doesn’t stand up to cooking at all, I usually just pick a bunch as I’m walking or gardening and consume it leaves, flowers and stems immediately. the bright yellow-flowering garlic mustard leaves and flowers make a spicy addition to salads as well, and they’re everywhere.

Purslane, chickweed and lamb’s quarters are all great in salads, as are the buds and flowers of day lily. I slice the buds for salads, but they’re also good dipped in beer batter and light-fried like squash blossoms. Another edible flower is Lady’s thumb (redshank, pictured above), and these grow in dense stands to make it easy to pick quite a lot in one place. Another flower that can add color and substance to salads is nasturtium, and the younger leaves are delicious raw as well. don’t be afraid of those now-tall and seeding wild onions/garlics either, just be aware that they’re strong so you don’t need that many. Dandelion flowers are always good, and if you happen upon a thicket of blooming wild roses (white or pink), pop off some and add the petals to your salad.

Summer fruits are beginning to ripen now as well, and these are always a treat. Elderberries, blackberries, blueberries and such can be encountered almost anywhere out in the country. Elderberries need to be made into pie or jam, but black and blue berries seldom make it back to the kitchen before getting eaten. If they do, cobbler is easy to make and a summer favorite around here.

Check out wide eyed lib’s series on foraging if you want more info, and as always, be absolutely sure you’ve got the right plant before you eat it. Now that the abundant season is upon us, take advantage of some of nature’s offerings!

The news these days is chock full of dramatized street theater as the “haves” fight about ridiculous things like super-bonuses for AIG grifters, amazing world-class ponzi money-laundering schemes, and how we on the low end of the totem pole get to pay through the nose (as usual) to bail these crooks out. At this point it’s not even a partisan fight, it’s just rich versus poor. As usual. We who have been actually harmed by these interminable games of economic Risk are just trying to survive with the basics – food, clothing and shelter.

While I hope that anyone who regularly reads this blog has already bought their seeds and planted their ‘taters, there are things we usually have to purchase – or trade for – because we don’t produce our own at home. Sure, it doesn’t take more than a quarter acre of yard to keep a fresh milk goat or half a dozen chickens who give us eggs for free, but often people will be unable to even do that much. Keeping that goat fresh requires breeding once a year, and then you’ve got to either deal with a smelly billy goat or transport to where the smelly billy goat is standing stud. And what about the kid? That’s something my family could never quite conscience (these youngsters, if not also female, are usually slaughtered for meat). And don’t let anybody fool you. Those chickens CAN fly (sorta). At least to get over the fence into your neighbor’s yard.

If you are lucky enough to still have a roof over your family’s heads, there are ways to save a great deal on foods you can’t produce in your garden but need to keep everyone healthy and satisfied. Nothing makes us feel wealthier than a truly fine and healthy diet. Plus, that alone can save us multi-thousands in chronic diseases we really don’t have to get in the first place. The first of these is to join a local CSA. With this membership, which is critical to purchase right now if you can, you get a portion of the crops and products of local farmers near your home. Even if you garden, this can help fill out the take so you’ve got more to work with. Buying local directly supports your local farmers, and helps them to purchase the seeds and equipment they need to keep on producing.

Even better, many CSAs also keep bees for honey, cows and/or goats for dairy, chickens for free range eggs plus poultry, and some even raise pigs and steers for later slaughter so you can purchase a “share” of those as well. When I was young – it was a large family – my mother always purchased a half a steer every year to freeze in the chest freezer, along with as many chickens as she could get locally. Not only are these animals raised humanely and fed on pasture and hay that they’re naturally designed to consume for maximum health, they were always locally slaughtered so that even the ground beef came from just those steers raised on that farm. Nowadays when ground meat from the supermarket may contain the remains of as many as 100 animals, some of whom were no doubt very sick when they went in, this is vastly preferable.

But what I want to talk about in this post is dairy. Not just milk, but also cheese, yogurt, butter, sour cream and other dairy products we use on an almost daily basis to add protein to our diets and keep the kids happy. The reason to avoid store-bought dairy is more than just the fact that big dairy farms often pollute their milk with genetically engineered hormones and such, it also avoids the mass mixing of milk from farms far and wide that must be mass-pasteurized and have much of its useful ingredients neutralized. So that you end up paying $4 or more for a pound of butter, $2 or more for a few ounces of yogurt or sour cream, etc. We can save a great deal of money – and learn a lot about how food works – if we do this sort of thing for ourselves.

If you’ve a CSA with a dairy division, or a local dairy farm, you can often purchase raw milk on the sly (the government is trying hard to close this loophole). This gives you the raw material to work with to produce your own high-protein and full-fat food ingredients. My family once had a friend up the road who got a fresh goat in payment of a debt, a guy who didn’t drink much milk. That goat gave 2 gallons a day, so I did the calligraphy for his craft catalog in exchange for a gallon a day of fresh goats milk. Which he delivered! Now, you need a mechanical separator to get cream out of naturally homogenized goat milk, and I didn’t have one, so we just drank it. Cow’s milk is much easier to work with…

Raw cow’s milk naturally separates just by being left to separate. Cream rises to the top, the regular milk settles below. You should always pasteurize what you have, meaning that before you drink or use it, go ahead and boil for 5 full minutes. This can destroy some of the natural caesins in the milk or cream, but is definitely worth it to avoid any sicknesses that might result from raw. Just separate the cream first, and what’s left after pasteurization makes fine butter, sour cream and rich cheese. If you’re working with goat’s milk and don’t have a separator, make the butter first since this will serve to separate. Just keep it refrigerated or frozen for longer term storage.

To make butter, just fill a sterilized quart jar half full of whole milk or cream and shake it. This will take some time, but is definitely worth it. The cream component will tend to coagulate and this is what you want. It also floats atop whole milk so is easily scooped out. Accumulate a pound or so of this thick butter, fold in a little salt, and it can be used immediately or frozen in wax and plastic for later. It won’t be yellow, but that’s just another coal-tar dye. Who needs it?

To make yogurt, a spoonful of ‘live’ yogurt is added to a jar of milk and well-shaken, allow it to set overnight (shaking occasionally). By morning it should be thick, stir again and refrigerate. Add sugar, honey, spices, flavorings, whatever, and spoon in liberally on your burritos or use it as dip for pita (which is also easy to make). Yogurt is a bit like sourdough, in that your refrigerated starter can last for years. A single purchase, you can turn it into whatever you like! It freezes fairly well, so you can make a lot when you get your local milk and it’ll last a long time.

Cheese is a bit more labor intensive, but worth it if your family gets most of its animal protein from milk products. There are both natural and genetically engineered rennets on the market, go for the natural if you can. These can also be salvaged from commercial, natural cheeses and added. Cream makes the best strong cheeses, but this takes some time. The internet has sources for the necessary ingredients, or perhaps your CSA can help you with that as well. Be choosy – local food is a growing movement as things in the dollar-based global economy fall apart, be on the forefront of making sure you can do as much for yourself as possible!

This sort of knowledge – how to grow, preserve, obtain and stretch food for your family – is not knowledge that ever really “goes out of style.” Who knows what will happen to those jet-setters and politicians who whine endlessly about pieces of paper or mere bits and bytes of information that grant their wealth – so much greater than We the People who are just trying to survive? Do we really care? If we can do for ourselves, they don’t seem so important anymore, and our personal worlds expand locally to include all the things we really need.

Perhaps in the end that would be the greatest lesson any of us could ever teach our children as well as our erstwhile ‘masters’. We’ll be okay, thanks. When you’re hungry, we’ll talk about it…

So get busy, folks! Find out where your CSAs are, start making some friends in the farming community, see if you can turn that shed into a goat barn, and figure out how many chickens you can host in your back yard without compromising the garden. We can live through this, maybe come out the other side more confident than ever that we’ll never be helpless again!

Links:

Local Harvest: CSA
Dairy CSA
Cook for Good: Yogurt
Homemade Cheese
Cheese Making & Supplies
What’s Cooking: Homemade Cheese

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports its latest unemployment figures as of January 2009 as 7.6% of the workforce, compared to 7.2% in December of 2008. We all know that jobs are being lost by the hundreds of thousands across the nation. We also know that these statistics account only for those workers who file and are eligible to receive unemployment benefits. Which makes the real unemployment figures at least twice as high, now more than 15%. That’s definitely edging into ‘Depression’ territory, and there will be no let-up any time soon.

Whether or not you qualify for unemployment benefits – which aren’t enough to pay the mortgage for most people – if you are out of work you and your family probably qualify for food stamps, or what is now termed by USDA as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP]. The Social Security Online website also has good information about eligibility for food stamps, and we most certainly hope that readers of this weblog aren’t too proud to make good use of this program if they find themselves in need. You may hope that another good job will soon be offered, but don’t let your family go hungry in the meantime. DO something!

This blog has examined issues of health and nutrition in trying economic times in several post series. 3 Easy Ways to Eat Cheap outlines best strategies for stretching food dollars without sacrificing nutrition. What’s For Dinner? examines fast-rising food prices and ways to get around paying so much. There are some good resources linked in those posts and their follow-ups, but today I discovered a whole new resource that is dedicated specifically to getting the most from minimal food budgets and food stamp allotments.

The website is called Cook for Good and it breaks things down for all to understand. Food stamps in most instances offer a mere $1.50 or so for a single meal per person in a household. It is difficult to figure out how to feed a family on so little as the price of food goes up every single day at the supermarket, and most government subsidies won’t cover fresh foods, farmer’s market purchases, etc. In this website a host of questions and answers can be found on just how to stretch those fake food dollars to not only keep your family fed, but fed well and without the gross extra calories that have turned the “face of poverty” in this country from rail thin to seriously obese in a short 50 years.

Cook for Good even offers a month’s worth of menus to demonstrate exactly how to feed a family for an average of just $1.25 per meal. Including desserts far less fattening than Twinkies! Going with the “green” menu adds just 53¢ to the cost per meal, but includes fresh and organic foods. Between this example of a month’s worth of menus and the shopping hints, recipes and hints on the website, anyone recently out of work (thus with time to spend), on food stamps and concerned about health and nutrition can plan ahead and feel much better about the whole situation.

Who knows? Perhaps if enough people have to go through figuring out how to eat well on much less money, when the economic situation improves we’ll be generally slimmer, healthier and more involved in eating good food than we ever were before. That would be something very good to come of these trying economic times. So go on over to Cook for Good, check out the links here at Shoestring Budget, and if you know of more resources out there please offer them in the comments.

Eat well, be happy!

Links:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Food Stamp Facts
Cook for Good
Month of Menus
3 Easy Ways to Eat Cheap
What’s For Dinner?

The election is now over, the Neocons and their operatives at Treasury and the Fed are doing their best to loot the nation completely before power changes hands, and the citizens are collectively holding their breath, wondering just how bad it will get, thousands of jobs disappearing every week. The Grinch may well have succeeded in stealing Christmas this year – looks like we won’t have Circuit City to kick around anymore.

As the economy falls (for everyone but the oil companies, who are enjoying record profits as usual), the prices of just about everything keep going up. The most primal of our needs is food, and how we will survive the depression without sacrificing our health, our weight or our taste buds is a question many families are beginning to struggle with.

By next spring we can expect the number of home ‘Victory Gardens’ to explode as patches of lawn are tilled under and favorite veggies are planted. Depending on where you live – thus how long your growing season is and whether you get two a year – a family can produce a significant chunk of its annual consumption of fresh greens, tomatoes, peas, peppers, and various specialty items like melons, squash, eggplant, artichokes and tasty herbs. In a well-managed yard garden of no more than 12×20 feet and a clever porch container garden.

In the meantime, here are some basics for making the most out of short food dollars while getting the most nutrition and least amount of excess fat from your day to day diet.

1. Eat More Soups and Stews

Basic one-pot meals can be hearty, tasty, nutritious and extremely satisfying. If you don’t have a crock pot, consider one as your Gift Wish this year. You can start a soup or stew you prepped the night before when you make your morning coffee, it will be ready to eat when you get home from work.

For these you can use cheaper dry legumes and grains, bullion stocks and storage veggies like potatoes, onions and carrots. If you’re meat eaters, a ham hock in the pot adds a lot of flavor. Cheaper cuts of beef make for fine stews, and chicken is a perennial favorite. Can be purchased in tuna-size cans (same aisle), will make tasty chicken-rice or chicken noodle or chicken n’ dumplings. A good pot of hearty soup or stew can last a couple of nights, or provide easily microwaveable lunches the next day. Every time you don’t buy prepared food you’re saving real money for better tasting and more nutritious home-cooked meals.

And don’t forget about pot pies – a great way to stretch a good hearty stew when there’s lots left over, they freeze well and can be made in single-serve portions when you’ve got time!

One Dish Crockpot Meals
All Crockpot Recipes

2. Learn All About Quick-Breads

To go with those hearty soups and stews you’ll want to whip up some good side-breads. A 5-pound bag of cornmeal (self rising) can make a lot of cornbread either for dunking or crumbling or just munching. There are good recipes for various quick wheat breads using leavening agents that don’t require as much work as yeast. Crackers are another side that doesn’t take long to whip up and can be as hearty as you like with sesame, caraway or flax seeds, some herb flavorings and maybe some additional flours (rye, oat, etc.) to the usual wheat.

Homegrown Evolution: Quick Breads
6,718 Quick Bread Recipes

3. Window Box, Porch & House Plant Gardening

Salad greens – your basic variety of leaf lettuces, spinach, etc. – love cool weather. Even if you live in an all-winter-freeze environment, if you’ve a sunny window you can attach plastic weather sheeting in such a way to enclose a window box, which will then pick up enough heat from the house through the window to allow growing salad greens. If you can water and harvest from inside the house, even better!

These boxes need not be deeper than 3-4″ of good potting soil and compost, lettuce and spinach have very shallow roots. If you sow the mixed leaf seed, don’t worry about separating the plants. Just cut the leaves when they get to be about 3″ tall with a pair of scissors, they’ll keep growing back. Spinach should have a bit of room, harvest outside leaves and let the center keep producing more.

Dark green leafies like kale and collards can easily be grown in well-insulated pots on the porch, so long as your porch gets sun. They’ll grow right through snow cover, but you have to keep the pot from “ground-freeze.” Harvest these the same way as spinach (though the leaves are much bigger) – outside first, let the central plant keep producing rather than just cut the whole thing down. I have collard and kale plants in my garden that are two years old, their multi-harvested stems several feet long, still producing fine greens.

And peppers (chili or bell) can grow indoors all year long in a good size pot if it gets sun. They even have seeds for ‘ornamental’ pepper plants just for houseplant use, though the peppers are indeed edible. And like avacado and citrus trees, they’ll live forever if you take care of them.

Container Gardening: Vegetables
Vegetable Gardening in Containers

More than 40 million Americans – including children – have no health insurance. As the economy continues to weaken and good jobs are outsourced to countries where universal care exempts businesses from having to carry the health care burden, millions more are being thrown into the ranks of the uninsured. Then there are those who have changed jobs, and encountered insurers who simply will not cover them due to pre-existing conditions. These days if you’ve ever had treatment for things like acne, high cholesterol or carpel tunnel you can find yourself on the growing list of the “Uninsurable.”

Now, if you don’t mind jumping serious hoops and get an early start in the fiscal year, states do have sliding scale plans and Medicaid allotments. If you are covered by one of these, you do NOT count among the officially uninsured. In my officially “economically depressed” region, approximately two thirds of the citizens qualify for food stamps and medical care, but there’s only enough money to cover less than half of them. The rest simply do without, at least until they simply can’t do without anymore. The cost of indigent care at our few public hospitals is yet another perpetually unpaid bill.

This blog offered many good tips and links to useful resources for the uninsured in a previous 3-part series Inexpensive Health Care Tips, Part 1, including in Part 2 some strategies for getting necessary prescription medicines, and in Part 3 how to negotiate access to primary and emergency care.

Now that approximately half of the citizens of the US are either uninsured or underinsured (have high deductible “junk insurance” or coverage that is routinely denied), we cannot expect that things will get any better any time soon, at least not so long as the inside-the-beltway crowd has unlimited free health care. The progressive political website Daily Kos is hosting a Thursday series by diarist ‘nightowl724′, part 1 of which is 10 Survival Topics for the Uninsured.

There are some good resources, advice and strategies presented (topics 1 – 6 of the promised 10). The project arose from the Daily Kos Health Care Google Group. The posting schedule for this month is worth noting:

August 14: Survival Tips for the Uninsured, Part 1
August 15: Uninsured and Lucky to be Alive Part 1
August 21: Survival Tips for the Uninsured, Part 2
August 22: Uninsured and Lucky to be Alive Part 2
August 28: Living with a Chronic Illness

Interested readers can subscribe to the series here.

Links:

Inexpensive Health Care Tips, Part 1
nightowl724’s page
Inexpensive Health Care Tips: Intro
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2: Necessary Medicines
Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3: Primary and Emergency Care
Basic Health Maintenance: Part 1
Basic Health Care Maintenance: Part II
Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism

The market news reports that consumer spending is up again this month. The problem is that this is not as a sign of possible economic recovery from the deepening recession we find ourselves in. It’s a reflection of the fact that people must spend more on basics like fuel and food – prices for both rising much faster than regular people can keep up with – thus must spend less on all that consumer junk our capitalistic system expects us to buy with our overrated “disposable income.”

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re like me – I have no “disposable income” because all the income we have must go to simply pay for the necessities of life, and there’s hardly enough even cutting corners. Food, clothing, shelter, transportation, utilities. I have previously posted about the clothing thing, as I haven’t actually purchased new clothing for at least a decade. Used clothing is good enough – even suits and formal clothing – though I don’t dress up much. But the mortgage is what it is. Gas prices are what they are, they cannot be bargained down. And as the price of fuel rises, so does the cost of food and electricity. Thus more of our money must be spent on necessities, even if we never had any left over for junk in the first place!

It’s spring, my tiller should come back from the shop Saturday, and all my garden terraces will be put into production this season. Of course that also means I must purchase seed and starts that I haven’t grown in flats, but all that will pay off as the food comes in. Spinach, lettuce, collards, kale and peas are all up, the asparagus (a perennial) is coming in rushes, and the strawberries will ripen if the nights ever stop dipping into the 30s.

Even if you live in a cramped apartment, you can grow a few tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in pots on the patio or porch. Buy into a CSA for fresh produce as your share of a local farmer’s crops, or plan a weekly visit to your area farmer’s market and buy fresh produce in bulk. That supports local farmers, lets you get to know the people who can keep you from starving, and saves real money over the whole supermarket system where locally grown tomatoes compete with tomatoes grown in Mexico or Guatemala and they all cost way too much.

A series in the Washington Post examines the issues in depth and is worth a read. The final installment appeared today (May 1) and deals with the American consumer’s issues. Clipping, Scrimping, Saving takes a look at how people are coping with the rising price of food.

There are some good hints and resources in the Post series. But there is another issue that people who really are having trouble making ends meet must consider as even more important. The diet for poor people in this country consists of worse than junk. We all saw the class divisions during the Katrina crisis, and understand that the shape of poverty in America is obese. I know it’s hard to think that people are actually hungry who weigh twice or three times what a healthy person weighs, but it’s true. They’re hungry for real food, but limited to eating worse-than-garbage.

We could be smug and say that rising food prices might cure that obesity epidemic, but it won’t. The fake grain paste and high fructose corn syrup diet is designed to pack on pounds even as it starves the body of necessary nutrients and energy. The result is crippling obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and a host of cancers. It’s a “killing diet,” not a basic level of necessary nourishment.

Given the even worse health care crisis in this country, we who live on shoestring budgets cannot afford to get fat and unhealthy. If the best thing I could offer my readers is the advice to pay attention to nourishment – buy fresh food, I offer it now. Sam’s Club and coupon-cutting will save you money on junk food, but it won’t help you stay healthy and fit. Do not be fooled – take the time and trouble to seek out healthy food, don’t give in to cheap obesity.

Links and Resources:

WP: Global Food Crisis Series
NYT: As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise
Food Crisis Hits America
Disappearing Amber Waves of Grain
Where Every Meal Is a Sacrifice

As the recession kicks in – and looks to be a long, deep one extending well beyond this fall’s elections and possibly through 2009 as well – the health and wellbeing of all our families are going to be something at the top of the list of “important” considerations. Worse, there are strong hints of a coming Worldwide Food Shortage caused by expanding droughts in grain growing regions as well as diversion of cropland and crops for the production of ethanol.

So in this post I want to talk about bread. That generally most ignored of foods in the modern world, turned into nutrient-sapping paper maché paste by giant food processing conglomerates. Yet bread is traditionally known as “The Staff of Life,” the most important staple food for human beings since ancient prehistory.

My father was a big fan of “meal bread,” what he called breads that form the belly-filling ‘meat’ of a day’s diet to supplement any vegetables or cheeses that are available. Breads that sop up the “pot likker” liquids left from boiling greens or stewing meats, breads that offer complementary proteins to spreads like nut butters or flavored oils and butters, breads a person can live on if need be while not causing drastic shortages of necessary nutrients.

These breads are quite different from your basic Wonder Bread loaves of bleached white bread with the consistency of thin mud pie. They often come with a variety of nuts or seeds, sprouted whole grains, grated cheeses, diced garlic and onions, even wildings such as acorn or bark flours. Bread can also be made with potatoes, beans, dried squash, corn or even fruits, enriched with sun-dried tomatoes and laced with herbs like rosemary and basil and oregano and mints. Made from any combination of wheat, rye, rice, soy, barley, amaranth or millet flours, preferably with grain-heart and bran included, meal bread is a solid, heavy loaf with a lot of body and plenty of personality.

We’ve examined some of the most immediate ways to save money, and one of the most important of those is learning how to cook meals from scratch. Not only does this save a lot on prepared and processed foods and eating out, it also allows people to get more involved with their food – which tends to translate directly into a healthier diet and fitter body. Bread is probably one of the best foods a person can commit to making for themselves and their family. One can go whole hog with the project or simply purchase one of those handy dandy bread machines that so many Yuppies swear by these days. But if you want to try your hand at real live meal breads, your best bet is to do it by hand. That way you can be creative day after day after day, and your family – including those kids who think the world revolves around Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs – will learn to love it.

To save the most money on the project while obtaining the most bulk for your buck, you can purchase whole grains by the pound at health food stores and organic co-ops. You’ll need to bring your own bags and have ample well-sealed containers at home to store them in. The best I’ve found are those plastic 5-gallon buckets with tight-fitting lids you can recycle from construction sites (they hold drywall mud) or perhaps get from your local deli – those big kosher pickles come in these buckets – or even from your local school cafeteria, as many bulk foods are packaged this way. Wash them thoroughly and sterilize them with boiling water, let them dry thoroughly and line with a white plastic garbage bag. Once your grains are in the bucket you can twist the bag over it (this helps defeat weevils, mice and other vermin) and then cover firmly with the lid. The grain will keep for more than a year this way. Do keep out a quart jar of whole grains (and mung beans/alfalfa seeds) if you can, as these can be sprouted in a day’s time to add green-growth vitamins to your breads.

If you purchase just a few pounds of different kinds of grains at a time, you can go ahead and grind it (I use a nifty countertop hand grinder from Poland) and store it in canister jars with screw-on lids in your freezer. Label the jars so you know what’s in them, most flours look pretty much alike when they’re ground! Or simply purchase bags of pre-groud flour (and artisan flours) at the grocery store and store them in the freezer.

After awhile you’ll develop some favorite combinations of flours you’ll want to use over and over again. In a 3-cup loaf recipe I like to include half a cup of bean flour (garbanzos and blacks grind up nice or can simply be added mashed), half a cup of serious whole grain (like acorn or cracked wheat) with fine-ground rye or soft wheat flour. Oat flour isn’t as good in “meal bread” as whole rolled oats, but that’s personal taste. You’ll also want to get supplies of flax seed, unsalted sunflower seeds and unbleached sesame seeds to include. If you like poppy seeds go for it, but be forewarned that they’ll make you flunk a drug test!

It takes 3-4 cups of flour to make a standard round bread or loaf. You can always double a recipe so you don’t have to bake so often, and for a little less than $100 you can get an efficient solar oven that will bake bread fine as long as the sun shines – thereby saving you money on that electric range oven!

Now I guess we should examine leavening. Some combinations of flours are quite short on developed gluten, which is the wheat protein that allows bread to rise and become fluffy when yeast is added. Some people are sensitive to gluten and/or yeast, so there are recipes for no-yeast breads out there that use baking powder instead of yeast. Sourdough is my favorite penny-pinching leavening, but it relies on natural yeasts. Anyone sensitive should avoid sourdough and just stick with non-yeast recipes.

I say sourdough is my favorite cheap leavening because once you start shopping for breadmaking supplies, you’ll find that yeast is an expensive item. And it takes at least one whole packet (or tablespoon equivalent from a jar of dried yeast) per loaf of bread. You’re not just keeping healthy with meal bread, you’re also trying to feed your family well on a shoestring budget! Sourdough is the best answer I’ve found.

I’ve heard tell of sourdough starters out in San Francisco that are more than a hundred years old! No, the sourdough itself isn’t that old, as it’s “fed” daily as it’s used to make bread, but that’s an impressive batch of leavening! Sourdough is basically just a fermented mix of flour and water. The yeasts that thrive naturally on the surface of grains, fruits, vegetables and in the air are what causes the fermentation, or you can take the shortcut like I did and start your starter with a packet of store-bought yeast. I use a starter that has a bit of added sugar (used a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses) and a bit of milk (for its lactic acid), but you can make a good starter with just flour and water.

My recipes usually call for 2 cups of liquid (starter or starter plus warm water) per loaf, which means that I have to feed the starter with that much more flour and water – and maybe a spoonful of sugar – every time I bake bread. Weekly I pour it out into a bowl and let it sit bubbling for an hour or two, while thoroughly washing the jar and letting it dry. Then I put it back into the jar and pop it into the fridge to use next time. It needs shaking or stirring regularly to mix the beer-like liquid with the settled flour, and I do let my dough sit out for a couple of hours to develop well before kneading and shaping the loaves.

Heavier breads take longer to rise than breads made with fine-ground unbleached wheat flour alone. The more additives (veggies, nuts, sprouts, seeds) in the loaf, the longer it’ll take to get a good rise. For some really rich meal breads I go ahead and put the dough in an oiled pyrex bowl with a tight lid in a slightly warmed oven and let it rise overnight. Sourdough doesn’t have to rise twice (though sometimes you’ll want to do that), and should be baked at a hot temperature. 450º for a basic semi-white light loaf, 425º for whole wheat and mixed grains, 400º for heavy loaves with seeds and veggies. Cook it covered if you can for the first half hour, then uncovered until the crust is brown and the loaf sounds hollow.

I’ve listed some great sites for information and recipes below, and hope my readers will take the time to check them out. I know it doesn’t sound all that important to talk about bread when there may be a major food shortage as well as economic depression in the next couple of years. But again, bread is the most important of the foods we need to keep us and our families alive in hard times. A basic plain loaf of sliced whole wheat sandwich bread is now $3.50 at my local grocery store – and while I don’t remember when bread was a nickel, I do remember when it was a quarter a loaf. Once you become adept at making your own breads, you’ll find that by buying ingredients in bulk you can have a fine heavy loaf of serious artisan bread for less than a dollar a loaf! It’s some work, but the kind of work that is most satisfying. If you plan well, you can bake up to 6 loaves over a single weekend, enough for the coming week and high in nutritional value. Bread can be frozen and re-heated before serving.

If you make 6 loaves of meal bread – very much gourmet specialty items, by the way, which cost 7-10 dollars a loaf locally – for about $6, that’s some serious food value! If you can get your children to love it, you’ll find that they can be very creative in their lunchtime trading with friends. My grandchildren always pack extra slices of bread and trade them for apples or carrots or cookies, or sometimes a fine mac and cheese. Kids are ever more environmentally and nutritionally aware these days, so encourage them! Let them help make bread with you on the weekend and they’ll be even more proud of their lunches!

Links:

Sourdough: History, Science, Recipes

NPR: More than a bread

No Yeast Bread

Hungry Monster: Types of Bread

Breaducation

Ancient Egypt: The Staff of Life

Food Reference: Bread

Science of Bread

Click through background sites for great recipes, and create your own!

My last post offered some Tips for Avoiding Pressure to Shop, mostly in the context of getting out of the usual “girls’ day out” type of expensive, mall-hopping, credit card fueled frenzy that way too many people in the modern world view as entertainment. At least, until the bills come due. Sad statistics demonstrate that if medical costs from an accident or illness in the family don’t lead to bankruptcy, credit card debt will. These are the two biggest contributors to middle class bankruptcies in the U.S. at this time, and as the mortgage crisis becomes ever worse, it’s not going to get any better.

In this post I’m going to offer some ways of thinking that can become habitual without too much trouble, that will help keep you out of debt by not going into debt in the first place. Not everyone can put these to good use, but those who can will find that their shoestring budgets go a lot farther in covering necessities.

• First and foremost, get rid of the credit cards. Even if you just pay the minimum every month, all that covers is interest and fees. Nothing you bought with the cards gets paid for, and your debt never goes down. I know this can be difficult when you receive a dozen “Great Credit Card Offers!” every week in the mail, but you can ignore them if you try. There are no “great credit card offers,” there are just financiers trying to profit from your spending habits. If you can start thinking of them in those terms it’s a lot easier to resist.

And don’t be fooled into believing you HAVE to have a credit card in order to purchase anything on-line. Your debit card from the bank usually comes with a particular card option stamped somewhere that allows you to indicate what kind of card you’re using, even though the transaction works just like regular bank account debit. If you don’t have enough money in your account to buy that nice watch you saw advertised on the Shopping Channel, you shouldn’t be buying it. It’s not that hard to find out what time it is, and most grocery stores sell $5 watches right there in the checkout line anyway. They work fine.

• Another way to save money – while at the same time doing wonders for your family’s nutritional health – is to learn how to cook from scratch. I have a sister who hasn’t had a working stove/oven for the last 15 years, and never bothered to get one because she doesn’t cook and neither does her husband. The family, which includes three children, lives on fast food. Wendy’s gristleburgers, MacDonald’s big macs and Happy Meals, most any highly fattening, nutritionally deficient fast food or processed junk they can buy. Not only is this outrageously expensive, it leads directly to health problems, obesity and chronic depression. For which my sister takes drugs she doesn’t really need. My best advice on this is to sit down and watch – really watch, paying attention – the movie “Supersize Me.” It’ll scare the heck out of you, and maybe scare the junk food out of you too!

It’s just not that hard to heat up some frozen vegetables or open a can of beans, cook up a roast or even try your hand at some cool vegetarian alternatives. Get a few cookbooks at a used book store, read through them, see if there aren’t some recipes that make your mouth water. I’m betting there are, and your family will thank you for it.

• You can also purchase food and home products like toilet paper, toothpaste, etc. in bulk when on sale. Prices are not coming down at the grocery and drug stores any time in the future, as increasing energy costs translate directly into higher prices for everything. If your local store is having a week-long 2-for-1 sale on canned and boxed goods and TP, paper towels, garbage bags, etc., take advantage of it! You’re going to use these items in the course of your daily life regardless. Might as well double up at half the price.

• Another idea if you’ve got the time and energy is to make your own household products and beauty items. These projects can be great fun for families to work on together during at-home weekends, and many who do this find that their products earn serious fans among the extended family visitors and friends who end up using them at your house. Or get them as gifts, since they make such good gifts. There’s some good information and recipes out there, such as Making Your Own Natural Designer Soaps. The web is a very useful tool, with sites devoted exclusively to recipes, projects, crafts and basics that you can make at home for not much money. Do some surfing!

• If you have school age children, get them a nice lunchbox and make their lunches. Not only will their lunch be more nutritious and useful than the junk that passes for food at most school cafeterias, you’ll save a significant amount of money. Buy dried fruit (roll-ups, raisins, mixed fruits, etc.) in bulk, have single-serving zip-locks handy to divvy it up into a week’s worth of lunch. If you make your own real good bread (with a machine or the old fashioned way), it can give peanut butter and jelly a whole new meaning!

I make sourdough bread, which my family thinks is the best bread anywhere. It’s quick because sourdough doesn’t have to be kneaded to death and doesn’t require hours’ worth of rising time. I usually use half unbleached all-purpose and half whole wheat, sometimes adding rye, barley or soy flour plus sunflower seeds, flax seeds, even chopped walnuts to make a slice a meal. A chunk of good cheese and a thermos (or purchase a carton) of milk and a baggie full of celery and carrot sticks makes a highly nutritious lunch that will stick with your child through the rest of the day and maybe even help them do better in school because they’re not falling asleep from sugar-crash during their afternoon classes.

• Home gardening saves a lot on truck vegetables now getting so expensive at the store than many can’t afford them at all any more. Things like bell peppers and tomatoes can be easily grown in containers on a sunny porch. Use a lot of compost in the soil mix (these are heavy feeders) and water them with compost tea regularly. My grandchildren eat raw peppers and tomatoes just like apples, and can never seem to get enough. I do sometimes include apples in their lunches, but if there’s a home grown, super-sweet handful of cherry tomatoes or a fist-sized home grown purple bell pepper they’re thrilled – and the envy of all their friends at school!

There will be more money-saving ideas forthcoming in future posts, and if any of my readers have good ideas please send ‘em in! Putting our heads together can help all of us better weather the coming recession, maybe even help us learn to live on less while enjoying our lives much more. Happy thrifting!

In Part I of this series we looked at the actual current situation with health care in America, the impossibility of purchasing usable health insurance by increasing millions of citizens barely getting by, and what regular people can do to help themselves. Now that increasing inflation is fully evident – mostly due to $100+ a barrel oil – more and more people whose incomes are not increasing as fast as the costs of living will find themselves beneath the floor after “falling through the cracks.”

Thus it is increasingly important for people living on a shoestring budget to take care of themselves – to do what they can to prevent disease from striking, which translates directly into less need for expensive treatment after the disease has them in dire straits. And the best way to do this is to make the healthiest affordable choices for the food you and your family consumes on a daily basis.

If anyone reading has seen the documentary film Supersize Me they are already aware of the outrageous damage to one’s health that consuming a steady diet of good ol’ American Fast Food will do to even the young and healthy among us. The dangers of a high-fat, red meat, white bread and indestructable fries diet provide already rich doctors with a never ending stream of obese, seriously health-challenged patients. Direct contributions of such a diet to liver and kidney disease, diabetes, obesity (and all its accompanying problems), high cholesterol, high blood pressure and other general metabolic disorders should be telling us something about the connection between diet and health that too many in the modern world ignore.

Basically, if your diet can kill you, it can also enrich your life by maintaining your health – You Are What You Eat. One of the oldest, most welcome healthy diet staples is the humble garlic. Recent research has established some of the details about why garlic is so good for us, as reported in the New York Times Health Blog. Seems that eating garlic increases the body’s supply of hydrogen sulfide, which acts as a potent antioxidant and helps transmit cellular signals that relax blood vessels and increase blood flow.

Boosting the body’s production of hydrogen sulfide could explain why a diet rich in garlic appears to protect against such ailments as breast, colon and prostate cancer and heart disease. It may also help control cholesterol levels as well as boost the efficiency of other metabolic functions. Ancient Greek athletes would eat garlic before participating in Olympic games, and garlic was a staple for warriors preparing for battle.

What’s the optimum health maintenance dose? Well, in some parts of Italy where heart disease is rare, the per capita consumption of garlic is as high as 12 cloves a day. Yet even the consumption of 2-5 cloves a day has significant health benefits in easy reach of the average consumer. The trick is to learn how to use garlic whenever you prepare a meal. If your family is worried about “garlic breath” from such a steady intake, chewing on a sprig of parsley or some fennel seeds after dinner neutralizes that problem. Or your basic mint gum after dinner works as well.

Research hasn’t shown that taking garlic oil or powder as dietary supplements provides the same health benefits, and it isn’t very hard to become a garlic-lover. Below I list some of my favorite ways of getting ample garlic in our diet, I’m sure there are others that readers can provide. All garlic recipes welcome!

Some Ways to Serve Garlic

Roast cloves. This is an easy way to serve garlic as a snack or accompaniment to any meal or all by itself. Just break the cloves off a head of garlic and put into a little oven bowl or pan. Don’t peel those cloves, leave the skin on. Add enough extra virgin olive oil to thoroughly coat the cloves (stirred or rubbed) and bake at 350º for 10-15 minutes. Just let the cloves cool a bit (they’ll be slightly brown) and serve in a bowl from which your family or guests can serve themselves. The roasted cloves squeeze out easily from their skin wrappers and are delicious. I have friends who fully expect me to roast up at least 2 whole head’s worth of cloves whenever they visit, and they’re more popular as a snack item than peanuts or chips!

Roast whole heads. For this one you simply rub off the outer paper skin until the head’s cloves are revealed. Pull them slightly apart without separating them from the base connection, cover with olive oil and roast at 350º for 20-30 minutes or until slightly golden. Serve these whole on the side. Delicious!

Garlic hummus. Hummus is garbanzo bean mush with lemon juice, olive oil and spices added, that is best dipped or spread on whole wheat or multi-grain pita bread, melba toast or crackers. You can buy it already mixed (and add some extra garlic from roast cloves squeezed and mixed in) or purchase hummus powder that is easily prepared any way you like it. We like it strongly garlic flavored and I also add dried chili peppers (high vitamin C and A content).

I also add a couple of cloves of chopped garlic to soups, stews, homemade veggie-burgers and chili. Garlic bread is always a treat, and for this I add large chunks of chopped cloves to my sourdough bread and bake it right in. Wonderful with beer-cheese dip or hummus!

Let’s hear some favorites from the readership!

Links:

Unlocking the Benefits of Garlic

All About Garlic

Botanical.com: Garlic

The World’s Healthiest Foods: Garlic