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

World markets continue to take dramatic hits and the Dow has fallen below 10,000 for the first time in four years. Seems a lot of banks and other players are unhappy with the trillion dollar bailout package passed last Friday because it limits their personal golden parachutes and stock option scams. Awwww. Should we call the waaaaambulance for these whiners? Nope. If they didn’t need our money they shouldn’t have begged for a handout in the first place. In the meantime, regular people are having a much harder time putting food on the table as prices rise dramatically and more and more find themselves out of work. This post is a beginner’s primer on how to get food if you can’t afford it.

Before I get to the list of good links readers may find helpful depending on their particular situations, readers should know that many states, such as the one where I live (NC) have budgetary caps on how much relief in the form of food stamps they are able to provide. This can mean that even as increasing numbers of people find themselves going hungry, fewer people will have access to the standard governmental relief. Thus more people must turn to other providers. A good overview of those providers supported by the USDA commodity program is provided at Amber Waves. If your family is in danger of ‘food insecurity’ be sure to familiarize yourself with emergency providers in your area. Cities generally have soup kitchens, places where you can go for a hot meal. Most smaller cities and many towns or counties also have food banks, check into what you will need to provide to qualify.

For those with few to no reasonable alternatives, or who may find themselves in a chronic situation (or are just stubbornly self-sufficient), here are some fine hints about foraging. Foraging the nearly lost art of getting your food from places other than the neighborhood supermarket or soup kitchen. Food prices are projected to continue rising and stay high for at least the next three years. Part of this is our newfound dependence on imported foods with huge ‘carbon footprints’ due to transportation and energy-intensive mechanistic agriculture. If you’re trying to keep your family alive and healthy, you honestly don’t need mangos in January or expensive processed foodstuffs at any time.

Of course, as with all matters of saving real money on food, you’ll have to learn (or remember) how to cook for yourself. Eating out and buying pre-prepared meals is the most expensive way to eat, not to mention the most unhealthy. Since health care is a growing desperate concern for everyone, staying healthy should be paramount in all our planning.

From the great DailyKos “Frugal Fridays” series, Foraging: Living Off the Fat of the Land we get several good ideas. Of course living close to water allows foragers with a little skill the luxury of catching crabs, crayfish, regular fish, baby clams, etc., and seaweed can be a fine addition to the pot to lend nutrients and salt (plus ample amounts of iodine). Living inland can offer lots of fine opportunities to forage for edible fungi, berries, tubers and pot herbs as well. it’s puff ball season in my neck of the woods, which are spendid stuffed with chopped acorns, cabbage, herbs and onions, baked in clarified butter in a covered dish. Hickory nuts are falling, and the wild sunflowers are blazing – these are otherwise known as Jerusalem artichokes, and eat like small potatoes.

Of course there’s Cossack Asparagus in marshlands almost everywhere. These are your basic cattails, and all parts of the plants are edible all times of year. The new green shoots are better than bamboo shoots (which also may be found here and there), but I best like the set-cob’s fuzz which can be ground into a very light, fine flour for baking and thickening broths. As things nutritional become rarer, families will likely have to learn how to like basic stew meals that can be made in large pots and eaten over a period of two or three days (refrigerated in between, of course).

If you don’t mind killing and cleaning, there’s a reason they call possom the “other other white meat.” People have traditionally made fine meals of squirrel, turkey, various ground birds, snakes and the standard larger game. Just be sure you’ve got whatever permit is required, both for hunting and fishing, in your area for the game you’re seeking. I’ve known families who could eat meat twice a week (all anybody needs) for an entire winter from a single deer. Best advice is to stay away from carnivores and scavengers (like ravens and buzzards, bears and racoons).

People in the country or with ample back yards could consider a fresh goat for milk and some few chickens (easily kept but noisy if you’ve a rooster) for eggs and occasional Sunday dinner. Check your local paper’s “livestock” want ads, chickens are very cheap and goats aren’t anywhere near as expensive to buy or feed as a cow. Or make friends with a farmer who has livestock. Around here I can get cheap (or for straight barter) milk, honey, free range eggs, grass-fed meat if I ate it, and all the composted fertilizer my garden can handle.

Of course learning how to garden will help a lot. Tomatoes and peppers and salad stuff can easily be grown in pots and flats on the patio or deck, herbs in the kitchen window, and many other things if you’ve the room, a shovel to turn ground and a metal rake to break it up. Know what grows in what seasons in your area – some crops like cabbage, collards, kale, lettuce, spinach, radishes, broccoli, brussles sprouts and cauliflower need cold weather to develop. Kale will keep on growing right through the snow! Others need lots of heat and sun. If you plant extras you can preserve for the future, or barter for trades with those who have foods you didn’t grow. Specializing can be better than trying to grow it all. Barter will become increasingly important as the food shortages and high prices continue.

Many wild flowers and weeds are edible, and some of those are more nutritious than anything you can buy in the store. Violets, dandelions (greens and flowers), day lilies, wood sorrel, purslane, etc. Don’t forget kudzu – its greens are very high in protein and its flowers make lovely jelly or colorful additions to salads.

Out in the woods there are acorns, elderberries, fox grapes, sloe plums, wild cherries, blueberries, hickory nuts, walnuts, ground nuts and other goodies in addition to the edible ferns and fungi. Be sure you know what you’re doing with those fungi – many local extension agencies offer print material and courses to let you know what’s edible and what’s not.

And don’t be shy – if you live in a farming/gardening region, keep track of who’s been harvesting, go ahead and ask permission to glean from those fields. Modern mechanical machinery leaves quite a lot of edible food behind, and farmers usually just plow it under. Many or most farmers in your area may be entirely willing to have you gather what you can of their already harvested crops.

Foraging is a lot like work, but more fun. Since millions will be out of work (and many of those one out of a two-income household), there should be time if you’ve got the energy and desire. Do check out some of the links in this article and below, get yourself psyched about the possibilities right now. In really hard times all we really have to do is survive, and learning to do for ourselves instead of waiting for a handout that may never come is very empowering. Kids love this stuff, so be sure to include them on your weekend foraging trips!

Links:

Emergency Providers Help Put Food On the Table
Foraging: Living Off the Fat of the Land
BHM: You can become a hardcore forager
Wild Food Foragers of America
Edible Wild Things: “Cossack Asparagus”
Wild Herbs/Foods Archive
Staples Archive
Harvesting Wild: The Mast Crop
Modern Forager

Posts to This Series:

Part 1: Roadblocks and Interference
Part 2: Food: Eating What You Can Get

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

Perhaps many readers have become aware of the looming worldwide food shortage, there was a story on NPR’s The World just Monday night (March 31) about rising tensions in the bread lines of Egypt. London’s Guardian reported this past November that the crisis can be attributed to climate change (crop failures and ag diversion of rice and wheat crops) and fuel shortages – both the increasing price of petroleum fuels for transportation and agriculture as well as the diversion of staple food crops like soybeans and corn toward biofuels production.

Soaring grain prices are now exploding into full-fledged food riots in many corners of the planet, while Americans are stunned by rising prices every time they go to the grocery store. As of December, 2007 the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported that 37 countries face immediate food crises, and 20 nations had imposed some form of food-price controls. Reuters lays additional blame on panicked speculators trading on global futures markets in the wake of recession fears fueled by the increasing defaults among Wall Street’s investment banks and stock market gamblers.

But there is hope on the horizon, particularly for those of us who were smart enough to purchase diesel powered vehicles, despite the ruinous and increasing costs of gasoline. That hope is a new source for producing biodiesel (which can run the entirety of our transportation system, including passenger cars if GM can be persuaded to come off their new diesel they’ve been sitting on in joint patent with the EPA).

Ride Lust reports that a new process to produce biodiesel from algae – thus leaving staple food crops for people who eat staple foods – may be ready to hit the market. Green Fuel Technologies has begun construction on a “Closed Water Algae” bioreactor facility that will feed from the smoke stacks of a local power plant. PetroSun has also announced that their many acres of algae ponds will be going commercial today – April 1st!

The Closed Water System technology uses energy from the sun and carbon dioxide from industrial smoke stacks to feed the algae growth, thereby ‘closing’ the carbon dioxide loop from fuel use to fuel production. This is an exciting development. Biodiesel is readily available in my locale because the nearest city requires all its mass transit and truck fleets to run on biodiesel, thus it’s available from several area stations. The problem is that it’s still more expensive than regular diesel, and goes up at the same rate as petro-diesel. That is mostly due to greed, of course, since I’m not dumb enough to believe any producers or dealers are actually pouring the excess profits into greater R&D or production. But one day soon regulators will step in, producers will recognize the gold mine doesn’t need seeding, and distributors will remember that they’ve plenty of underground tanks at truck stops that could fuel the shipping fleets. And the price will go down.

If biodiesel development can be made to go with switchgrass, algae and agricultural green-waste instead of actual food humans need to survive, basic staple food prices should go down too. Even if the financial sector goes into deep depression, you can’t have bread lines when there’s no bread. And nobody can make a market killing if nobody’s got any money to spend. So in addition to growing your Victory Garden this year to supplement your own family’s food supply, we should all be cheering these alternative biodiesel sources and technologies, helping to support production and getting in line for demand. Governments aren’t going to fix our problems. We’ll have to do it!

This is the second installment of the 20 ways to live on little-to-nothing. Obviously, not all of these alternatives will appeal to everyone. But perhaps some will appeal to some.

6. Personal Housing for the Gypsy Tread-Lightly

If your lifestyle doesn’t require thousands of square footage consider the advantages of an RV or travel trailer. No, not one of those $200,000 new fancy jobs, but one just “big enough” and in desperate need of some handy TLC.

Getting “free” will take more ingenuity that most people have to spend, but getting “cheap” is entirely possible. Unless you’re a serious mechanic, travel trailers are a much better option than RVs or old city buses that probably need totally rebuilt engines. A trailer can be moved as regularly as necessary (many state and national forest sites have 2-week limits) so long as you’ve something to haul them with.

7. Take Advantage of Gypsy Food Sources

If you move around quite a bit, you’ll have more opportunities than most people to take advantage of wild foods along the back roads and byways of your travels. Did you know that your basic cattails are a regular supermarket of goodness? Or that acorn flour makes great bread or breakfast mush that’s extremely healthy? Did you know that violets, tiger lilies and nasturtium flowers make a very tasty salad?

There are apple and pear trees that have escaped old homesteads, often right beside the road. In some producing regions you can glean fruit from orchards after main harvest. Grapefruit, oranges, peaches, apples, sometimes cherries and grapes as well. Truck and grain crops can sometimes be gleaned as well, allowing you to pick vegetables that weren’t ripe for the main harvest and will otherwise be left to rot.

8. A Place Of Your Own

Free land? In the 21st century? Believe it or not, there are towns in the Midwest offering land for free to people willing to build new homes within 2 years. Of course, this means you’ve got to invest in building a new house, and that’s certainly not zero cost! Do not be fooled – the US Government [BLM] stopped offering free land in 1976. You can’t just go claim some.

Yet an industrious and/or well-connected professional caretaker could end up with space enough to put a home in exchange for simply living there to take care of things! That way you don’t have to “stuff-less” or rootless, your home is your own. This takes some diplomatic skills and might take years to work yourself into, but there are people who got their property (including yard and garden!) for free on a corner of someone else’s property.

9. No-Cost Housing for the Handy

People might be surprised at what’s available out there for those willing to do the work or bargain with others for the services. Older houses on acreage that’s being subdivided for development are often given away rather than simply torn down, but you’ll have to move it to where you want it. Those who can build and re-build can often tear them down and keep everything for rebuilding on their own property. Which is often much cheaper than moving a farmhouse…

Careful inspection to decide the best relocation option is required. If that house will fall apart two blocks down the road, you’ll be better off just taking it down and hauling it off in pieces. Building materials, bathroom fixtures, plumbing, wiring and electrical box equipment, kitchen cabinets, cabinets and even sinks are often available for free where a developer is tearing down older dwellings to make way for new too.

10. Powering Your Living Space

Cost of electricity is always going to be with us, it seems. Still, there are alternatives out there that a handy person could make good use of. There are ways to obtain free solar panels that would make a real dent in a traveling home or even a stationary one. If you’ve some land of your own or you end up in a community of like-minded people, think about developing a diversified alternative system.

Posts to This Series:
Part 1: Items 1-5
Part 2: Items 6-10
Part 3: Items 11-15
Part 4: Items 16-20

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!

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

People trying to make do on less and less money in the modern world already know that food is a greater expense for a family than most economists like to admit. Most of us have scanned various ‘official’ guess-timates of how much of a family’s income goes toward groceries – not eating out in restaurants or fast food joints – and have smirked at the discrepancies between what government thinks we can live on and the constantly rising prices at the grocery store.

Fortunately for those who live near a copse of woods or a real forest, nature does provide a bounty of foods that can be had for no more than the price of a healthy hike, some prep time and effort, and the energy it takes to process the harvest.

The production of acorns by oak trees every fall is called the “mast crop” here in the southern Appalachians. Some trees will produce bushels of acorns one year, practically nothing the next. We know that squirrels, bears, deer and other wildlife depend on the mast crop to put on weight for the coming winter, but did you know that the nuts of wild hickory, walnut, chestnut and oak trees were a large part of the staple diet of Native Americans long before white guys came?

Acorns of oak require more processing than the other nuts do, but provide a heavy staple flour rich in nutrients, complex carbohydrates, minerals and rich oil. The tribes depended on acorn flour in the Americas to supplement the meat-heavy winter diet with acorn flatbreads and stew thickener, or a hot combo mush with acorn meal and wild grass seeds.

Acorns tend to be much more bitter than sweet hickory nuts or black walnuts due to their tannin content. This tannin must be leached out of the acorns before they become the nutty-tasting sweet meal that makes such tasty breads, cooking and cakes that serve as a nutritious staple food for the winter. And it takes a lot of acorns to produce a significant amount of meal, so enlist the kids to help harvest and process.

Red oak acorns have a lot of tannin, white oaks less, and some oaks (burr oak, swamp oak) produce acorns that hardly need any leaching at all. If you find a variety of acorn types in a park or copse, keep them separate in your baskets or bags so as not to mix them for leaching purposes. There’s really no efficient way to get to the nutmeat other than to use a nutcracker, but acorn shells are thin and easily split. The meat usually comes apart in halves easily. It should be a creamy yellow-white without holes or black spots. I personally look for acorns after a rainy period that are barely sprouted, as these tend to be sweeter and contain less tannin that needs to be leached.

Take a little taste of your acorns to judge how bitter they are, and label them for bitterness as they are cracked and split and put into containers. When you’ve a good bowlful, put the nut halves into a soup pot and cover with twice as much water, boil for 5-10 minutes. After it sits for another 10-15 minutes, pour into a colander to discard the dark, tannin-tinted water and spray rinse. Then repeat the process until the water no longer turns dark. Some acorns need only one or two boilings, others need 5 or more. You can taste an acorn after each process. It should have a sharp bitterness when you first bite, then a rich sweetness.

Once the nut halves have been sufficiently leached of their tannin content, put them in a food processor or blender and chop them into a chunky meal. Spread this meal thinly on oven trays and dry on a low temperature (225º), turning occasionally, until well dried. A dehydrator also works, the Indians put their meal out in the full sun to dry.

Once the meal is well dried and warm brown, you can put it into quart Ball jars or ziplock freezer bags and put it in the freezer. It will keep in the refrigerator for about a week if you are planning to grind in that time, but the oil will go rancid if it’s not kept refrigerated or frozen.

To make the final ground meal you’ve several options. You can do it like the Indians and pound it with stones, you can use the food processor’s fine-ground setting, or you can use a hand-mill grinder. Due to oil content the flour is going to be grainier than regular wheat or bean flours, like cornmeal. You can grind flour as you need it, or grind up a few pounds and freeze it along with the other flours you keep in the freezer (all flours should be frozen for storage).

Check out some of the great acorn recipes and links below, consider how much high quality staple food you could provide for your family without having to spend a near fortune at the health food store (the only place you can get pre-processed acorn meal, and it’s expensive!

Acorn Recipes

• Use acorn meal to thicken stews and soups, instead of masa, flour or cream.

• Add 1/4 cup acorn meal to any single-loaf multigrain bread recipe, adjusting other flours to compensate. It adds a sweet, nutty taste. Other sweeteners should be adjusted, as acorn meal is itself a sweetener.

Apache Acorn Cakes

1 cup acorn meal, ground fine
1 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup raw honey
pinch of salt

Mix ingredients with enough warm water to make a moist but not sticky dough. Divide into 12 balls. Let these rest covered for 10-15 minutes. Shape into thick, tortilla-shaped breads and cook on an ungreased cast iron skillet over medium heat. When slightly brown, turn and finish cooking the other side.

Cornmeal and Acorn Mush

4 cups water
1 tsp. salt
1/2 cup acorn meal, ground
about 1 cup cornmeal

Bring salted water to a boil and sprinkle the acorn meal into the boiling water while stirring briskly with a whisk. Then add the cornmeal to make a thick, bubbling batch about the consistency of cream of wheat. Place the saucepan over boiling water (double boiler) and simmer until the mush is quite thick, about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Satisfying hot cereal with a little milk and a bit of fruit jam or compote. As a main dish it can be topped with salsa, grated cheese or bacon bits. Or put the mush into a greased bread pan and refrigerate overnight. Then cut 1/2 inch slices, dip in flour and fry in hot vegetable oil.

Links:

Backwoods Home: Harvesting the wild

Prodigal Gardens: September

Acorn Recipes: Pancakes, Bread, Cookies, Gingerbread, Muffins,Acorn Burgers, Chile Con Acorn, Acorn ‘Meat’ Loaf