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?

Let’s face it. The “Recession of 2008″ is now officially over, because it is January, the first month of the “Depression of 2009.” The last jobless statistics for ’08 showed more than half a million new first-time unemployment filers, which represent only those workers who qualify for unemployment. Final ‘official’ tally for ’08: 2.6 million jobs lost. These are the worst figures in 16 years, while the average hourly workweek for those underneath the supervisory level doing the real work shrank to the lowest number since the government started keeping such statistics in 1964. That, for the quick-math challenged, is 45 years ago.

Most of us who watch the economic comings and goings in this strange era of bail-outs for super-crooks and callous economic eugenics for working families also know that the ‘official’ statistics don’t come anywhere close to matching what is really going on in the real world. Young workers, seasonal workers, minimum wage workers, temp workers and millions who otherwise don’t qualify for unemployment aid or who have exhausted their eligibility are completely off the books – no one bothers to count them, even if their numbers swell the real unemployment picture to more than double the reported statistics. “Unofficial” numbers can range anywhere from 11.1 million jobless Americans to somewhere very close to 20% of our work force. No one much likes to mention that, since anything more than 10% puts us in that ‘depression’ they’d rather slit their wrists than admit to.

Because lengthy layoffs and lack of available new jobs will tend to swell the ranks of both young and unemployed workers going back to school (one way or another) to expand their horizons, I have found a very interesting website tool called Online College that readers may find helpful for themselves or their children suddenly looking at a bleak employment picture for the foreseeable future. There are good and very useful articles posted to the site, and one stands out right now – 15 Ways to Set Yourself Apart in a Recession.

These are hints on how to make yourself stand out on the job so the bosses looking for employees to lay off skip right over you. Some have to do with expanding your useful role to the company, how to make the best impression while looking for new work, and what you can do educationally while ‘between jobs’ to enhance your hireability when the smoke clears. There are even helpful hints about striking out on your own – always risky even in the best of economic times – to find opportunities that will either get you inside a startup or send you in the direction of starting your own business.

And on that starting your own front, a website called brainz offers some great ideas in 33 Ways to Fund Your Startup Business. With the observation that even in the worst of economic times there is always money out there and people looking to invest, these 33 ideas are pure gold for the budding entrepreneur with a good (and potentially lucrative) idea. Some will cost the idea man less than others, and it’s probably not the best idea in this economic climate to risk one’s own property, if one’s real estate is still worth anything (and that’s not very clear right now in many parts of the country).

In future posts we’ll take a look at some of the ideas out there for small business startups, supply and demand and the most “recession-proof” goods and services people will need regardless of economic situation. So stay tuned, don’t get too discouraged, and begin taking a close look at where your family is right now, what its immediate future looks like, what resources you may have to invest and how best to invest them.

Links:

Free Fall: Jobless Rate Worst Since ’94
Mid-Cycle Meltdown: Jobless Claims January 15, 2009
15 Ways to Set Yourself Apart in a Recession
33 Ways to Fund Your Startup Business

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

As Congress meets today and tomorrow to grill the principals before Friday’s vote on the $700 billion “emergency” Wall Street bailout plan (which has been in the works for months but strategically dumped on us all as an “emergency”), oil companies have instituted “rolling shortages” all over the Southeast. Some areas have been out of gas for more than a week and a half, and the situation is not expected to ease until Monday at the latest. Some gas – a single tanker at a time – is being delivered to stations along the Interstates and is being strictly rationed unless it’s diesel, one station per county.

State police are managing the gas lines to prevent violence, which did break out last week in the Nashville, Tennessee area when people started cutting in line. Food prices are rising so fast the stock boys at the grocery stores can’t mark up the goods fast enough, and the specter of looming fuel shortages for winter heat – or price increases that will force people to do without – is beginning to look very scary.

Bailout or no bailout – and despite the launch of FBI investigations of Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Lehman Brothers and AIG – the United States may well be fully in the clutches of major economic depression before winter even hits. Whether or not that translates to global recession isn’t much of an issue to regular people, as we here in our own homes wonder how we will survive. This post and several following posts in a new series will take a look at the steps citizens should take as soon as possible to ensure their families will make it through the next 6 months. If depression goes on longer than that, additional strategies will be necessary, some already compiled as series in this blog and available under the “Our Most Popular” header on the left side of the page.

Here in Part 1 there are two broad categories of concern citizens will have to work around in order to do for themselves, particular to not freezing, not starving, and not getting indefinitely detained or killed. Considerations must start NOW.

Things to Plan Around:

1. Availability of home heating fuel/gasoline.

It is quite likely that there will be rolling gas shortages throughout the next year. We can also fairly assume there will be drastic fuel oil shortages in the northern tier of the country, and that many will unfortunately freeze to death in their homes or die of carbon monoxide poisoning from kerosene heaters, or fires from badly planned fireplace/wood stove installations.

If you live in an area with ample woods with standing or down dead or a brisk firewood market for purchase, or availability of wood stove pellets, get yourself a wood stove. These come in all sizes and thicknesses, some need more protection to floors and walls than others. You will also need stove piping and must plan a way to get the smoke outside your house (can be through a removed windowpane if necessary). Stoves are often available reasonably cheap and in good condition through Craig’s List or other re-sale sources. Do your homework, install it correctly. If the electricity goes out or fuel oil is unavailable, your family will still be warm. AND you can cook on it!

Resource: NASD: Proper Installation, Operation and Maintenance

2. Deployed Troops, Curfews, Travel Restrictions, Rationing.

Beginning on October 1st – next week – the US Army’s Third Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team – all 6500 to 8000 troops – will be re-deployed within the borders of the United States for various police functions. Regular police forces are being deployed for crowd control and peacekeeping functions as well, in managing protests, gas lines and runs on banks, grocery stores, etc. Expect to be challenged every time you go out, be thankful when it doesn’t happen.

Important: In case of travel restrictions, try to gather your immediate family in one place, preferably the place among your extended network best situated according to all considerations. Schools may be shut down due to lack of fuel for transportation and/or heating, if you have college-bound offspring, consider taking a couple of semesters off unless things at the college look stable. Don’t be afraid to call the admin and ask pointed questions, either. You won’t want anyone near and dear to you to be stuck someplace where they have no resources.

What this means is you need to do what stocking up you can immediately, and plan for obtaining the rest of your needs in possibly creative ways. If you have money socked away, withdraw enough to get you through if the bank goes under, all of it if they’ll let you have it. Store ready cash in freezer bags in the freezer. Purchase as much staple supplies as you can possibly afford, NOW before there are serious shortages and before the prices double or triple.

What food supplies you will need to obtain, along with other tools and supplies, will be supplied in Part 2 of this series. Please stay tuned!

Links:
Southeast Gas Update
FBI investigating companies at heart of meltdown
Long Term Capitol
Craig’s List: Great Resource or Scary Place?
20 Ways to Live on Almost Nothing
It’s Better Than Cheap… It’s Free!

Posts to This Series:

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

Well, it was a tough weekend. After insurance giant AIG hinted that it might be heading for bankruptcy, investment bank Lehman Bros. went ahead and filed Chapter 11. Merrill Lynch grabbed at a $50 billion takeover from Bank of America, which is already regretting its takeover of the nation’s largest mortgage lender [Countrywide]. Stocks fell worldwide on Monday even after intervention from the Fed promising eased restrictions on emergency funds.

It’s not difficult to find gloom and doom on Wall Street today over how many jobs in the financial sector are going to be lost. Worse, that concern will in fact translate into a whole lot more jobs lost out in the real world where you and I live. Factories will be closed, inability to finance durable goods orders will exacerbate the problems, and GM is about to go under too. It ain’t even close to over yet, folks. If all you lose is your home, you’ll be among the lucky ones.

I’ll be posting more good information on stretching leftover dollars for those real people being harmed by all this, maybe even have something to say about the fact that there’s no gas in my region right now at all, leaving nothing to ration. Or tell you how I fare on my plan to sell my now-useless diesel ‘vintage’ Mercedes so I can buy a horse (have plenty of grass and kudzu). But in the meantime, best advice – if you’ve got gas – is to head directly to your regional farmer’s market and buy as much rice, other grains, fresh veggies and fruits as you can possibly afford. I’ll talk a bit about how to preserve it through the winter too, since it’s not really that hard.

I will also start posting information about growing some of your own food, even in the winter. There will be lots of links to great sources for information on these strategies too, so please stay tuned. The best advice I can give to people who end up here after searching something on Google because they’re just now joining our Shoestring Budget ranks, is…

Don’t Panic.

All you really have to do is survive. The future is the future, it’ll bring its own problems and opportunities. Right now you just need to “ride it out” in one piece (and all of a piece family-wise). Money’s just paper at this end of real life, you CAN learn to make do on much less of it. And who knows? Once you’re out the other end of the tunnel, you might even find that you can live a much happier, fulfilled and truly shared life without all that much of it. It’s a good lesson to learn. It puts things in perspective, something this modern world could use more of.

Links:

Lehman Brothers collapse stuns global markets
Lehman Files for Bankruptcy, Merrill Sold, AIG Seeks Cash
Wall St.’s Turmoil Sends Stocks Reeling
Credit Crunch: How to Survive the Recession
20 Ways to Live on Almost Nothing
Uninsured? More Ways to Survive

That’s what Angry Bear says about the government bailout of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced on Sunday, September 7. It will cost the American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars we don’t have. Why? Because more than 1.3 trillion dollars’ worth of those mortgage bonds are held by foreign countries, primarily China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg and Belgium, and they want to know if their holdings are any good.

Now, you might be struck by some of those listed ‘foreigners’. Cayman Islands? Luxembourg? Belgium? Well known for hosting questionably legal accounts for some questionable characters, I suspect we’d find a lot of Americans on those lists. Americans don’t count as “foreigners.” Unfortunately, we’d also find a lot of Russian front companies and Middle Eastern Sheiks as well.

We’ve once again been robbed blind by wanton corporate and individual greed, and we are expected once again to bail out the wealthy speculators whose greed led to the failures.

Predictions for what happens now aren’t pretty. The dollar will plunge, inflation will zoom, regular Americans will have an even more difficult time keeping up. While the richest 1% will have their taxes cut and get their bad investments paid off so they can go speculate on other nifty things like food and water.

So buckle up, fellow shoestring budget enthusiasts! We’re going to get our chance to put all our alternative survival strategies to work. If we do it right, what will arise from the ashes of the late, once-great American economy might be strong enough to last awhile.

Links:

Bonddad: Our Foreign Masters Have Spoken
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: A Broader View
The Fannie/Freddie Bail-Out: The Plan and Why Now?