Why growing and preparing your own food is the future
blog.baremetalnetworks.com
blog.baremetalnetworks.com
Also, everyone will build their homes from scratch and compile their own Linux kernels. Sorry, division of labor is a good thing.
The difference in taste is incredible.
We grow tomatoes. It takes lots of water and food and months and care, but they're like our babies when they are born (only good for roasting, and we feel proud).
Lidl, a German discount supermarket, sells good cherry tomatoes => it is possible for good tomatoes to be mass produced, but they are not easy to find.
I don't wonder any more why children don't want to eat vegetables
They don't like any kind of spice on their food either. Makes it really frustrating to find meals that the whole family can enjoy... Either we all have bland food (and the adults add spice after being served) or we have to cook the kid's food separately.
My mother assures me that this is just sweet, sweet revenge for my own childhood misbehaviour :)
The reality is more complex. When they get hungry they also start to lose a lot of self control: running around and screaming; fighting; raiding the fridge; etc. And these are kids that are normally very well behaved.
I suppose if I ruled the house with an iron fist I could enforce the "they'll eat it when they get hungry" paradigm. But doing that results in other (far less desirable) rebellious behaviour.
Children pretty much by definition lack self-control. That is why they require parents, to provide external control.
> these are kids that are normally very well behaved.
They behave well when you give them they want? What happens when they want to stay up all night and kick strangers in public?
> if I ruled the house with an iron fist
Children thrive in an environment of clear and consistently enforced rules. The rules themselves are pretty arbitrary. Consistency is the key. Let them rebel against the rules and let the pre-established consequences result.
> But doing that results in other (far less desirable) rebellious behaviour.
Who is in control of the household: the parents or the children?
They behave well when you give them they want?
It's more that becoming hungry seems to suppress their natural self control and sense of social balance. (To a certain degree it's fascinating to watch) in much the same way that an overtired child loses a lot of emotional control and sense of perspective about minor annoyances.
You don't have to have an iron fist to be assertive. Besides, I kind of like having rebels for kids.
Well there is your problem, but let me explain why it is a problem.
An iron fist of sorts is very much needed for successful parenting. This falls into my general theory of life: Clear rules result in more fun. Definition: An attribute of a perfectly clear rule is that it never changes.
Why do rules result in more fun? It is because there is too much choice without rules, and humans want to test the boundaries of any game before they starting playing 'for real'. Consider this example: You jump into a parallel universe, everything could be different. You can hardly enjoy yourself unless you first defined how the world works = how to move, what to eat, what to avoid..all that. After that, you can start living your life. So when you tell your kids that they have to eat their vegetables, but after they complain for a few minutes, you change your mind and tell them that 'just this once' they can eat something else instead...the rules vanish. Suddenly anything is possible. Maybe it's possible to never eat vegetables again? Maybe she was just kidding? Maybe there are no rules? What rules are there?
The kid is certainly happy at first, but now the boundaries have moved. It has to test them again! This theory also explains why games like Tetris, Mario and recently Minecraft are so incredibly popular. They are based on a very well defined set of rules. People love to experiment, and they can do so freely in a world which is safe to experiment in. They love to maximize efficiency within the bounds of the ruleset.
I have recently seen it with my dog actually. He was always barking at anything that moved while he was outside in the garden. Earlier I sometimes got annoyed enough to force him inside. He was very displeased and didn't understand why he had to go inside, and why I was so upset. His barking never stopped of course, he couldn't ascertain the underlying ruleset.
A few weeks ago I started to move him inside at even the tiniest whiff of a bark. No exceptions, ever. He adapted incredibly quickly, he barks much less now, and he even waits outside the door when he hears me coming because he doesn't want me to get upset. He now understands the rules, and we both like it more.
If you ever tire of your kids' constant rebellious nature, it will be far too late to change it. They adapted to your parenting style, and they will care very little for your very much unexpected change of mind. In fact - if you put up a fight - they will be the model screaming teenagers we all shake our heads to on TV.
Stores love premium brands. The profit margin is higher and they make the cheap brands look like a better deal.
In a grocery store produce section, the "organic" aisle there is the premium brand. At one point in time, organic was more tasty, but now it's the same mass-produced, over-transported crap.
If you took away their "organic" brand, they'd find another way to coax you to spend more money. If they did that by finding and marketing tastier vegetables, they'd empty my wallet PDQ.
Looking forward to my black krims, mr. stripeys and brandywines....
The general idea of CSA is that small to medium farms sell shares of their crop each season. That money funds their operation, and they produce a variable and generous amount of crop for each shareholder. The price is competitive and there's economies of scale, with the guarantee of knowing where and how the food is produced. Of course, its not for everyone, but its a better bet for most people who'd like to grow their own crops but don't have time/knowledge/space etc.
For anyone in or around Lawrence, KS, Rolling Prairie [http://www.rollingprairie.net/] has been fantastic.
Anyone interested in eating better should look into it. http://www.localharvest.org is a good site to find a CSA near you.
Note that CSAs usually take applications during the winter months. So you probably can't sign up now, but keep it in mind for next year.
I get about 200lbs of potatoes/year out of ~1000 sf. That's one crop a year. I get a year's supply of garlic in another 100sf or so.
Slugs ate my greens this year, so we're at 0 lbs/40sf so far, though there are some chard coming on.
The chickens were doing well till spring, when they molted and went from ~.9egg/hen/day to about .4/hen/day, so the price per egg went from ~15c to ~30c.
Had to build a greenhouse for the tomatoes after getting nearly none last year, so the first one's going to cost $150, but the second one will be cheap.
And now, I have an almost 2 yr old, and I'm not really into him pouring sluggy beer all over himself.
"People focus too much on the 'work' aspect of it, it should be looked at as more of a zen practice. Growing and preparing food is very zen and is a very karmic and devotional practice!"
In this way, one could conclude that the work you put into it actually does cost nothing and in fact benefits you through it's karmic ROI.
When I'm at work I find myself looking forward to getting home so I can spend my 20 minutes doting over my plants. It's also really rewarding seeing how much everything has grown by since yesterday (sometimes it's by surprising amounts).
At the sort of scale I'm doing it... it doesn't feel like work at all. But I can imagine that changing if I was depending on it for survival. If I scale it up, I very much intend to rely on supermarkets as a backup (especially as I'm still learning). Eliminating the stress (and work aspect).
I would love to have a large multi-level greenhouse to work with. I suspect that the average backyard could supply enough food for three or four families with about 1hr per week invested in time.
When you set up a hydroponic system like that, the cost side of the argument in the OP changes dramatically though. Then it becomes a real 'hobby' in the sense that it costs more than you can possibly get out of it (unless you grow marihuana in it - ironically, the most information I could find on hydroponics was in books for marihuana growers, and the shop I got my supplies from sells their stuff mostly to that audience and demos their gear by growing peppers in them. The first time I came there the guy was quite excited to speak to someone who didn't intend to grow marihuana).
I get pretty upset by this sort of 'reasoning', since it dismisses so much suffering by people who actually have to live a subsistence farming life, or barely above that. It's usually made by rich yuppy guys who have never known any hardship but who feel the need to proclaim the moral superiority of 'back to nature' or 'local food' or whatever. Fuck those people, with their know-it-all attitude - millions of people who actually live the life say you're full of shit, go do it yourself before you go all holier-than-thou on the rest of us.
(related: a guy at a conference on sustainable energy I was at a couple of months ago was preaching the sustainability gospel and mentioned the Uros in Lake Titicaca in Peru, who live on floating islands made of reed. He held these people as some form of example because of their lifestyle which is so entwined with nature, much better than us Evil Westerners. Well I have actually been on the Uros, and the people 'living' there are, apart from some old people who don't want to change what they've known for their whole lives, actors for the tourists, and live in Puno (big-ish city on the shore of the lake) and in the mornings put on their reed skirts and take the first boat to the islands, and then meet the tourists who take the next boat. I know because I was in the first tourist boat of the day and some of the guys missed 'their' boat and had to come with us to the island. Who wants to live on a floating reed island, catching and eating fish every day when you can have 5-day working weeks, a TV and a car and send your kids to school and soccer practice? I found it incredibly insulting that this tree hugging idiot somehow dismissed these people's drive to move away from their primitive lifestyle and wanted to build a live of modern luxury for themselves. All while he himself didn't fail to mention how his own house 'was superbly insulated, and very comfortable' - yes you fucker, you live a comfortable life subsidized by our governments (he was a professor) and then you go preach how a 'primitive, natural lifestyle' is so morally superior.)
Can you really harvest 70lb/wk from a 10x10 plot? For how many weeks?
You can jack the numbers up a lot with heavy irrigation/fertilization/perfect climate and lots of experience and work, like in some of the urban homesteading movement. But even the urban homesteaders are serious outliers.
If you sell it to others, you now fall under the same regulations as regular farmers.
Disclaimer: I am not a laywer, etc etc.
As for agrarian society I think we disagree on what it is. Typically the fundamental unit of agrarian society is the family farm, something virtually every developing country wants to consolidate and eliminate in favor of a city-based manufacturing and service economy.
That's my point. Food production affects social stability in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
>But if I had to choose between having and eating my cake, I would prefer to let international relations slide in favor of growing food with my family, neighbors and co-workers, because I would rather increase the peace in relationships I can directly affect and growing and sharing my own food is a great way to do that
You'd prefer to let other countries spiral into war and starvation?
>In fact, I do make that choice. Because I can see its benefits directly, I also encourage others to do it.
I grow my own food as well but I have doubts as to whether it is a scalable arrangement.
however, i appreciate people's efforts to correct the situation.
i see immigrant homes (Chinese, Indian, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese), on the less desirable side of town with fantastic vegetable gardens. instead of planting decorative trees, people planted fruit producing trees. but when someone on the more desirable side of town makes a small little garden, they make the front page of the newspaper :(