It's surprising we don't have this already in North America given how much surplus food is produced.
It's surprising we don't have this already in North America given how much surplus food is produced.
I grow a fair amount my food on my allotment, and one of the interesting things I've noticed is how little the grocery store prices are related to the effort it takes to grow it myself.
For example, I no longer grow potatoes except for rotation purposes, because the time and inputs (fertilizer, etc.) aren't worth it compared to £0.5 per 1kg of potatoes from the supermarket.
On the other hand, basil is extremely fast growing and doesn't need any fertilizer, other than a bit of manure/compost at the start of the season. From my basil bed, I get about 50kg in a season, which has an ASDA street value of about £1000.
This obviously comes down to things like the ease of mechanical harvesting, the complexity of cold chain logistics, etc. Still, if you have a free windowsill and find supermarket basil ludicrously expensive, it's worth sticking a few Sweet Genovese on there.
I also start them off indoors and plant out early since London has a rather mild climate.
Also: it smells bloody amazing.
Besides that, I preserve it by making it into pesto, chutneys and other basil-based sauces, oils, jars of dried flakes and freezing it.
Anything I have left over, I give away to friends and family.
It's unfortunate that pine nuts are so expensive. We base most of our pesto on other nuts to save money, but you just can't beat the taste of a pine nut pesto IMO.
I make a vegan pesto using the following ingredients: basil, pine nuts, garlic, miso, olive oil. The miso adds the fermented and creamy flavor of the parmesan.
Remove stems from basil, wash and tap to dry, don't spin (a little water is good). Add ingredients to the food processor and blend until desired consistency. Scrape down sides and add oil as needed.
Mint is about the same and I think even more easy.
One of the things about herbs is that alot of them are great chelating agents for soil. It's something to be aware of because if for example your soil is rich in arsenic, cadmium or lead, you can remediate some of it out with oregano or thyme but since these things absorb enough of that to become a potential hazard to health it's actually fairly prudent to grow your own as consumer reports has pointed out that all brands they have tested in stores have this crap in them [1], especially if you're gardening in an urban setting [2]
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb...
[2] https://clf.jhsph.edu/sites/default/files/2019-03/suh-soil-t...
My grandpa was a medium scale farmer for most of his life and when he retired he kept a couple dozen cows for milk and he paid every single month to keep it going. It was his hobby and he knew that, he said he'd need a couple hundred again to make it at least pay for itself.
It's one of the reasons I LOL hard whenever I hear tech people saying they will "retire and become farmers", these people have no idea what it is like to work on a farm for real.
Farm to Taber is a great listen on farming in general, eye opening for those that have had little to no contact to real world farming: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/farm-to-taber/id166958...
I'm not a farmer, but I did some tech for farming and you would be surprised how tech driven it is. Agriculture was probably the first industry that used satellite imagery outside of military on the large scale.
If someone is Silicon Valley web app developer and went farming, they actually could be going deeper into tech than escape it.
Most people that I know that have backyard gardens aren't doing it for the majority of their calories (I don't know people growing wheat in their backyard), but lots of people grow in their backyard because it is more convenient and the vegetables are always fresh and flavorful.
I grow an herb garden with stuff like basil, chives, parsley, oregano, etc. plus some smaller vegetables like peppers and tomatoes. I grow the herbs because many times they don't even have fresh herbs available at the supermarket or are inconvenient (e.g. a giant thing of parsley when I just want a few snips), and the vegetables taste better.
We had a great run with heirloom (Cherokee Purple) tomatoes this year, purchased for $5.99 per plant at Lowe’s. Our raised bed cost about $100 to build and fill with soil. I spent $100 to build a deer fence. I also bought a $20 jug of Miracle Grow feed. Let’s just cocktail-napkin the water at $10 for the season, and say I have $250 in input to start my garden this year.
I got, at most, $15 dollars worth of tomatoes for the two plants. I could increase that and get into canning to reap some more value, but it’s a hobby to produce neat exotics I can’t even buy if I wanted to. Hopefully I can amortize the upstart costs over the years and achieve a break even on a long enough timescale :)
But I'm wondering if you're not growing your tomatoes right, or the cultivars you have are not great? One of the biggest issues I run into when I lived somewhere I could grow is the plants getting so large they uproot the posts I have them staked up with if it gets windy.
Good soil goes a long way, you'll want it to be mostly a decomposed manure. Then you'll really want to get the biggest plant you can find at the store as early as weather allows, then bury most of the plant you buy. If you're just planting it like a normal plant, you've wasted a ton of its potential.
In one of the best years I've had my plants grew nearly 8 feet tall and with only 4 bushes I had to have the kids load up a wagon with tomatoes and give away them to the neighbors I had so many.
Another (cherry) that is really tasty is Rosella (a dark purplish variety like the other two). So tasty.
https://shadeclothstore.com/product-category/aluminet-shade-...
I've had great success with the 40% setting tomatoes all season and my temps push 110F in the summer. One thing I learned the hard way, in addition to this, leave the plants bushy so it shades internally.
I was very impressed with the material though. Complete game changer in my environment. I can grow all kinds of things through summer. Parsley, lettuce, I even had Brussels sprouts and rhubarb go through the heat this summer looking perky the whole time.
Elaborate ?
Buy seeds, plant some in a beer cup of potting soil ~30-45d before the last frost. Don't need to worry with seed starting mix. Don't worry about how tall they get, just plant it almost all sideways.
> I got, at most, $15 dollars worth of tomatoes for the two plants
What were your lbs of yield per plant?
I do cherry tomatoes in 5gal buckets and get ~1.5-2 lbs per bucket. Soil mix is leftovers from contractors mixed with composter stuff and peat moss. Actual garden does better. Retail price for that qty is $7. I have too many buckets set up...
But still, yeah, at that scale its not much more than a hobby, certainly not a way to save any actual money.
> Hopefully I can amortize the upstart costs over the years and achieve a break even on a long enough timescale :)
Or some disease or insect will destroy it. The wonders of farming...
My grandparents live in Ukraine and do just fine growing most of their food on a small plot of land and their pension.
Tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes, watermelon, cucumbers, some other stuff I've forgotten and bees for honey.
They definitely do not have too much money on their hands. Time yes but thats no different then for anyone retiring?
There are alternative methods of farming like permaculture, and people all over the world use them to grow an abundance of food in an area not much bigger than a large backyard. They are specifically geared towards better utilization of space, and creating natural systems that replace the need for traditional inputs and labor.
Growing someone's entire diet is no small challenge, this is true. But it's also not an all-or-nothing proposition. Someone with zero experience farming could plant some perennial herbs on their balcony, and discover the joy of cooking with them (and replacing a $5 plastic clamshell of Thai basil.) From there, year-by-year, people can get more ambitious with what they grow.
But it's comparison of "job in IT vs job in farming" (i.e. actually making money in both cases), and not "just farming enough for your food needs"
"making enough for your needs" is few crates of apples, not working whole day with a bunch of temporary workers gathering it while tractors are going around gathering the crates, often in burning sun.
Turning it around it would be like saying "job in IT is SUPER easy" but meaning just setting up a home router once a week (because that's what "farming for yourself" is compared to running profitable farm)
If you are producing cheese, or tomato sauce, or pesto, for example, the farming activity makes a lot more sense financially. Trying to grow and sell produce is a non-starter. If you can turn it into a shelvable, in-demand, item you can diversify and greatly increase or even just capture profit that you would normally lose.
As I mentioned, diversity is key. You can just deal in one or a few crops. You have to have a range of crops and value added products distributed to a variety of markets and you need to be selling directly.
We have some ultra small farms working here in Ohio doing very well and many have been for generations. It's damn near foolish to shop Kroger for produce here. I know I don't. Not until the ice hits.
If you're going to make cheese, you'll need a lot of cows (even for cheap cheese you'd need at least 10 liters of milk to get to a kilo of cheese) or someone near you that produces enough milk for you to buy and make cheese out of it.
Food production is a heavily specialized, mechanized and complicated job, you need a lot of support and resources around you even for basic canning and dairy products. And then you also have to figure out a way to sell these products to someone at a price they're willing to pay.
It's not by accident you'll see areas heavily focused on specific products (like Winsconsin and cheese) because everyone is, intentionally or not, pooling resources and creating the infrastructure to make it all possible.
There's a traditional soft cheese that is a staple where I'm from in Brazil that is made like queso fresco, but we mix in clarified butter at the end of the cook (it's called butter cheese/queijo de manteiga) that is at risk of disappearing because it's getting harder and harder to produce it locally due to the lack of milk producers and other infrastructure as most milk production has moved elsewhere.
are there no vertically integrated cheese production there ? If there is demand for milk why cow farmers are moving away?
Which is why I focus on specific crops that I've identified as being valuable or useful to me.
Basil, of course, I already mentioned, and similar to basil is other green and leafy veg, such as spinach, mint, coriander, rocket, spring onions and cress. They grow so quickly and easily that I guess the majority of the cost in a supermarket is the packaging and logistics. I also grow a lot of soft fruits such as strawberries because supermarket fruits are expensive and bland tasting compared to a freshly picked ripe strawberry. Squashes are good to grow as they're quite prolific producers without much effort, yet fairly expensive to buy in the supermarket. Garlic, chilli, tomato, runner beans and leeks I grow mainly because I can choose the cultivars I like, and find they're tastier than the ones I can get in the supermarket.
Of course, the biggest input I'm obviously not accounting for is my time, but as it's an enjoyable hobby that's good for my physical and mental health, that doesn't factor in for me. Plus, I think it's a good life skill to know how to grow food, and it's interesting to try and do it in a sustainable way, e.g. permaculture, supporting pollinators, producing your own compost, propagating your own seeds, capturing and storing water onsite, etc.
I certainly wouldn't quit my job and become a farmer, but I do think growing some of your own food is something everyone should at least try once if they have the space. Also as a general rule, animals require a larger scale to make a profit than do vegetables.
When I hear this sentiment expressed and/or express this sentiment myself, it generally has nothing to do with the farming, but is rather meant to convey an interest in a life as far removed as possible from the stresses and bullshit and growing moral conflicts of working in tech.
Of course, there is probably no industry that is immune from any of these things, or even immune from tech itself.
But consider all of the posturing of the "farmer" being of-the-land and small-town and away from the chaos of city life and away from Silicon Valley ivory towers. All the folksy hokey drawl and front-porch iced-tea that people like to put up, especially politicians and entertainment performers in the country music industry. All the idyllic glorification of the people who "feed the world." It's all beautiful sunrises over fields of grain, people in work clothes who don't have much but still have it all. Obviously, none of that reflects reality any more than a tech worker jumping into that world. It overlooks the backbreaking, bank-breaking labor involved at the lowest levels, and the exploitation of an entire sector of the economy from top to bottom, beginning with government subsidies handed out to a rapidly growing corporate oligarchy swallowing up family farms that have produced our food for generations and converting them to nightmarish factory farming operations of unspeakable horrors. But if golden sunrises is what people want to pretend it is, then that's as good as anything for a tech worker to pretend to want when they fantasize about standing up from their seat at a row of workstations in a FAANG labor facility and walking out.
Of course "these people have no idea what it is like to work on a farm for real." Nobody who hasn't done it does. Just like nobody who hasn't worked in tech knows what it is like working in tech for real.
The point isn't to sincerely go into farming. The point is to imagine getting out of an industry that mills "intellectual labor" into advertising revenue for billionaires. If people like to imagine "flyover country" being some unspoiled unappreciated paradise, then people who genuinely want to get off of the "elitist coasts" are going to imagine going there. If it happens to call the cultural bluff on farming being some quaint, pastoral life of simple but rewarding hard work, that's hardly the tech worker's fault. The blame for that most likely lies with the people in power who stand to benefit from sustaining that fantasy — who are often among the same people who benefit from the fantasy that tech work is all pinball machines and free sodas for typing on computers.
LOL, if that's your coping mechanism. But while one might laugh at a worker wanting to jump from one bleak industry to another bleak industry, the people who profit from all of this bleakness go on profiting. If we have a problem with the fantasies, then maybe we should do something about the realities first.
It's really not that crazy of an idea to be a mostly self sufficient farm. I would say that including non-grazed pasture we have under 8 acres for crops. Probably an additional 30 for grazing. Of course we buy groceries of things we don't grow but if that wasn't an option we would still eat plenty just less varied.
The important thing is to just have good land I think. Most of Americas farmland isn't great land for farming, it's just flat or ideal for a specific crop, which is great for mass production. The downside is that it's less productive and requires a ton of inputs with a limited and very time sensitive growing season.
It’s a meme at this point to make fun of people who want to do some form of labor that doesn’t make a good career when they retire. Of course farming is a worse job than being a developer, that’s why this person is a developer! But many things that make hard or even terrible jobs make great hobbies when you’re not doing it to make a career. And people who like to get things done still often don’t want their last accomplishment before they die to be “delivered corporate value in Q3 by…”
Small farming was viable few decades ago, now you'd have to make some speciality fancy food there to be profitable, not anything mass market.
Small vinery? Sure you might have some chance. Potatoes and wheat ? Good fucking luck.
> It's one of the reasons I LOL hard whenever I hear tech people saying they will "retire and become farmers", these people have no idea what it is like to work on a farm for real.
Clarkson's farm is essentially a documentary about that lmao. Rich man invests a lot and with ton of help earns less than a thousand a year from quite a lot of land.
Which just doesn't work. I needed to use a bunch of basil, and it was either cut off all the leaves or buy it at the store. So I cut off all the leaves and that was the end of it...
But another thing about growing anything is that it works better if you work around it's schedule rather than the other way around. Hothousing and international shipping have got us out of the habit of thinking seasonally or by growth cycle of a plant, but it's not hard to adapt to.
Pruning the basil will also cause it to grow bigger and better
Besides that, there are a lot of great resources on YouTube. Personally, I mostly watch the British videos because - bluntly - Americans are very wealthy and always have loads of land, power tools, cheap resources, pick up trucks, backhoes, etc. and I don't have any of that. They also seem to be a lot more serious about it, with homesteading or even borderline industrial setups. The British videos tend to be much more about bodging things on a budget in a small back garden for fun, which is much closer to what I'm doing! Also I don't have to worry about climactic differences that way.
With that being said, some of my favourite channels are alexgrowsfood, GrowVeg, Charles Dowding, homegrown.garden, My Family Garden, Down to Earth with Jim, Castle Hill Garden, and of course, BBC Gardeners World. I also love (and am a member of) the Royal Horticultural Society.
I really think there's a market for a grocery store "herb bar." A self-service bed where herbs grow and customers just take what they want. I would think this could greatly lower the expense of selling fresh herbs, since it's probably a easy thing to set and forget with a little automation.
I maintain my own herb garden. $10 of plants and some regular watering keeps me very well stocked with everything I need from spring until fall. I haven't refreshed the soil in five years and everything still grows to fill the entire pot by summer.
I can also grow various different herbs that are normally tricky to source, e.g. thai basil that can't be found outside asian grocery stores. Plenty of these heirlooms would be impossible to get other than growing them yourself because they have characteristics that make commercial sale a nonstarter: e.g. my heirloom tomatoes basically cannot be stacked up and sold in a market stand because they are sometimes larger than grapefruits, aren't very sturdy like perhaps a roma tomato is, and will crush themselves.
A cafe and ‘market’ that was entirely sustained by ‘expired’ goods from the local super markets that was otherwise destined for the garbage bin. Trucks kept rolling in as we are.
The cafe was only open weekend (volunteers) but the market was open everyday.
It was a ‘pay what ever you can system’, and $0 was fine. There was a 2 bag maximum on goods you could take away from the market.
And any payment made was a tax deductible donation.
The market had an obviously limited selection of goods, dependent on what came from the supermarkets.
But when I was there,
- unlimited breads of all kinds (like shelves and shelves and shelves, including very nice sourdoughs)
- capsicums (green)
- milk
- yogurt
- lettuce
- carrots
- few other misc veg
- a lot of soy and protein powders
- juices
- and frozen goods, which I didn’t explore.
You couldn’t survive off it alone (unless you had to). But it was a cool option to have. Love the concept.
So this only works at a very high cost or donated labor (which probably won't scale).
They’re not next to expensive grocery stores real estate but they do receive donated food and labor.
You fix it by making food expensive. I doubt anyone’s too keen to do that.
The problem is that ~20% of the population has food & housing insecurity when we're supposedly ridiculously rich.
I'd argue that the problem is labor is artificially expensive - which prevents all types of things like this from happening - because you can't buy labor for less than $15 an hour after taxes in most cities.
So you can't serve people that make less than a certain amount of money effectively.
People could be employed, making money working in these places - rather than people donating labor - and these same people working jobs like these would have access to these cheaper prepared meals, too.
But, we'll never get that. Nor will we get boarding houses back, because instead of having "slums" we'd rather have a homeless problem and high housing "costs".
And food being very cheap is definitely why there’s so much waste. There wasn’t, within living memory, and it’s because food cost a way bigger share of the median wage than it does today. Talk to some folks who grew up poor in the 40s and 50s about their cuisine, and they’ll tell you about what low-food-waste living looks like.
The goal isn't to reduce the cost of labor.
The goal is to unlock low-cost labor that is currently priced out.
We only have ~60% workforce participation.
The ultra-poor community could be served BY the ultra-poor community - and then a large percentage of them could go from ultra-poor to regular-poor, having a place to live and struggling to make ends meet instead of being homeless & hungry.
But that's not possible. Because we decided if you're not worth $15 an hour - you're worth nothing.
Montgomery, Al is known as a "poor" area - and yet there are only ~330 homeless people in a city of ~200k people (0.165%). In SF you have about ~8800 homeless people in a city of ~880k (1%).
If you're looking at somewhere like Rural PA - you're already not going to be able to employ people at low wages - because you're going to need to pay them almost $4 per hour just to get to and from work.
These are my people, and it gets worse than that. Rural America is shockingly poor. The cost of living’s low because nobody there can afford to pay more, and because they have no local public services to speak of.
[edit] the reason, specifically, there aren’t more homeless those places isn’t because it’s better, but because 1) nobody moves in, so 100% of people have family ties of some kind, at least some background that gets them access to a hovel or something, and 2) if you’re actually homeless there, you get picked up and shipped somewhere they can actually serve homeless people (or just go to prison), or you die.
And yet unemployment is lower than in places like SF, and homelessness is also lower, so is hunger.
I think you're forgetting how shockingly poor the entire world is.
I'd have to imagine that police in Alabama are probably a lot more aggressive in "running off" homeless people.
YMMV.
You can barely buy labour for $18 an hour. If there were a ton of surplus labour with the limiting factor being the law, labour would be priced at $15 an hour and unemployment would be high. But it seems to be priced well above that at the moment and unemployment is low.
Child labor laws are also fudged a bit for that specific category. Like, by law, they are, not just by convention.
Certain farm laborers have a lower minimum wage, and all farm laborers are federally exempt from overtime pay.
If food is inexpensive compared to labor and, therefore subject to be wasted, that seems like a good thing overall (at least as compared to the alternatives) rather than a thing that "must be fixed".
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2022/01/24/food-waste-and-it...
You fix it by making people aware and asking them to act responsibly.
Recovering waste in production and transportation is labor costs. If it were cost-effective, they’d already do it. Recovering waste at the grocery stores costs labor and/or loss of sales in excess of the cost of the risk of waste. Same at restaurants. Again, if it wouldn’t cost them more to avoid that waste, they already would.
Admittedly, at home, it’s mostly a time cost, but good luck convincing people to spend even a couple more hours a week in the kitchen and meal planning and pantry organizing to save small amounts of money (and really cutting home food waste takes a lot more than a couple hours a week)
Here is an idea: Move food subsidies from farming industry to people needing it.
Now people needing it most can afford non-crappy food. And industry have to care about wasting now-not-so-cheap food.
Carrot family plants like parsley and cilantro will not get roots.
I also have rosemary, thyme, and sage outdoors - they survive year-round in Seattle. Not everybody has the space or climate for it, but they're low maintenance and it's nice to just go out and grab some fresh herbs.
What you're describing is a soup kitchen rebranded. Plus some extra logistical issues from the 24/7 model.
With that in mind, you may want to investigate how your local soup kitchens get their materials. Your idea may be closer to reality than you think.
I went to one lady and took her plate, upon which she angrily scoffed at me "I can take my own plate up! I am not one of the guests here!".
She was in fact one of the guests.
So $16/4 ~= $4 per portion for absolutely delicious pasta. And about $5 per portion with basil. Of course, it'll be even better if you make your own tomato sauce and all.
The bare-bones option is: $3 for Barilla pasta, $4 for jarred tomato sauce, and like $1 for onion and garlic. You'll skip the block of Parmesan and basil, of course. But then it's ~$2 per portion. Saving $2 for such a drop in taste is not really worth it. You may skip the cheese, just to avoid eating such a rich meal.
The problem in my city is labor - there simply isn't enough manpower to convert all that produce into healthy food so they end up dispensing mostly the less healthy processed stuff, which also tends to have lower spoilage and higher "utilization" at the supermarket so there's never enough to go around based on peoples preferences. Whenever I volunteer at the local shelter, anyone who wants fresh produce can just ask for it but most people wanted (needed) hot prepared meals that tasted familiar and comforting.
Food Banks actually have a whole interesting economy they handle within themselves with "fake" money. It's pretty neat.
Grocery Outlet is the big chain that takes "waste" food and other smaller retail stores do the same thing(s).
It's not exactly the same as what you are talking about, as it's generally on the other side of the equation, it's all the "left over" food that never makes it to the grocery store, because the manufacturers over-produced, essentially.
Not all of the items are strictly near expiration, but a very large portion of them are near or past expiration in practice.
They were operating under federal funding, which the workers seemed to imply required the policy.
I regularly see past-expiration stuff at Grocery Outlet stores and other discount grocery stores like that still being sold.
All the trappings for a commercial kitchen and getting a space to work out of is fine but it's the nonprofit fundraising and grocery store food-pantry connections that seem impossible. I've basically resigned to starting at micro scale to get around the first one but actually getting a steady stream of food without pissing off the powers that be is an uphill battle.
Ask questions like "hey, who are those guys taking the stuff we pulled off the shelves cause it was expiring?" or "where does all this food that's right around the expiration date come from?"
The risk of customers becoming community kitchen dwellers could be too high for the store. Stores need people buying the produce from the shelf, rather than helping themselves from the bin.
The audience who buys high-margin grocery items is almost entirely separate from the audience who would even semi-regularly eat at a community kitchen.
Also many of the people who buy "high-margin grocery items" won't want to be physically near anyone who would "even semi-regularly eat at a community kitchen." Any store that ran a community kitchen to consume food waste would likely attract a homeless encampment. Even extremely liberal/progressive upscale shoppers would angrily complain.
To add food for thought, could the basil be dried in a dehydrator immediately after being taken off the shelves after minor wilting but while the taste and nutrition are still there? The resulting product might be better quality than what is sold in the dried spices aisle that is much less fresh..
Honestly indistinguishable from fresh basil once you cook it, and I say this as an Italian food snob.
Not in Vietnam, and not in the Chinese (Great Wall)/Korean (Hmart, Lotte) grocery chains in the US. Eating a whole sprig of basil is common in various Vietnamese meals. My point is that basil doesn't have to be a luxury item. It grows very well without much effort.
You're describing a social function without a lucrative profit motive.
One man's desire to improve their community is another's worst nightmare.
If that would work and people would use it then it isn't surprising. Supply and demand. More supply, less demand for the produce that costs money
How about vending machines that scan an ID and dispense nutritious (but bland) biscuits ?
If you genuinely want to know why, I highly recommend the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
It does a fantastic job of explaining how our society got really messed up the day food was put under lock and key.