Ebony's Pearls

Blackberry Jelly
Originally uploaded by nodigio

In a depression caused by fuel shortages, food will be extremely scarce in cities. Most cities only have enough food for a few days. If shipments are sent in only once a week, the stores will run out days before the next shipment. If shipments are monthly, people can starve if they don't know how to shop or find other food sources. Food may be rationed again – at least some foods. I expect food will still find its way into cities, even if people return to horse and wagon days to haul it in, but it will be much more expensive. One of the other things that will drive food costs up will be fuel shortages in the production of food – no fuel to run the huge combines, harvests, plows, tractors, and other heavy farm equipment will mean more people-intensive farming – good for employment, bad for food prices. Without specialized farm equipment that depends upon fossil fuels for operations, some crops can’t be grown where they now are. Irrigation systems and greenhouses will suffer from a fuel shortage – and in turn create a food shortage of the foods they grew. Huge mono-crop fields will disappear because there won’t be the equipment or manpower to care for and harvest them – wheat, soy, corn, and possibly rice.

Suburban areas won't be hurt as badly, especially since many suburban areas have enough land around them for food gardening, but you'll still be dependent upon finding and stocking food. Don't expect the Post Office to deliver food, either. Mail order food may become a distant memory due to fuel shortages. Mind you, all my harping about depression problems caused by fuel shortages may be meaningless if we do manage to convert to other affordable fuel sources. Or this may be another depression like the so-called depressions of the 70’s (when gas prices shot up to almost $1.00 a gallon!), or the 80’s or 90’s, which, to be honest, I never noticed because they didn’t affect me and mine. Still and all, if we do have a financial crash because of the credit and insurance industries, and fuel shortages because we lack foresight in preparing for it even with decades of warning and the delivery trucks can't run for lack of fuel, you can believe the mail trucks won't run reliably, either. Communication outside your local area will be by cell phone and internet, not through delivery either by the Post Office or the various delivery services. Expect packages to take much longer when you send anything because of fuel shortages – and expect to receive much larger deliveries because they’ll be held until there’s enough to make it worth while to deliver.

Cell phones may also be powered down or even subject to rolling brown-outs, black-outs or rationing because they are highly dependent upon fossil fuels for making and servicing them. I could be wrong, but I don’t think as many people will be as dedicated to keeping cell phones working as there are people who will dedicate their resources to keeping the internet working. Who knows, maybe iPhone is the wave of the depression because people can combine many devices and services into one – saving money and still having their tech, too. Television is going to migrate to the internet – we already see signs of that with hulu.com and YouTube.

That’s only peripherally related to securing food, as delivery services will be hurt by fuel shortages and many may disappear if they can’t adapt. and it won't matter if you have a blackerry, an iPhone, an internet connection, or a cell phone. If there's no way to get the food to you, you'll have to find some way to make the food where you are.

Food-wise, I’ve been advocating buying local for many reasons. One, food that hasn’t traveled for days or weeks to reach you tastes better and has more nutrients in it. Two, buying food locally encourages local farmers to grow more food and a wider diversity of foods. It encourages more people to grow food that wouldn’t otherwise do that. It makes our food base more secure in the event of fuel shortages – we’ll be more likely to have food available and have more foods than mere survival foods on hand. If farmers do have to return to horse-drawn wagons, having a large and diverse local food source will save many people from starvation diseases.

Even if you live in a high-rise, you can still grow some of your food: lettuces, small greens, radishes, carrots, even tomatoes and bell peppers grow well indoors in containers, especially if they can be supplemented by grow lights. You can grow and harvest them year round. You may be able to join with neighbors to garden on the rooftop or in waste areas near your building.

Foraging in a depression shouldn’t be as worrisome or dangerous as foraging after a nuclear accident or if chemical or biological warfare bombs are detonated near your home. You do have to worry about pesticides because many cities spray their waste areas to kill off weeds and pests. I’ll admit this practice is falling by the wayside in some areas because it is expensive, so even that threat is lessening. Still, wash your foraged foods well before you eat them. Pay attention to where you forage and pay particular attention to dump sites for industrial wastes. Don’t harvest near those sites – even if they claim to clean up, residue remains and can contaminate the plants. Plants will draw contamination out of the soil as long as that contamination remains in the soil and will concentrate it in their leaves, roots, fruits, and seeds.

Get yourself a good book on wild edibles, and take a class in foraging for your city. Learn what’s edible and how to prepare it. Not everything edible will be tasty or 100% nutritious, but it will fill your belly and provide you with some nutrition. If you know what’s edible in the waste places and wild spaces, you won’t starve.

We have to forget all the ads that claim you’ll get 100% of your daily vitamins from one bowl of this one highly processed food because it’s not healthy to depend upon a single food source in a depression. Not only will it be expensive to buy that food, it will not be healthy to eat one thing for extended periods of time – no matter how many vitamins they artificially add to it. Vitamins don’t give you essential micronutrients. You’ll be eating a much wider variety of foods. It will help if you start broadening your diet now, before the foods you normally eat become unavailable or priced out of your ability to buy them. If you have allergies, the coming depression will be much harder on you if you don’t prepare for it. Try growing just a few of your foods, and adding a few more each year.

Eat what’s available, and if you go from eating Kobe beef to pigeons you snare on your balcony, so be it. It won’t last forever. The last great depression only lasted 10 years. That seems like a long time, but it will end. All you have to do is get through it.

Get together with friends and neighbors to grow larger gardens. Use the front lawn for food gardening as well as the sides and back. Put container grown foods up in hanging baskets and in window baskets, too. If you grow flowers, slowly add edibles among them. If you start building your food gardens now, you’ll have them established and productive before the depression hits. You’ll have food, and food to share.

Check out Mel Bartholomew’s New Square Foot Gardening http://tinyurl.com/3x5ors , Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza http://tinyurl.com/2m4xrw , Gardening Basics for Dummies http://tinyurl.com/382hj6 , Rodale’s Illustrated Guide to Organic Gardening http://tinyurl.com/2ogejc , Gardening When it Counts by Steve Solomon http://tinyurl.com/2nquoe , Everyone’s Guide to Food Self-Sufficiency by Walt Gulett http://tinyurl.com/34tvkw, Self-Sufficiency Gardening by Martin Waterman http://tinyurl.com/34mlu7 , and local gardening guides, available from your local horticulture or agriculture departments and gardening clubs.

Learn how to preserve your harvest so you’ll be able to eat from it until your next harvest. Canning, root cellaring, salting, pickling, and drying skills will be useful to you not just so you can eat well during this depression, but so you can barter your skills for other things including more food if you don’t have land space to grow your own food or enough of your own food. Some good references for this are: Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning by Deborah Madison http://tinyurl.com/33eu8t , Root Cellaring by Mike and Nancy Bubel http://tinyurl.com/3co9gn , Solar Food Dryer by Eben Fodor http://tinyurl.com/2p5tz8 , Build Your Own Underground Root Cellar by Phyllis Hobson http://tinyurl.com/2kjhk9 , Charcuterie: The book of salting, smoking, and curing by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn http://tinyurl.com/38lvss , Easy Japanese Pickling by Seiko Ogawa http://tinyurl.com/2ne5fs , The Complete Book of Year-Round Small Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard http://tinyurl.com/2m3d5a , and The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving http://tinyurl.com/2j8p9o . You can also check with yout local county extension, or vo-tech to see if they offer classes in food preservation for the home cook.

Unless you happen to be in dairy country or have access to either a dairy or people who own a few milch cows, fresh dairy products will become very expensive. Most dairy products are highly perishable and spoil easily. The hotter parts of the nation will have less access to fresh dairy products because transportation will be expensive not just in fuel miles but in refrigerant for the trucks to transport them. Fresh milk, yogurt, butter, cottage cheese, cream cheeses, cream, sour cream, buttermilk, half and half, semi-soft and fresh cheeses, and even some of the hard cheeses will spoil if it takes too long to get them to market. This isn’t going to hurt fairy farms as much as it will people living in distant cities. The dairy farms will be marketing closer to home so people living in the vicinity will continue to have milk and milk products. Those of us living far from dairy farms may want to consider altering our diet to accommodate non-instant dried milk, powdered buttermilk, powdered sour cream, and canned evaporated milk. Those dairy products will still be available to us.

Eggs (and chickens) are more widespread and may still be easy to get even in densely populated areas. Turkeys, ducks, and geese are regional so their eggs and meat may not be as easy to get as chicken eggs and meat. I think, even in cities, these will be available. If people can raise pigeons on rooftops, raising chickens should be equally as simple. All we have to do is get cities to change their zoning regulations before it becomes crucial. And pigeons, squirrels, and rabbits may find a place in the city grocery stores in place of the much more expensive and difficult to get pig, sheep, and beef.

Smoked meats, sausages, salt pork, and canned meats will still be easy enough to get because of their non-refrigerated shelf-life and transportability. Fresh meats will be scarce inside large cities, and will be expensive when available because either the living animal must be transported to the city for butchering (cattle drives, anyone?), or expensive transportation and refrigeration must be used to bring them into the city.

Landlocked cities will settle for canned or dried seafood and fish from local lakes and rivers. No more “fresh” shrimp, lobster, crab, swordfish, cod, tuna, salmon, or other fish of the seas for us. Landlocked cities will still get salt and dried seaweeds.

Either plan to move where your favorite (or essential because of allergies) foods will be available or alter your diet to match what will be available where you live. Stock up on those foods that will become scarce as the depression advances in your area before the depression reaches you and drives prices up.

Next to home security, food security is one of the top important survival needs in a depression.