8. Food Gathering and Production
Information on In the Wake:
Notes towards an egalitarian food gathering
process. [01/11/04]
Information from other sources:
Further Reading, Bibliography
and Links
Related posts from the blog:
Thursday, April 13, 2006
The Soil and Health Library
is a simply massive online collection of important, hard-to-get
and out-of-print books on soil, ecological and human health.
It's broken down into several sections. One section is the
Holistic Agriculture Library. I really like Soil
Microorganisms and Higher Plants by N.A. Krasil'nikov, which
is one of the classic old texts of soil ecology. (It's a bit dense,
but full of really important information.) There are also books
on what civilization has done to the soil, such as the oft-cited
Topsoil and Civilization.
Some of these, like Topsoil and Civilization, will bring up a
request for you to put in your email address to get a copy due
to copyright issues. If you are worried about getting spam, you
can always use a free disposable email address from a service
like Spam Gourmet.
In the health section you can also find, among many other things,
a review of and excerpts from Weston A. Price's classic study
of health in uncivilized peoples, Nutrition
and Physical Degeneration.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
The
oil in your oatmeal is an interesting article which examines
the oil and energy required to make your average breakfast.
The article notes that about 40% of the oil used to make an average
breakfast goes into keeping the ingredients cool ingredients and
cook and prepare it. You can reduce the amount of energy you need
to cool and cook food with some of the cheap suggestions in Tools
for Gridcrash, such as a haybox
or solar cookers, or various
methods of low-energy cooling.
If you want a more detailed examination of the energy content
in food, check out the informative article The
Oil We Eat.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Fruits and vegetables grown today are less
nutritious than those grown fifty years ago, but apparently
organic food is better than conventional. The linked article notes
that a similar study done in 1980 also found a decline in nutrient
density compared to 1930, so this is an old and continuing trend.
It reminds me of a recent study from Scotland which showed that
modern people have less healthy diets and worse teeth than
people did six hundred years ago. And those people had worse
diets and teeth than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Ahh, the
march of progress!
The declining nutrient density could be one of the contributing
factors to the declining
cognitive skills of children we looked at a few months ago.
If the brain has serious nutrient deficiencies when it is forming
it can never quite make up for it, even with excellent nutrition
later in life.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
One of the issues that I work on beyond this site is food security
and food relocalization. This weekend I wrote a proposal to start
a cooperative for local organic growers in my area. I think something
like this will encourage people to participate in small-scale
organic food growing which is important for a whole lot of reasons
around collapse, sharing skills, and the failure of energy-intensive
industrial agriculture.
You can read my proposal and reasoning
here, which might be of special interest to anyone who wants
to encourage something similar in their area.
Subjects to add, discuss or address:
Suggestions welcome.
Edible Plants
Poisonous Plants
Herbal medicinal plants
Smoking, salting, and preserving meat
Preserving and storing other foods
Foraging
Intensive, "sustainable" gardening and permaculture
Composting techniques
Which foods are more nutritionally rich
How to encourage the regrowth of different foods in the wilds
Where to find seeds (precollapse)
Hunting and fishing
Animal track and scat identification
Water collection and safety
Where to find water
Maybe a couple of good recipies
What you can learn about soil and environmental conditions from
different plants
Tree identification
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