am I prepared?

I've been reading a lot of fiction lately. The following four books I've read over the last few weeks, the first two I read last weekend:

Last Light, by Alex Scarrow  (here is the amazon link if you want to read about it http://www.amazon.com/Last-Light-Alex-Scarrow/dp/0752893270).  This is about a fast crash that occurs because some group blows up a couple mosques in Saudi Arabia, which causes wide spread war in the Middle East, plus bombs other key refinery points across the oil industry.  Set in London, with not just crash impact but also a mysterious-bad-guys thread.

Last Light, by Terri Blackstock (http://www.amazon.com/Last-Light-Restoration-Terri-Blackstock/dp/0310257670)

This is about a fast crash that occurs because of a EMP-like event - all electronics & electricity is down, in a suburban community where there is a killler on the loose.  This is the first in a four book series.  

One Second After by William Forstchen (http://www.onesecondafter.com/)

This is about a fast crash that occurs because of an EMP set over the US.  set in a small college town in North Carolina, not far from a few big cities. 

Crossing the Blue, by Holly Jean Buck (http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Blue-Holly-Jean-Buck/dp/0615241719).  A post petrol, post american road trip.  about a cross country road trip in post-crash, post-climate-change-flooded America which takes the hero & heroin through many different examples of post-scenario possiblities. 

Suffice it to say that reading these has definitely gotten me back to where I was when I first learned about Peak Oil.   I'm incredibly aware of how vulnerable we are, especially to food & water supply issues.  I'm reminded of something I read a long time ago on Energy Bulletin.  I'll have to paraphrase, since I don't remember the exact quote, or who said it.  If and when the crash occurs, many people will be caught unawares, even those of us who are aware of Peak Oil and the coming crises. 

As I said before, when I first learned about Peak Oil, I did a lot to prepare. And I stocked up on food, and got to know my local food sources.  But my food stocks have gotten back down to nothing.   I have heat (I ordered my cordwood, should come this weekend) and shelter, but the freezer is empty, my chickens are gone, and my garden is non-existent.  So I'm back to being completely unprepared for something happening.  I might be prepared emotionally, but that isn't going to put food in my stomach.  

I think that along the way, I've spent so much time dreaming about the ideal place for me to land - a farm or ecovillage, that I've forgotten that I'm going to be where I am now for some time to come.  And I've figured out that while I work full time to afford where I live, I have very little energy left over to raise my own food.  I know some people do, and I'm definitely on the lazy side, but I have to be honest with myself about what I can and cannot accomplish.  And if I'm going to stay sane, I can't expect too much of myself. 

So what I figured out over the last few weeks of reading this fiction, is that I have to come up with another way to have enough food on hand if something happens.  And I need to incorporate that food in my daily diet, so that it doesn't go bad.  Most of what I stocked up with in 2005 went bad because it was stuff that I would only eat if I had nothing else on hand.  So I need to plan better while I am stocking up, mark expiration dates so that I eat things before they expire.  And only buy what I will eat and have recipes to cook with.  This will be slightly easier this year, since I'll have fewer children to cook for and cater to. 

This will also help me save money and lower my carbon footprint.  Over the winter, I usually buy fresh vegetables every week from the grocery store that have traveled thousands of miles.   If I start buying fewer fresh vegetables from the grocery store when they are out of season and not local, and buy canned goods instead, I'll be learning better to eat in season.  I can even attempt to simulate what it would be like if I had time to can local produce for the winter, by buying canned foods that I know I would can or freeze - beans, corn, tomatoes, etc.   I know this may sounds simple or obvious, but it will be a big change for me.  I never eat canned vegetables - those were always what we ate, and only ever ate, when we went camping or sailing.

I used to think my only option was growing all my own food, and if I couldn't do that, then why bother at all.  But this way, I'll focus on local food and/or canned, and I'll be able to continue to support the local economy as well as start building up a larder that will make me feel more secure.  I may renew my purchases of survival gear as well - lanterns, propane for fuel, candles, etc.  I used to do that as well, and stopped after a couple years of nothing drastic happening.  

And I need to remember that I was well prepared when the ice storm in Dec '08 took out our electricity and communications for days.  I had a wood stove & cordwood, a cook stove & propane, lots of candles and a couple battery powered lanterns.  I also had airbeds for our guests who came so stay with us because they had no heat.  The one thing that I didn't have, and should probably be on my list of the first next thing to buy, is a generator.  They are expensive, yes, but if I'm going to stock up on anything frozen, I'll need a generator to keep those things frozen.  Otherwise its a waste of money to spend any money on anything frozen.  And a crank-operated radio, so we can get news without electricity.

OIC

I think I see now why I've been thinking about getting back to the many local efforts I was doing a few years ago. I've been following John Michael Greer's "Green Wizardry" course, and he has been blogging about compost and gardening as a key part of the Green Wizardry training. 


Another thing that I started back then, and have kept up with, is my worm bin. I bought it the same day I bought the rabbit.  The rabbit is gone, and I'm on my second pound of worms, but they made it through the winter and are doing fine.  My first pound died, mostly because I stopped paying attention to them, and stopped feeding them, and they ran out of reasons to go on.  That was last year.  This year, I opened up the worm bin to "harvest" some worm castings ( I was told this was key to keeping your worms going), and discovered I had a lot of worms in there.  I had been looking but couldn't see them because the light bulb burned out in the garage!  But they are thriving and doing well on weekly food scraps, and every so often adding some more newspaper strips (I hadn't been doing that the first time around either).  I also went to a Vermiculture class at NOFA, and learned a lot about them there. 


Someone even mentioned that if things get really bad, she had a whole book of recipes for cooking with worms....ich!

Wax and Wane

When I first heard about Peak Oil, I did a lot of things those first few years to prepare for the coming crisis.  I 


- bought a wood stove fireplace insert & cords of wood (and got good at stove stoking)
- started a garden (and got to know the three kinds of slugs in my yard)
- raised layer hens from chicks for eggs (and a few broilers by mistake!) 
- started buying local milk from a dairy many miles away
- figured how to get my favorite type of bread from the local bakery (order ahead!)
- built a couple different chicken tractors for my chickens
- started raising an angora rabbit for the wool
- volunteered at the local Heifer Project International farm (learning about raising livestock)
- joined a local spinners guild and bought a portable spinning wheel
- banished the TV from the living room to areas in the house I don't go to
- attended a Peak Oil Community Solutions conference
- started riding my bike and getting in shape
- bought a moped to drive to work (my commute was 6 miles)
- joined a vegetable CSA and a meat CSA

I'm sure I'll think of more, but that's a good start of the list of things I was doing in the early days to be prepared.  And I felt prepared.  But I had a definite advantage those first few years: I was working part time.  So I had time for all these things. 

And then I started working on the coop, and soon after started working full time with a long commute.  The chickens started eating each other, the rabbit kept getting matted because I wasn't grooming her, the milk place was too far, and I couldn't make it to the bakery before it closed because I was working so far away.  The vegetable CSA was far away, and far too many vegetables for me and my daughters.  The meat CSA - I kept missing the pickup even though it was on my way home from work, and the meat turned out to be a lot of cuts that I didn't want or didn't know how to cook.  I could go on, but you get the idea.  This stuff isn't easy.  And it is so easy to be pulled back into the industrial system, because the grocery stores are easy to get to , open all hours, have everything you need, etc. 


The one thing that I have continued to do is the wood stove.  Which reminds me, I need to order my cordwood for the winter.  I always worry that they'll have run out by the time I call.  I do love the fire, building it, watching it, feeling the heat.  Lugging wood is a pain, especially in the snow, but its good exercise.  And I feel stronger after doing it all winter.  And I do a darn good job stacking it in the fall - I get comments on it!  


And the other thing, of course, is the food co-op I started.  It's an online way for people to order from local farmers, with a volunteer distribution service to pickup sites once a month.  The co-op is also why I didn't even try to plant a garden this year, and why I've hesitated buying chicks again.  Between working full time and the co-op, I'm so busy and so stressed, that choosing not to plant the garden this year was a choice to have a little less stress in my life.  That's how I felt when I gave away the last hen after she had killed and eaten her buddies.  And relieved to find that same person would love to take the rabbit as well. 


But as I've been reading a lot of fiction lately, about post peak oil scenarios, its got me thinking about how unprepared I am, and how much less vulnerable I felt when I had the chickens and the rabbit, and the CSA shares, and the garden.  I feel like my level of preparedness waxed and now has waned, and its time to get back on the waxing side of that cycle.  Sure the local food co-op is good, good for the community.  But it is only one piece of my personal preparation, and I'm going to feel a lot better if I get back to some of those other things I was doing to prepare for the coming crisis. 

What Do I Believe?

Someone got me thinking this weekend - what do I believe will happen?  How can I stay so positive when things seem so dire?  And I guess the answer is.... I believe we will have a long slow descent, like some people in the peak oil community believe (The Long Descent by John Michael Greer and The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler).    I think there will be crisis and then recovery and then crash and then recovery.  As Heinberg says in End of Suburbia, recession after recession.  

I think it is possible that we might have a complete, full on crash into mayhem, but I really hope we don't.  And I think it is less likely.  I think the government will continue, at all costs, to keep the economy going.   It's harder to prepare and stay prepared for a sudden emergency, both physically having enough supplies on hand and emotionally expecting it every minute of every day.  Expecting doom every day is a really tough way to live.  It's hard to be cheerful. 

I think Relocalization and Transition Towns are great ideas, but I don't seem to have the charisma to get anyone in my town to join me, and I got tired of trying.  

So I have opted to work towards preparing for the long descent, re-skilling myself and others if anyone wants to learn, so that eventually I and whoever wants to join me will be self-sufficient.  I also work daily on the Mass Local Food Coop, working towards supporting local farmers, and encouraging more and more people to eat locally, and support the local economy so there will be one if something does happen.  And along the way, I may just buy a few extra cans of soup & tuna every week during my weekly shopping trip! :)

Not Too Hard

So I cooked a real dinner last night, and it wasn't too hard.  Once I gave up on the hope of having dinner on the table by 6pm, I just started when I got home at 5:50, and when it was done, we ate.  

I made tuna noodle casserole, since I have lots of cans of tuna from a BJs purchase. I checked online the day before for recipes - never searched online for recipes before - a great resource for any of us newbies.  I specifically looked for recipes that used Cream of Mushroom soup, because I have a lot of that as well.  I used to make baked chicken with cream of mushroom soup, but the kids tired of it - and I stopped buying chicken from the grocery store - and I ended up with more cream of mushroom soup than I knew what to do with.

Once I had planned to make it, arriving home and discovering no children to cook for didn't stop me.  I just plowed ahead and made it, a quick recipe and then popped it in the oven.  And low & behold, hungry children arrived home just when it was coming out of the oven.  How about that!

Another thing about cooking.  It takes practice and trying different recipes. That one was a little too cheesy - I was using a couple different recipes together.  Next time a little less cheese.

Tonight I'm going to try vegetable stir fry - I have lots of vegetables from the mass local food pickup & farmers market last Friday, and I'm going away this weekend to the NOFA summer conference, so I need to use them up.  Wish me luck!

Local Food and How to Cook

(I wonder if other bloggers have the same problem.  I couldn't get to sleep last night composing this in my head!)

One of my main problems with local food these days is that I don't like to cook.  Don't get me wrong.  I love the coop and I like buying food from the coop from local farmers and producers.  But local food tends to be in an "unprocessed" state".  That's the point, right?  That local food doesn't have those 10 calories of fossil fuel used for every 1 calorie you eat? 

But I've forgotten how to cook.  And I've gotten really lazy about cooking as well.  

When I was a child, my mother cooked a full meal every night, often with a homemade dessert as well.  Always protein, veggies, & starch.  And I learned to cook from her.  She often had me help, or sometimes would call and tell me to start something if she wasn't home yet.  I remember taking cooking lessons in middle school, and getting excited about bringing home easy recipes my mom didn't have.  Like sugar cookies. 

Later, when I finished college and got a professional job, I discovered the blossoming world (in the 1980's) of fast food and sit-down restaurants.  I didn't have to cook, as long as I could afford eating out.   I can't even remember eating at home much, I probably ate a lot of ramen!  If I threw in an egg, that was protein, right?

When I got married and had children, I had to cook.  And by that time (1990's), the variety of processed food had blossomed in the supermarkets.  I could pick up easy meals to cook, and this fit my schedule - working full time and raising two kids.  I could shop on the way home, and then quickly cut up some protein, throw it in a pan with a frozen mix with vegetables and sauce, and dinner was ready in a jiff.  I did most of the cooking, and so I had to deal with the kids finicky eating.  Shopping for food and cooking was a chore.

When I got interested in local food, in 2005, I came face to face with the fact that I no longer cooked anything from scratch.  And I didn't know how to cook most of the mystery cuts that came in my Meat CSA share, or the variety of vegetables from my Vegetable CSA  share. Thankfully, at that time, I was only working part time, so I had time to figure out what do to with a overload of tomatoes one week, or corn the next.  But most of the irregular cuts of meat went bad in my freezer before I dared figure out how to cook them.  And only half of the excess from the CSA that I had frozen got eaten before it got freezer-burnt.

Then I went back to work full time, and all that processed food in the grocery store made sense.  For full time double income families or single parents, those processed food meals and fast-food/take-out meals are lifesavers.  I don't know how most families do it these days without taking shortcuts.  Cooking a full meal every night is exhausting, especially after a long day of working and commuting.  

So they really do have us over a barrel.  We want all those consumer goods they keep pushing us to buy, and the bigger house, so we send both parents to work, and then there is no one home to cook dinner.  So then we go out and buy fast food and take out and processed meals from the grocery store since we have so little time.  So we end up supporting the gigantic corporations and watching the little guys go out of business.  And all of us gaining weight on all that processed food. They have us RIGHT WHERE THEY WANT US!

I believe that the local food movement will continue to be a small fraction of the population, as long as we ignore the other pressures on families.  Consumers are under stress with little time and less money, and they need to be able to get their food/meals quickly, with little effort, so that they can have a little rest each night before they go off to work again the next day. 

We need simple cooking classes.  We need personal chefs.  We need entrepreneurs who are cooking local meals from local produce and delivering to our homes. We need more people living together in houses so at least one person is at home to cook and shop and other necessary home-type stuff - yes, housework, but we hate to call it that, don't we.  But someone's got to do it.  We have to stop trying to be so independent, and gather together so that we have the energy and the support to do what's right.  Grow our own food, shop locally, and do-it-yourself whenever you can. 

About Me

In June 2005, I saw The Day After Tomorrow.  The next day, I googled it, to see if any of it was true, and I stumbled onto the concept of Peak Oil.  I'm not sure if it was DieOff.org or lifeaftertheoilcrash.net that I found first, but eventually, I found both, and it scared the $&*+ out of me.  I remember freaking out, sending messages off to ask if anyone else had heard of this, and spending the next few days, months, years, reading and reading more and more about it.  Eventually, I became a regular reader of EnergyBulletin.net.

Learning about Peak Oil tends to make you fall into one of several camps - doomer, techno fix believer, community builder, or non-believer.  I have found that I fall into the community builder camp.  I learned early on about relocalization efforts, and joined up with a group in the town I grew up in.  I tried to start a relocalization group in my own town, but could not build enough interest.  But finding a group in another town, to meet with and strategize with, and commiserate with, did a lot to help me stay positive during those first few years.

Sometime during my initial research, I discovered the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. This was an online shopping cart which connects consumers to local farmers and producers.  Sounded like a great way to get local food, and I wished we had something like that in Massachusetts.  I had been trying to find local food in my own area, and spent a lot of time driving around and not finding much.  Trying to compare prices between farm stands is an exercise in futility.  And arriving after a half hour drive to find they were closed was very frustrating.

Then I heard, through the ComFood (community food security) listserv, that the Oklahoma Food Coop was giving away their software for free.  Not long after that, the relocalization groups that I was in touch with had a visioning day, Jan 1, 2007, and we all set goals for where we wanted to be in 1, 3, and 10 years.  And I made the statement, that I wanted to get a Mass Local Food Coop started, in 3 years.

So from Jan 2007 until now, I've been working to create the Mass Local Food Cooperative. This has truly been a labor of love.  In January 2009, I found my co-founders, and we launched in June 2009.   We incorporated on Jan 5, 2010, just a couple days after my 3 year goal (although I didn't realize it until we started writing up a history of the coop for our new website).  And we had our first annual meeting in Feb 2010.  The coop has been doing well.  We sort 60-90 orders a month, for over 200 members and about 30 producers.

But it is all volunteer.  I figured out last month that we put in about 80 hours a month, and 50 of those hours are between four of us.  We had hoped to be able to give volunteers credit - like $5 or $6 an hour - for their time, but we are not clearing  enough (we charge 5% per order to customers and 5% per invoice to producers) over expenses to be able to give volunteer credits.  And of course, I put lots of time and money into the project before we launched.

Ok, that's my little whining for today.  I get frustrated sometimes, you know?

I do have other projects in mind, particularly transition towns and some way to save the knowledge we have in case of a hard crash, and it is hard sometimes to keep focused on the day to day issues of the coop when I'd rather read, research, and study how to move forward with those.  But a lot of people in the coop depend on me, so I need to continue there until I'm no longer needed.  Someday I would like to start a university/college for learning the pre-industrial skills we used in the early 1800s, before coal and then oil began to be used for industry.  I'm very interested in water power.  We used to have a lot of water-powered industry here in Massachusetts, and it would be really cool to get those started again.  And I'd love to start or join an ecovillage focused on self-sufficiency.  Agraria looks really cool - would love to either go there or start one here.

I have lots and lots of links that I've saved over the years.  I'm hoping to make them available to my friends (and myself - I hate being at work when the link I need is home on my home computer!).