Food Security and Climate Change

Some years peppers are abundant; others, not so much.

This June our local weather here in Vermont has been abysmal. Rain is about two inches over the average for this month, and the month isn't over yet. 

Our deluge appears to be the result of a Persistent Arctic Cyclone of unusual duration. Speculation is running rampant as to whether this is tied to global climate change, and climatologists and sea ice specialists are intently discussing the relationship of the cyclone to sea-ice breakup and a rising thermocline in arctic waters. 

Be that as it may, my garden is seeing record rains. My pepper plants, so fabulously lush last year, look like drowned rats. Several eggplant plants have died. Yet other things are thriving. All the greens, from lettuce to cabbage, could not be happier. I've never had this many peas in all my  years of gardening. And I've been eating beets and turnips out of the garden a month earlier than usual. 

My home food security relies on resiliency arising from planting a wide diversity of food crops, sprinkled with a substantial layer of flexible attitude. I don't dictate to my garden what it will produce. I let my garden tell me what is going to grow well, and just roll with that. 

I never know from one year to the next whether this is going to be a hot dry summer or a cold wet summer (or heck, as it is so far this year, a hot wet summer). So I plant sweet potatoes and kale, hot peppers and overwintering cabbage, tomatoes and arugula -- things that like hot, and things that like cold. I see how the weather is going.  I see what withers and what flourishes. I watch the sky and the almanac and eavesdrop on the farmers in the diner and then take a risk and throw in an extra row of peas or an extra flat of basil. 

I may not get the same produce every year, but whatever I get is a bounty and a blessing and I figure out what to do with it. Last year I had more hot peppers than I'd imagined possible in my small Vermont garden. I dried a bunch, made mountains of salsa, and then looked at the last bucket full and decided to try making hot sauce, which turned out wonderfully.  This year does not exactly look like it's going to be a hot pepper year, but I'll be using that hot sauce on my abundance of turnip greens tonight. 

In bad tomato years, I've made zucchini salsa instead, or batches of apple-green tomato chutney. When the brussels sprouts never came in, we ate the tender delicious greens off the top of the brussels sprouts stems. When the radishes started bolting early instead of forming radishes, I yanked them out, threw them to the chickens, and swiftly planted some heat-loving summer squash in their place. 

Our industrial food system, however, is so large and commercial-market-driven that farmers -- agricultural industrialists -- are not responding to the land and letting the earth and climate guide their hand in what to plant to produce healthful abundance. The drive to deliver X amount of wheat for processed white flour, or iceberg lettuce to decorate burger buns, or watermelons of a certain size and color to meet a contract with a huge supermarket chain, means that the resiliency I've built into my garden is utterly lacking. Flexibility and redundancy are not watchwords of our current food economy. And that puts our large-scale food supply at risk. 

While this risk can be seen as driven by commercial agricultural interests, it can also be seen as responding to market forces. The American consumer demand for white bread, white potato fries, and corn means that vast quantities of these monocrops will be grown -- at least until they fail.

Anything that you can do at home to diversify your food sources will help to ameliorate this large-scale risk. Grow some salad greens or sprouts on a windowsill or porch; buy from a farmers market or swap with a local gardener; even buying types of produce that you haven't tried before (kohlrabi? parsley root?) will help to encourage diversity in food markets. Go for the locally baked multi-grain breads, the brown eggs, the cornmeal from a small regional company. Your choices will help our food systems weather the storms of change.

 

BATNA: Lessons from Conflict Resolution

Self-Reliance Improves Your BATNA

 

My conflict resolution students swiftly learn to apply the word BATNA to every conflict situation. The principle of Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement means that anyone negatively affected by another person or entity should first look for options that are wholly within their own control to improve their own position in a way that will minimize the impact of the actions of others.

For example:  Afraid your place of employment might be downsizing? Bolster your eduction and job skills to make yourself as valuable in your workplace and as employable elsewhere as possible; start up other income streams, even small ones like selling some homemade items on Etsy, so that when your employment ends it won't feel quite like dropping off a cliff. Or, relationship on rocky ground with an uncertain future? Strengthen your network of friends and community, and shore up your financial independence; the boost in self-confidence may help put the relationship on better terms, or will clarify its ending without feeling like the your whole life is ending, too.

Every day brings us reports that food prices are rising, food production is down while population is skyrocketing, climate change is bringing drastic shifts in agriculture and patterns of civilization, and the food reaching our grocery store shelves is full of GMOs, lead, arsenic, high-fructose corn syrup, and a host of chemicals with names we can't pronounce. Health care costs are soaring while our health is diminishing.

It often feels as if we are ever-increasingly the helpless victims of massive corporate and governmental forces that we can not possibly control. Do we even have a BATNA in the face of what experts say is global environmental and economic collapse?

It is true that there are many things in life which any one of us can not control. Yet, you always -- ALWAYS -- have a BATNA. There is always some realm of your existence over which you have at least some modicum of control, about which you can make choices and formulate decisions to better your own position.

The food we eat is an area of our life over which we exercise a large amount of control. As supermarket prices rise and family budgets shrink, it sometimes may not feel that way, but it's true. Remember how I said that in the face of possible job loss, starting even a tiny sideline income stream was useful to improve your position? So it is with food. Even the smallest step towards food independence begins to free you from the power of the corporate agriculture giants and reduces the harmful impact of other people's actions on your body, wallet, and family.

Growing sprouts or shoots on the edge of the kitchen sink adds a nutrient-rich green vegetable to helps stretch your grocery shopping dollars and boosts your health. One pot on an apartment balcony with a single cherry tomato plant and some lettuce will give you fresh, nearly free salads all summer, helping to offset shortened summer work hours. Buying at the local farmers market is a fabulous option if you don't have growing space or time -- and can be cheaper than you thing, especially if you come at the end of the day and negotiate. (Many farmers markets also take EBT cards and some states provide food-assistance recipients with extra farmers markets coupons as well.)

Buying produce in season and throwing some in the freezer creates a buffer for lean times. Eating lower on the food chain -- lentils instead of meat some nights of the week--is cheaper and healthier. Drinking ordinary tap water instead of soda or other bottled drinks saves money and could be the best single thing you could do for your health.

Any one of these little steps empowers you by moving you one small step further away from the impact of decisions made by corporate agriculture--yet without any diminishment in the quality of your life or health. In fact, you'll improve your health, reduce your anxiety over food bills, and likely develop new tastes and food interests that will enrich your life far more than the box of expensive powdered donuts could have ever done. BATNA is about making yourself stronger and freeing yourself from the shadow of others' power over you. The more you re-assert your control over the food you eat, the stronger your BATNA, and the less power bad news about food prices and supplies will have over your life.

Growing Things That Come Back: Permaculture For the Rest of Us

There's an old saying that Society Creates the Crime. It could also be said that Society Creates the Trendy Environmental Solution.  

Locally-grown organic food, for example, could only be considered a neat thing by a society which has abandoned locally grown organic agriculture, and then embraces it as a fashionable passion as if it had just been newly discovered. In a way, it's akin to Columbus 'discovering' a half of a planet which was already inhabited by many millions of people. 

'Permaculture' is one of those trendy cocktail-party words that left-leaning publishing houses just can't seem to print enough about. Only a society which had entirely converted to exotic, non-sustainable decorative landscaping, maintained through intensive chemical and labor interventions, could think of permaculture as a trendy new invention discovered by white men from some upscale north-eastern university instead of good-old fashioned practicality. 

For those of us who are not much concerned about how our gardening methods sound to the cocktail-party set, planting things that come back year after year and work well in our local climate and soil is not only common sense, but is cost-effective, environmentally sound, and an efficient means of feeding both body and soul.  Native plants -- in my neck of the woods, mint, sunflowers, black-eyed susan, joe pye weed, Jerusalem artichokes, bee balm, etc.-- and their cultivars make a natural starting place. 

Rhubarb and Jerusalem Artichokes Return Every Year

Locally-adapted, low-care perennial flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables create a rich and beautiful home environment needing only annual additions of compost and frequent picking. Rhubarb, irises, daffodils, thistles, anise hyssop, rue, oregano, marjoram, aloe, bleeding hearts, elderberry, blueberries, hibiscus, sand cherry bushes, yarrow, echinacea, all come back year after year. 

Self-seeding annual herbs and flowers like sweet williams, cilantro, parsley, bachelor's buttons, lupines, walking onions, multiplier onions, pansies and johnny jump-ups, all establish their own patches and do not need to be replanted each year. Just refresh with a little compost and weed out any intruding grass or other unwanted species to give them a competitive advantage.

Sunflowers self-seed each year, and give goldfinches and other songbirds a place to perch between eating garden bugs. Lilac hedges provide heavenly scent and a practical wind-break. Kale, left to regrow a second season, provides edible flowers loved by butterflies -- and a crop of easily-saved seed to replant. 

The high-end permaculture books would have you believe that this trendy new idea requires consultants, graph paper, earth-moving equipment and a huge financial investment. None of that is true. All it takes is attention to where you live and in the space you have, and to what you want to get out of that space.There's no point planting a big asparagus patch if you can't stand asparagus. Look at what you've got for space, light and soil; look around you and talk to your neighbors about what grows well for them; and plant what works.   

Save the Earth: Rip Up Your Lawn

The largest irrigated crop in America is lawn grass. There is three times as much acreage in lawn grass production as in corn -- and many lawn owners apply just as much fertilizer and pesticides to maintain their outdoor carpets as those big corporate farmers do to produce commodity corn. 

Where does that fertilizer go after you dump them on the lawn? Some gets taken up by the grass, of course, but much of it washes away, into our rivers and lakes causing excessive growth that uses up too much oxygen and ultimately chokes out the aquatic ecosystem. 

Think about the quantity of fresh, potable water nationwide used to water lawns. Think about the amount of air pollution sent into our lungs every week as millions of homeowners or their landscapers mow, leaf-blow, and power-rake. 

Food prices are rising, and most people go without fresh, locally-grown, organic produce because it's unavailable or too expensive. Yet America's suburban homeowners are sitting on the most valuable asset our nation has -- fertile land -- and using it for a home decoration. Instead of generating healthy food for themselves, their neighbors, and those without land, suburbanites waste this resource by using it as an expensive, chemical-laden hobby.  

While it's easy to point fingers at corporate agriculture as the root of food shortages and a loss of food quality, the millions of small landowners who inhabit suburbia have the power to make a significant impact on world food supplies and their own pocketbooks and health simply by ripping up their lawns.

Turning your lawn into gardens means you'll get economic value out of it instead of dumping money into it.  You'll get healthy produce for your own family, saving on the grocery bill, and can even produce enough to share with neighbors or the local food shelf. Check out the Facebook site for Grow Food, Not Lawns if you want to connect with like-minded individuals who can inspire you with stunning photos, plans, and information for transforming your expensive lawn crop into an environmentally-sound, economically-productive garden. 

Weeds and Thinnings: Greens and More Greens

Pigweed weeded out of the garden and onto the dinnerplate

Beet greens and kohlrabi leaves from thinnings

One of the best things about gardening is getting to eat the weeds and thinnings.






Pigweed, cress, purslane, young dandelion leaves, and many other garden weeds are delectable 'specialty greens' that commandeer high prices at upscale food markets. The young leaves of beets, kohlrabi, turnips, rutabegas, even carrots are delightful in salad, or mixed together and sauteed with the first garlic scapes, chives or new onions, a sprinkle of sugar, and a splash of hot sauce. Over brown rice topped with a fried egg, they make a perfect early summer meal that is economical and packed with nutrients.