What Real Alaskan Women Read
The Plenty Measure: Where do my foods come from?
I have read up to November. I thought for awhile that I would read a chapter with each month that I go through, but I became involved in the book. I also just realized that the chapters change as to who is telling the story (duhh!).
As I read I marked several pages that I wanted to share and talk about.
The first section that kind of sucked me into the book was the May chapter. I had read it right at about the time that we had returned from visiting the Foshees and had gone to their farmers market. I had been contemplating much about being able to survive off the land and the 100 mile diet and think extensively about Cynthia's friend in McCarthy that lives mostly off the land (and Cynthia's amazing garden and all those other gardeners I know that garden and store for winter.) The sense of plentitude after having nothing when Alisa and James experience when entering the farmers market after running out of food was an experience I can vaguely relate to. I think often about what it would be like to "feel" like you do not have anything to eat. It reminded me also of the guy who took a month, I think, and lived off of food that was growing in the city: crab apples, weeds etc. It has forced me to look outside my door and realize how much there is to eat right outside my door. :) I could live without buying any food, and eat rather well!
Perhaps one of the things I love most about the book so far is that it has made me realize my relationship and perspective I have for food. It is very distant and non-existent. Yet, when I can or collect food, the relationship is much closer and understanding and dare I say, ethereal? I am afraid I have no other words to explain it. In terms of perspective, I had never made a clear connection about food in relation to the plants and what could or could not be eaten. For example, the radish. I grow radishes so I can eat the root. But when picking wild plants, you pick different parts of the plant (shoots, leaves, roots etc.) at different times of year and they produce different kinds of food. Yet, I dare not think about eating the leaves of the radish. Now having never had a connection to my food, one could understand why I did not make this connection. But for a farmer growing wheat, they would be looking at me like I was plain stupid. :) But this is precisely what I am saying, if the connection is not there, why would we have made it unless it was pointed out to us, or we began to wonder...
This connection was made from two sections in the book, the one where James discusses the history of why farms and chickens were moved out of the city:
"It was the bourgeois reform movement of the late nineteenth century that banished livestock to the countryside; the campaign had been motivated in part by a proper concern for disease, but more so by obsessive tidiness." (I absolutely love this. I feel like I get stuck in this ridiculous concept sometimes, and how can you not when you consider places Target or Fred Meyers that exude clean, white. Do we not cringe when we see a dirty place, and think, I should not go there? Oh wait that is just me and my clean issues. I will take my own dirt, thank you very much.)
and also the section:
"Not only have we forgotten much of what our landscapes produced; we have never known the full range of possible crops."
"At least 30,000 plant species have edible plant parts."
"Today just 20 species provide 90% of the world's foods." "Pattern of underutilization"
This lesson comes again as I am told by the woman at the Farmers Market and Stacy, sure you can grow carrots in your ground. Throw them in and see what happens. :) Sure enough, they grow like crazy (based on my friends garden. I did not quite get them in the ground soon enough this year, but then again I think this is one of those that we can put in a summer crop. I may have to give this a try.
All in all it makes me realize how little I know about my area and growing and eating locally. Since reading the book in April and May, I have begun to very carefully look at eating from the land, cultivating and considering where my foods come from. Rich and I speak about trying 1 week of eating locally, lame I know. Alisa and James did a year. It seems that this is a large bridge to jump off of, though I am not sure why. I feel myself white knuckled holding onto the rope with this one, what is with my attachment to food soaked in oil? I live in a cabin in the woods with an out-house for heavens-sake.
As I read I marked several pages that I wanted to share and talk about.
The first section that kind of sucked me into the book was the May chapter. I had read it right at about the time that we had returned from visiting the Foshees and had gone to their farmers market. I had been contemplating much about being able to survive off the land and the 100 mile diet and think extensively about Cynthia's friend in McCarthy that lives mostly off the land (and Cynthia's amazing garden and all those other gardeners I know that garden and store for winter.) The sense of plentitude after having nothing when Alisa and James experience when entering the farmers market after running out of food was an experience I can vaguely relate to. I think often about what it would be like to "feel" like you do not have anything to eat. It reminded me also of the guy who took a month, I think, and lived off of food that was growing in the city: crab apples, weeds etc. It has forced me to look outside my door and realize how much there is to eat right outside my door. :) I could live without buying any food, and eat rather well!
Perhaps one of the things I love most about the book so far is that it has made me realize my relationship and perspective I have for food. It is very distant and non-existent. Yet, when I can or collect food, the relationship is much closer and understanding and dare I say, ethereal? I am afraid I have no other words to explain it. In terms of perspective, I had never made a clear connection about food in relation to the plants and what could or could not be eaten. For example, the radish. I grow radishes so I can eat the root. But when picking wild plants, you pick different parts of the plant (shoots, leaves, roots etc.) at different times of year and they produce different kinds of food. Yet, I dare not think about eating the leaves of the radish. Now having never had a connection to my food, one could understand why I did not make this connection. But for a farmer growing wheat, they would be looking at me like I was plain stupid. :) But this is precisely what I am saying, if the connection is not there, why would we have made it unless it was pointed out to us, or we began to wonder...
This connection was made from two sections in the book, the one where James discusses the history of why farms and chickens were moved out of the city:
"It was the bourgeois reform movement of the late nineteenth century that banished livestock to the countryside; the campaign had been motivated in part by a proper concern for disease, but more so by obsessive tidiness." (I absolutely love this. I feel like I get stuck in this ridiculous concept sometimes, and how can you not when you consider places Target or Fred Meyers that exude clean, white. Do we not cringe when we see a dirty place, and think, I should not go there? Oh wait that is just me and my clean issues. I will take my own dirt, thank you very much.)
and also the section:
"Not only have we forgotten much of what our landscapes produced; we have never known the full range of possible crops."
"At least 30,000 plant species have edible plant parts."
"Today just 20 species provide 90% of the world's foods." "Pattern of underutilization"
This lesson comes again as I am told by the woman at the Farmers Market and Stacy, sure you can grow carrots in your ground. Throw them in and see what happens. :) Sure enough, they grow like crazy (based on my friends garden. I did not quite get them in the ground soon enough this year, but then again I think this is one of those that we can put in a summer crop. I may have to give this a try.
All in all it makes me realize how little I know about my area and growing and eating locally. Since reading the book in April and May, I have begun to very carefully look at eating from the land, cultivating and considering where my foods come from. Rich and I speak about trying 1 week of eating locally, lame I know. Alisa and James did a year. It seems that this is a large bridge to jump off of, though I am not sure why. I feel myself white knuckled holding onto the rope with this one, what is with my attachment to food soaked in oil? I live in a cabin in the woods with an out-house for heavens-sake.
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