Good Monday morning C99ers! I hope y'all had a nice weekend. Today we jump into Chapter Two in the Resilience Series: “The Permaculture Kitchen Handbook”. Last week you were given the assignment of starting a Food Journal and keeping it for a whole year to determine what you and your family truly eats in a year. This week we will explore a few more things to think about and to do over the coming year in an effort to get you to think about your eating habits, and perhaps change the way you view the food you put on the table.

You will be able to find links to all of the chapters to this series in the Resilience Resource Library.

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Chapter Two

Step Two - Realize that this is more than just remodelling a kitchen, this a lifestyle change.

You need to work on redesigning yourself so you can use that kitchen once it's built. And sorry, but no cheating and getting ahead and building this kitchen before you're ready for it. If you do that you might discover that it won't work for you because it doesn't suit your needs and your lifestyle, and you'll have to start all over again. So, to prepare yourself for using this new kitchen, here are a few things you can do at the same time as you are keeping your food diary:

Consider food. Good food is the central part of a Resilient Permaculture Kitchen. Most North Americans eat a very limited diet. This may vary a bit from region to region, and if you tend to eat out frequently, your diet is even more restricted. Allergies and food sensitivities will alter that diet. If you've already made a start towards eating healthier, you may have a slightly longer list of foods, but for the most part, the typical North American diet looks like the list below, leaning heavily on prepared foods fortified with vitamins:

• Wheat
• Soy
• High fructose corn syrup
• Partially hydrogenated fats
• Preservatives
• Hamburgers
• Pizza
• Steak and potatoes
• Chicken and dumplings
• Potato chips
• Snack crackers
• Store bought cookies
• Instant soups
• Instant puddings
• Canned soup
• Frozen dinners

And take out…lots and lots of take out.

Don't try them in mixes or in pre-packaged prepared foods. Try them as fresh as possible. Expand your meat choices with different types of fish, buffalo, venison, ostrich, quail, partridge, bear, elk, or whatever is local to your area. You may find that you live in a part of the country where all of the meats (but not the fish) are raised locally and you can buy them direct from the ranchers.

Try arugula, rutabagas, turnips, kohlrabi, celeriac, fresh beets (surprisingly yummier than the canned variety), chard, fennel, mustard greens, turnip greens, poke salad, fiddleheads, whatever pops up in the farmer's market or the local produce section of your store.

Check out the local ethnic markets, too. You might be pleasantly surprised that some of your favorite foods are locally grown or made. Check them out. Make it an adventure, a reward for a job well done. Talk to the farmers at the farmer's market, too. They'll happily explain what that weird root is and how to use it, and you'll walk away with a notebook full of recipes and a list of other farmers who grow different things. This can take time, but you'll add the foods that become your new favorites to your food diary, so it's actually a way to help you with that, too.

Step Three - Learn new cooking and food preservation techniques

You have 12 months. In that time, you can learn 12 new techniques without stressing yourself out or disrupting your regular lifestyle.

If you haven't already learned to can jams, jellies, vegetables, fruits, soups, and such, now is a good time. A small amount of time invested periodically with small batch canning will reward you big time with good food throughout the year. This project will depend upon you knowing the basics of canning. Small batch canning is possible for even an apartment sized kitchen.

Another technique is brining and pickling. Brining allows you to preserve foods without refrigeration. It also does amazingly wonderful things to some foods when you brine them before cooking. Classic German sauerbraten is a pickling technique for beef, and what it does for beef, brining does for poultry.

Fermentation is also something to explore. Not just brewing, although that's a lot of fun. Think sourdough and sauerkraut. Fermentation is advanced pickling. Bread baking is also a type of fermentation, raising, and then killing the yeast at just the right time to get scrumptious baked goods. Cheese making is also a type of fermentation, along with cider making, vinegar and buttermilk, chocolate, coffee, black teas, and yogurt.

There's also the mixing and blending of your own condiments. Gourmet mustards, ketchups that aren't full of salt and corn syrup and artificial coloring. It can be fun to mix up your own salad dressings, and you may never go back to Kraft bottled dressings again. Many dressings and sauces are quick and easy to make in small batches - enough for a meal or two. And don't forget, you can always can them in the small half pint mason jars.

Another very important cooking technique to master is mise en place - "to put in place". When you go to prepare a meal, before you cook it, consider all the steps and ingredients you'll need and have them ready before you begin cooking. This will reduce cooking times considerably, and all the preplanning can be done in spare moments throughout the day - or even planned out days or weeks in advance. The best time to do this is before you go shopping. Perhaps even before planting your gardens. There's no sense growing foods you or your family won't eat. It's silly and wasteful to snap up a bushel of plums if no one in your family likes prunes, plum butter, plum jelly, dried plums, canned plums, or stewed plums, no matter how cheap they are.

When you get ready to cook, make sure all your ingredients are ready for you - washed, chopped, sliced, diced, separated out and waiting. You can do this a day or two before (no more if you want the food fresh and safe). Setting out meat to thaw before you need to cook it is also a part of this mind set. And it IS a mind-set more than it is anything else. It's "cooking in the zone"; where you can simultaneously keep the various tasks of cooking in mind in order and weigh and assign each part of the meal preparation process its own priority. This speeds up the cooking process much more than the average person realizes.

During your learning process for this, see if you can visit a restaurant that has open kitchen and observation counter so you can watch as these chefs prepare and send out hundreds of appetizers, entrees, and desserts in a single evening. Hell's Kitchen has nothing on these professionals. Watch what they do and how they think, and then think about how you can translate this to your own kitchen.

Step 4 - Eating Locally and/or Domestically

Becoming a locavore or a domevore (eating domestically) is becoming more and more important as each day passes. The need to know where our food is sourced, where it came from, who grew it, who handled it, and how it arrived where you could buy it, is a critical survival skill.

Melamine contaminated feed, E. coli contaminations, salmonella outbreaks, Listeria, prion diseases (Mad Cow), GMO, and growth hormones - these are the situations we face at the supermarket. Everyday there is another recall story on the news.

No matter how responsible the stores try to be, these things creep through. Most originate in factories where foods from many venues are mixed together and a small contamination becomes a huge one. Even the best food factories are plagued with bacterial infestations. No matter how clean and sterile they get the equipment, it only takes one small batch of contaminated food to damage the rest.

Think about the old saying; “One rotten apple spoils the whole barrel.” So much food gets wasted when it has to be transported to the mass-production food factories - from spoilage during transportation to resistant E. coli contamination (if caught before it's sold). Let just a minute amount of food be caught in an inaccessible gear or in a rivet or tight corner, and it can provide contamination for months. 76 million Americans and 11 million Canadians get sick from bad food each year no matter how responsibly they try to eat. It is a massive problem.

The earth is fertile enough to feed all the people currently living on it, and fertile enough to feed twice this number. The way we manage it is bad, though - wasting food, contaminating food, picking food before it's ripe to transport it thousands of miles away to big processing plants, making food expensive.

We've become acclimated to getting fresh tomatoes in January and strawberries in December, to having exotic fruits like bananas, papayas, and avocados available every day. We expect to see fresh asparagus in the produce section year round, along with lettuce, radishes, celery, and fresh herbs.

There are ways to change this destructive food pattern. They aren't expensive or time-consuming and practically everyone who wants to can participate to their benefit. We don't even have to give up our coffee and tea and fresh year round tomatoes to do this.

It will mean changing our shopping habits and our perception of what constitutes food. It will mean re-thinking what convenience foods are. It will mean enjoying a more flavorful and healthy diet. It will mean big food manufacturers must adapt or go out of business.

How will we have our food and eat it too?

Here, we get into some fantasies, some maybes, but honestly, if we worked at it, everything below is possible, achievable, and even affordable, no matter how fantastic it may sound.

We become locavores and domevores - the bulk of our food will be local or domestic, bought from CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) or farmer's markets or local buying coops. When we buy imported foods and spices, they will come to us through Fair Trade arrangements that improve lives across the world. Fair Trade groups can be found at UU and some Mennonite congregations, as well as stand alone stores.

CSAs are growing up and becoming more versatile for the consumer. They offer the traditional share, whereby the customer pays an annual sum to support the farmer, collects a basket of the harvest each week during the growing season and spends a couple of hours a week working at the farm year round. CSAs now offer the basket share alone with no farm work expected, and they offer farm debit cards, where the customer loads a card with a pre-set amount, then shops at a farmer's market type set-up to pick and choose the produce they want until they spend their debit card out - as opposed to taking the potluck of the share baskets.

These CSAs are also beginning to offer preserved harvests - canned and frozen goods, grains (whole and ground), and even meat from free-range, organically fed animals and eggs from free-range chickens, ducks, and geese. This isn't fantasy; this is real and available in some areas now. Now is the time to get used to stocking our pantries in this way because in the coming years, between peak oil/energy resources and climate change, other than growing our own food, this will become the norm in the coming years.
 
Local buying co-ops offer locally grown produce and meats, and products made by local people from local materials. You can place an order online once a month and pick it up at a convenient location a week later - already bagged. If you pay for it via PayPal (and many are set up for this), then all you have to do is dash in and pick up your order once a week or once a month - and pick-up sites are often conveniently located.

Farmer's markets have changed too. Many large companies are now setting up an area for a farmer's market inside their office complexes so their employees need only go to the lobby to shop on their lunch hour or on their way home after work. Some farmer's markets are now setting up in central downtown locations one day a week so downtown employees can take advantage of shopping there on their lunch hour. They are still open in their traditional locations on weekends. This gives many people the ability to shop locally and conveniently.

Even grocery stores are beginning to see the advantage of buying locally grown produce, either organic or conventionally grown. Shoppers are asking for better quality food at lower prices, and food grown in the US, China, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, Thailand, or Brazil travels a long, expensive way with the quality of the food deteriorating all along the route. The days of the 3,000 mile salad are dwindling.

As we have discussed, contamination is always a concern - the longer the food travels, the more opportunities there are for spoilage and contamination. With the price of gasoline fluctuating so much, the less distance the food travels, the less expensive it is - and the fresher it is. A lot of food is cheaper on the coasts than in landlocked states because sea transport is cheaper than trucking.

Food that is grown, harvested, and transported less than a few hundred miles is fresher, tastier, and less likely to be cross-contaminated with other foods. Food that is canned or frozen or butchered in smaller facilities enjoys a lower cross-contamination rate. And nothing beats the freshness of walking out to your own garden and eating what you pick fresh that day. However, not everyone has a green thumb when it comes to growing food, which is why we have the alternatives of CSAs, farmer's markets, food co-ops, and even the local and organic options of some grocery stores.

We also have the option of supporting neighbors who do have green thumbs. We can petition our city governments to ease the regulations and laws which restrict and, in some cases, prevent urban food gardens from flourishing. We can organize community gardens in our neighborhoods and share in the harvest. Cities can set aside public lands for food production, allotting each household a plot. This is a successful program in some European countries.

Schools can use part of their grounds as school gardens the students help maintain - and they can eat their harvest in the cafeteria - from public grade schools to universities and vocational schools. And think of the learning opportunities students would have from science to economics all of the while growing and consuming healthy food. If we all get in the habit of growing and harvesting our food locally - at school, at work, in the dorms, at home - then we will have better food, healthier bodies, and brighter minds.

Businesses can encourage hydroponic food gardening indoors and landscape with edibles which their employees can harvest and/or enjoy in the company cafeteria. We should insist that a large portion of public landscaping be devoted to edible landscaping. Rooftop gardens should become the norm in cities - from edible gardens on the tops of office buildings to high rise apartment complexes and hotels.

Cities have favorable microclimates that can result in longer growing seasons. The south sides of buildings protect from cold north winds, overhangs shelter tender plants from hail and heavy rains, and in the south, from the hottest summer sun. At the same time, the heat stored in the buildings allows earlier planting in spring and later harvests in fall. The companies that care for the tropical plants in the indoor atriums, lobbies, and office buildings can just as easily care for vegetable gardens and dwarf fruit trees. The natural lighting that is good for plants is good for people, reducing SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and increasing health and productivity - a bonus for everyone. Apartment complexes might consider encouraging their tenants to make use of the grounds with edible gardens and to plant fruit and nut trees.

It will take a new look at how we live. It will alter some of the fundamentals of our lives, and yet, we'll still have plenty of time to watch movies, play games, cruise the internet, visit with friends, and of course, work. Our cities can be lush with food. No one will ever have to go hungry if there's food for the plucking practically everywhere.

Agriculture can move from the countryside to the city with high rise hydroponic farms that use solar energy and city greywater to grow the extra food the city needs. We could still enjoy tomatoes in February and asparagus in September and strawberries in December - but they'd be locally grown tucked around our cities and in the farm towers.

There are plans for these farm towers and they look very good from an ecological and sustainability point of view. These towers could have floors with tanks for growing fish, and chickens could run free on other floors. There could even be beehives in the towers to help naturally pollinize the plants and to produce honey and beeswax and more. Exotic foods can be grown in climate controlled environments augmented by natural sunlight and soil so we needn't depend on vast supply lines to bring them to us - we could probably walk to the nearest farm tower and buy them right there in the tower's farmer's market, where it need travel no more than 30 stories to get there. It would take 150 such towers, 30 stories tall, to feed all the inhabitants of New York City (8.406 million – not counting the homeless) if we depended upon the towers alone. With widespread urban gardening - rooftops, atriums, lobbies, courtyards, school grounds, balconies, curbsides and medians, and abandoned lots inside the cities, and allotted garden plots like a moat around the cities - that could be reduced to less than 100 such towers.

By 2030, some people predict 87% of North Americans will live in cities, making it imperative that we also grow food in the cities. It is widely thought that the 13% of Americans still living in the countryside and wilderness areas in 2030 won't be able to grow enough food enough to safely feed that 87% living and working in cities. We need to start planning now how we will eat in 20 years.

Monsanto's answer of patented genes and terminator technology limiting people's access to food is not the way we need to go, not if we want to eat in 30 or 40 years. We need more food diversity and open farming, not the restrictive farming practices advocated by such companies as Monsanto. In today’s slang we are calling the foods produced by Monsanto and other biochemical companies “Frankenfood”. Like Dr. Frankenstein, they are creating things that they cannot control.

With urban gardens common and accessible to people, one can see a wide variety of new jobs directly relating to these urban farms. There are already companies that contract to care for interior gardens in office lobbies and atriums, they could just as well care for tomato plants as they do Peace Lilies or Snake Plants. They could expand their business to harvest the food and set it up for sale in tiny farmer's markets in the lobby of the building. There will be businesses devoted to trading foods between the buildings, and we'd need rickshaw or bicycle wagon couriers to run the food around. There'll be more street food vendors around cooking ad selling the city harvests. There will be businesses specializing in urban composting and greywater recovery. We'll develop neighborhood specialties in restaurants. And as people begin to talk about the great cabbage rolls they got at the little diner on the corner, or the fantastic homemade pasta sauce on freshly made noodles being sold in the restaurant inside the bank building, few will opt for a Big Mac.

Rather than plucking their own, a lot of people will still buy them, already bagged up and waiting for them, from street kiosks. It will be faster and fresher than traveling to a Big Box store and wandering down miles of aisles just to grab some apples and potatoes. For some people, convenience is worth the price they pay. They aren't looking for value for their dollars so much as they're using their dollars to buy value.

We'll still import some foods - spices, coffee, tea, chocolate - because people will find life rather dull living without them, but they will insist they be responsibly produced - no child labor, fair wages, good working conditions. Yes, the price will be higher, but it will be expected and will lead to a better and stronger world economy. In bringing ourselves up to a better level, we should also be bringing other countries up, too. Cultural diversity will still exist, may even flourish as people invest in their countries because the funds flow freely around the world.

If the population forecasters are right, we've got 20 years to do this - a single generation that we need to start raising to be locavores. Starting the gardens and getting the food growing won't take near as long as acclimating the people to doing things this way. We have to start them young: in the home and neighborhood gardens, the schoolyard gardens, and the office gardens.

End Chapter 2