My garden is at its peak and in a few weeks I’ll be selling the majority of my year’s calves and several surplus kids. (Real kids, baby goats) The hay is put up for Winter and I’m set for the rains to return to my pastures and fields.

A couple of books I’m reading are appropriate for this conversation: “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” has a lot to say about exposing our current food systems, particularly as they relate to Big Corn. I’m also reading “War Time Meals”, a WWII era cookbook that discusses the difficulties of making do in times of rationing and scarcity.

This is an auspicious time of year to consider our food supply and give thanks.

Oh, and thanks to you, Lupa, for the grapes. I’m still enjoying them!

I’ve been starting to think about how I live recently, and the choices I make, most pressingly in regards to food. I still live with my parents, but I would like to eat better than I am at the moment and I think learning how to grow food would be an excellent thing to do at some stage.

I don’t always consciously think of the full process, but the idea of it, and of all those involved in modern American food service, is there.

syncreticmystic–Glad you enjoyed it

Paleo–Oooh, I keep meaning to read that! It’s on my to-get list. And the sauce was phenomenal! Not quite so salty, and much tastier.

Being the child of an enlisted man in the 60s was a great way to starve. It still is — did you know that a lot of enlisted qualify for food stamps? Mom worked as a maid through a good deal of my childhood, and took other jobs as well. She also didn’t eat some days because she only had enough for me and my brother. I don’t recall ever missing a meal as a child, and I never knew until this past year that mom had, but I did realize much later that we really didn’t have that much. Mom was never a great cook, but she did her best. If all we had was a couple of slices of wonder bread and some sugar in our milk for breakfast, that was usually because that was all that we had in the house.

My grandfather was a subsistence farmer by nature. On the family’s almost ten acres, he had about a third of that dedicated to everything from sunflowers to hubbard squash. Some of it he sold, but most of it got canned or frozen or turned into jam or jelly by my grandmother. Other things got stored in a somewhat inadequate cold cellar through the winter until it started to go off, and we still had to eat it because that’s what we had. The animals he trapped so he could sell the furs got cooked and eaten. Mom joined a co-op in the 70s so that we could get things like oranges less expensively. Hamburger Helper lasagne was a treat because I’d never actually had the real thing.

All of this makes me greatly appreciate what I have available. I may perhaps be more conscious of it than even a lot of people my own age due to my past, but I love variety. I love that I don’t have to eat potatoes every day even though I hate them and they’ve gone squishy and have grown two-foot long eyes.

There’s a lot wrong with agriculture these days. There’s an incredible amount wrong with factory farming and slaughterhouses and feedlots and the misery and suffering, both animal and human, that goes into what we eat. And yet there are things we can do, even if they’re small. What you’re doing and learning and sharing with other people makes a difference. Every single positive thing anyone does helps, even when it doesn’t seem like it. It may not be enough to tilt the balance before we suffer a horrific human disaster that reduces our population to something sustainable, but it still helps.

Hold on to that.