Homesteading while sick and the 80-year food shortage
- Stephanie
- Nov 24, 2024
- 6 min read
A homestead, like a farm, is a living entity. It's not something you can just set aside when, approaching the best weather weekend of planting season, you get walloped by a brutal upper respiratory infection that leaves you hacking like an old coal miner whenever you move. No, I'm not grumpy. Not at all.
The bougainvillea is in bloom. That helps.
I started feeling something coming on Tuesday night. A couple of people in my office had been sick recently, so I knew right away that I must have caught it. Sneaky little microbes. Wednesday morning I was down for the count. Thursday was no better. By Friday I was over the lethargy and head-pounding, but I was into the "expelling" phase and considered it an act of kindness to end the week working from home.
The weekend was the low-humidity, not-hot, not-cold, sunshine-y kind of perfect that push those post-prime northerners to make their annual pilgrimage down I-75 in precariously large motorhomes. I had big plans for this epic weekend. I was finally going to plant my fruit trees and sow my corn, potatoes, garlic, beets, carrots, and if I still had time, pick up a stock tank to start my vermicompost system.
Instead, I sat around watching YouTube (living vicariously through other homesteaders), blowing my nose, and coughing my brains out. On Saturday I did feel well enough to carry the watering can down to my strawberry tower. I took advantage of the loss of my ability to smell and threw some fish emulsion into their water. When life gives you lemons...
I also took care of the chicks, of course. They really don't need much, and I like that I was forced to be outside at least for a few minutes. On Saturday they got their first taste of mealworms, which was the highlight of my day as much as theirs. I gave them a little tray of 6-7 mealworms so they would all be sure to get one. They were very hesitant and uncertain at first. Sybil (the Olive Egger) took the brave first bite and was subsequently chased all around the brooder by the other chicks. Once she was able to swallow her worm, another chick approached the tray, took a worm, and again, got chased. This process repeated itself until all the worms were gone, which took several minutes. It was hilarious to watch!
On Sunday, I took them another tray of mealworms, and this time there was very little hesitancy, but still a lot of chasing. It was so funny to see several chicks carrying worms running from each other. I take back what I said about the chicks being freeloaders - the entertainment value is next level!
Other than keeping my few crops and chicks alive, I pretty much stayed indoors. I did work a lot on my mealworm farm on Sunday, which I can do mostly sitting down. I think this is my first time mentioning this - yes, I have a mealworm farm! It's one of the "small livestock" options that I think is pretty great for a suburban homestead. It's got several benefits, but mainly, it produces undeniably delicious and nutritious treats for the chickens!
Before this weekend I had been feeling quite sad that the chicks seemed to be utterly terrified of me and didn't see me as a "friend". I figured it's probably a natural instinct when you're not much bigger than a chicken nugget and...taste like a chicken nugget...to be leery of, well everything, but still it hurt.
Enter the mealworms! When I approached them on Sunday with their second tray of these delicacies there was a noticeable difference in their demeanor and they actually ate them with me hovering very closely (to enjoy the show). I feel like I got the "oh, she's cool" head nod from a few of them. I'll take it!
I first started raising mealworms when I had chickens a few years ago and kept them going through my quail phase. Once you get the farm going it's [almost] free and limitless protein snacks for your birds as well as wild birds! With my first flock of chickens, I would bring out the mealworms in a little plastic cup and shake the mealworms making a loud rattle that the chickens soon learned. If any were staying out past curfew I could easily entice them to go to bed without having to play "catch the chicken".
I also collect the frass (fancy word for insect poop) to put in my gardens as a natural fertilizer, and the mealworms help me recycle my food scraps. They love carrots, potatoes, apples, cucumbers, jicama, sweet peppers, broccoli, and more! I'll have to make a separate blog post about my mealworm farm setup. I'm pretty proud of it!
In one of my first posts I mentioned that I have many reasons for homesteading and elaborated on one of them. I'd like to add another.
There are a lot of homesteaders who are the "doomsday prepper"-type and are worried about apocalyptic food shortages and therefore place a high value on self-reliance rather than relying on "the system". I'm all for preparedness, but I would like to be more prepared for common things like hurricanes (for my location) and getting sick before fixating on volcanos or solar flares (hope this ages well).
It would have been nice to have some canned or frozen homemade soup on hand when I came down with this sickness because I didn't have the energy to make it from scratch and had to get the factory-canned kind (not that good). When we had multiple hurricane scares this year, I was rushing around last minute to make chili (my go-to panic food) to have on hand for easy meals. It would have been nice to have this already made. That's the kind of preparedness that I think about.
Food shortage, though, is one of my primary reasons for homesteading. I'm not talking about empty shelves at the grocery store or Depression-era rationing. I'm talking about a real shortage of food that started about 80 years ago. Before the Green Revolution (1940s to 1960s), when agribusiness fully industrialized and monetized our sustenance, we modern humans ate hundreds more types and varieties of foods than we have access to today.
Yes, the Green Revolution made it possible to feed a lot of people and prevented famine, but an unintended (I hope) consequence was that it also transformed our food. Crops that were once grown and selected for flavor (which equates to nutrition) were instead selected for mass production, storage, and shipping. Pick any crop - from bananas to potatoes to tomatoes to corn to chicken - it's the same story.
All these low-flavor, mass-produced crops were eventually "enhanced" when scientists figured out how to create flavor in a lab. These fake flavors (whether "artificial" or "natural") confuse our bodies into thinking we're getting nutrition that we're not and cause a whole host of problems that we are just now beginning to understand.
One such problem is that fake flavorings make our bodies believe that our flavor-lacking foods are more nutritious than that actually are, but the biofeedback loop has a weak link. Our taste buds are telling us we're onto some healthy stuff (because it tastes good), so we eat more of it, but our bodies are not giving the feedback (fullness signal) that our nutritional needs have been met (because they haven't), so we keep eating more of the fake food. See where I'm going with this?
If you look at old (really old) cookbooks you'll see that recipes used to be a lot simpler with few ingredients. There was no shortage of herbs, spices, and tasty animal fats, but food just didn't need as much "help" because it was bred and cultivated to already taste good on its own. Chicken didn't need to be brined, marinated, injected, stuffed with herbs, and glazed in butter because chicken had a flavor of its own (unlike modern chicken, which some say tastes like nothing at all).
My point is that there is a giant shortage of these naturally-good foods at our grocery stores. Unless you have access to a local farmer who grows heirloom varieties, the only way to get these full-flavored and nutrition-dense foods is to grow them yourself.
People growing their own food 100+ years ago had no idea what "nutrition" was in the way we know it today. They just knew what tasted good. They saved seeds from their tastiest crops to plant again the following season, over and over and over and over. Little did they know that the plant chemicals that made their food taste delicious also contained the most nutrition. Knowledge about nutrition science did not become "necessary" until after the Green Revolution - after food had lost its flavor. Isn't that ironic?
We are now at a point in history where the jig is finally up. A lot of amazing and inspiring farmers, authors, food scientists, and activists are working hard to turn this food debacle around, but changes big enough to matter may be decades away. I'm rooting for them, but in the meantime, I'm taking matters into my own dirt-covered hands.
For some more reading on this topic...
Very informative!
First, you never told me you were sick! I hope you'll be over it soon! Second, you had me read "in Defense of Food" a few years ago. Excellent book. I should read it again. But not being a homesteader,I would not want to eat anything at all. I'm proud of you. Keep up the learning and implementing. And feel better!