Voting myself off the island

When I started this blog, I had my mind set on near-100% self-reliance on the purist of levels. I am really good at one thing - convincing myself that I can do nearly impossible (or actually impossible) things. It's a gift.

It's not that I worry about losing access to resources as much as I feel driven to rebel against this modern system of quantity over quality with "quality" being convincingly but dishonestly [often unhealthily] synthesized. I just want to, in the words of Joel Salatin, "opt out".

Then, at the peak of my determination to really "do" this thing, I was knocked out of commission for over a week with a bad cold or flu. This was prime planting time for my area, and I had huge plans for Thanksgiving break to finally get my plants and seeds in the ground. The whole break was just lying around being sick. We even missed Thanksgiving dinner, which was a bummer.

After Thanksgiving, I got off my death bed and decided to try to create my own cooking oil, which isn't easy to do on a small homestead. Oils usually require a large amount of crops or animals. I found it in my avocado tree. I harvested over 50 lbs of fruit and spent every day for over a week mashing and dehydrating until I had several gallons of dehydrated avocado flesh, which I then pressed in a stainless steel contraption I found online used for pressing fruits and honeycomb. For all of my efforts, I got 8 oz of oil. This was all new to me, so I didn't know what to expect, but I hoped to have a year's worth of oil for all the work it took.

After the avocado project, I launched myself into dairy - buying raw milk from a local farmer to make my own butter, cheeses, yogurts, etc. Like the avocado project, it took up the majority of my "after work" time. The yogurt was pretty good, but had a weird film on top. The cheeses I made were intriguing but mostly flavorless (I really didn't know what I was doing). And my cultured butter experiment was a total bust. Making cheese feels like potion-making in Snape's dungeon, and I'm afraid I'm more of a Neville than a Half-Blood Prince.

All that to say, I quickly realized that I can't do it all, and I'm not meant to. Few humans have ever thrived in isolation. We are a social, altruistic, communal species - all contributing to the colony so that everyone can eat and be happy without going insane. My version of homesteading like a pilgrim while working like a modern American semi-workaholic is a guaranteed path to psychopathy.

For the first time in 6 years, I actually stopped writing in my daily log book for almost all of December. I think I was going through some sort of personal existential crisis, and all of my mental bandwidth was occupied with figuring this out. I always assumed self-reliance was the way to opt out of the system that I've come to distrust, but when I finally made up my mind to fully commit to it, I was hit with this epiphany that it's definitely not the way - at least not for me.

I realized that complete self-reliance and total industrial dependence are not the only two choices. I must have already known this and simply forgot, but there exists a third sector - a thriving industry of local and artisanal food. It gets a somewhat bad rap as being food for snobs and over-the-top foodies, but I starting seeing it as the compromise I had been looking for. When I acknowledged that humans were meant to live communally - this is what it looks like. Both self-reliance and industrial-reliance lack this sense.

What's amazing to me is that even though I started out trying to be as self-reliant as possible, I was still coming at it with the hope of inspiring others to do the same, which is one reason I started this blog. The need for connection with others is in our DNA - even for extreme introverts like myself.

One of the things I got into in my short-lived homesteading craze was finally learning how to bake sourdough bread. I don't think I ever had real sourdough before making it myself. My motivation was to be able to bake yeasted breads without having to rely on purchasing yeast from the store - one more thing to "do myself". Amazingly, this is the one thing that I got right. My first loaf wasn't perfect, but it was edible and delicious, and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process.

Once I caught the sourdough "bug" I was all over YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, etc. trying to figure out all of these new concepts like hydration, bulk fermentation, cold proofing, and autolyzing. At first it was quite overwhelming, but I was spurred to continue after a couple of good experiments. It was in one of my YouTube forays when I came across someone's "micro bakery" vlog.

I had no idea that people were making bread for people from their own kitchens - that it was even a "thing"! That's when something finally clicked for me. Instead of trying to be mediocre or just slightly above failing at everything as some sort of self-flagellating rebel, I could be good at one thing and make that my contribution to society. If I could make delicious and nutritious 4-ingredient bread for my community that would be one tiny, but existent, ding in the armor of industrial food.

I started day-dreaming about the stories my mother-in-law has shared about growing up in France decades ago - how she would walk with her parents to the local baker, butcher, and produce stands every day enjoying the freshest food anyone could hope for. It's just the way everyone ate back then. Ultra-fresh, non-processed, used to just be called "food" - now it has to be distinguished as "fancy" and "artisanal". I don't expect a micro bakery to turn my town into Paris, but it feels like a positive move - a move back toward community and real food.

I am fully aware of my reputation in my family of being susceptible to an overabundance of zeal, but this time feels different. I feel like I've finally pin-pointed exactly what I should be doing. I made up my mind in one day of discovering the existence of "micro bakeries" that I would have to start one of my own.

From that point on I finally let go of the notion that I should have to do "everything". I do plan to keep gardening and raising chickens, but not with the fervor of a life or death situation. Instead, I can enthusiastically enjoy supporting my local cheesemakers and beekeepers. I can purchase things from afar from sources that haven't lost their sense of altruism. And if I must rely on industrial food at times (hard to avoid really), I will find comfort in the positive actions I'm taking simultaneously.

I created this blog as a way of fostering connection from a self-imposed island but came to realize living on an island is no fun and would probably lead to premature death. This will be my final post. I will go back to my daily log book and will pour my creativity at my new endeavor, which has already been one of the most satisfying things I've worked on.

To all 3 or 4 of my readers, thank you for going on this journey with me. My store-bought yogurt lid today said "Say 'oui' to taking chances". Oui!!