“But I can’t do that yet because . . . .”
”I am waiting for . . . . .”
”I can’t afford to buy that yet . . . . “
All of these are very valid, understandable excuses. Just because I understand it, doesn’t mean I am going to agree with you.
Over the years I have heard just about every angle from people who are desperately searching for something - information, support, money, resources, ingredients - you name it, they were searching for it, but what it all boils down to is what they were looking for is confidence.
We now have the first full adult generation ( don’t ask me for the descriptor ), who have never learned anything much in the home. Whether it is cooking, DIY, parenting, coping with finance and interacting with authorities. They haven’t stood beside someone and watched and skills were passed on. There doesn’t seem to be the old stalwart that our generation relied upon either - Evening Classes. After the annual Summer Holiday we all trouped off and signed up to learn Spanish or badminton, car maintenance or sewing for beginners. It was the Winter occupation. It is no-one’s fault - life is very different, two parents at work, single parent families, the kind of activities that I was brought up with, and almost everyone else I knew, just don’t happen currently.
That doesn’t mean that they cannot make a return. Not so much a municipal provison but maybe on a Community basis? Just people who know stuff showing other people who don’t, on a cost-sharing basis? I can never understand why people who have made something, especially if they have preserved something, issue photographs of their achievement with no qualifying offer of sharing. Not sharing the produce, but sharing the knowledge - and not just issuing the recipe but really sharing ‘how-tos’.
If you have put up photographs of your shiny shelves filled with jars of this and that then you could include a short video or a short series of photographs.
Throughout my teaching life I have advocated for at least one person per household being responsible for the nutrition of the rest of the people in that household. It doesn’t have to be the responsibility of an adult female, just someone who is able to give some of their time in the daily hustle of family life to making sure that ultra-processed food is not being relied upon for routine, regular nutrition. Someone to plan meals, organise shopping and supervise the cooking and the eating! Money will be saved, health will be better, learning will be easier and the building blocks for the next generation put into place.
Preserving your own food for a sustainable food bank right in your home is so ridiculously easy to achieve I get exasperated at the excuses. With the exception of pressure canning - see below - you will already have the utensils and equipment right there in your kitchen. I have a free to use recipe site, all links below, with a good cross section of recipes for all seasons of the year. This is unique as you are able to enter the amount of the main ingredient that you have and the recipe will rescale for you.
In addition, The Preserving School has around 150 videos in The Library, filmed in real, cook-along time. The all have downloadable recipes and most types of food preservation are covered. They are free to use as many times as you like, share with friends, and they incorporate many, many ideas for using in your everyday lives. You can use any pans that you currently have, regular utensils found in most kitchens, until you have a sense of the equipment that you might like to invest in.
Included in The Library are 22 pressure canning videos, from unboxing the unit, through simple initial processing, building a comprehensive store of canned ingredients that can be used in many ways to create everyday meals in minutes. I accept that a basic requirement is a pressure canner but again, get together with friends - it is not necessary for there to be a pressure canner in every home. I offer back-up via email, Live Chat, WhatsApp and Zoom and phone. I have written several recipe books which are all on the website.
As well as writing on Substack I publish a seasonal magazine five times a year which is available to read online and I am present on most of the social media platforms. My point being, short of coming into your home amd making these things for you I couldn’t have made myself or the subject more available - there has to be some effort on the other side. The more uncertain and unstable the world becomes the more it is important that you pay attention to your own welfare. As soon as I can find suitable premises I will return to teaching face to face again with the emphasis on the everyday value-for-money preserves to make the most of our natural resources.
It is also vital that as many people as possible return to domestic gardening not to emulate the Chelsea Flower Show but to grow as much of their own produce as possible. Start with a few pots of herbs by the back door, maybe 3 tomato plants in pots, or 3 runner beans in a big pot - once you have tasted produce like this you will begin to reject the bland, tastless ‘fresh’ fruit and vegetables transported from who knows where and kept for months in cold or gas storage. If we do not buy these offerings then they will become uneconomic for supermarkets to stock them. Think abour eating seasonally, ask at school for a list of menues and ingredients in the school dinners served to your children. The more natural food that they have the less they will search out unhealthy snacks and drinks.
Growing some of your own food has a knock-on effect - you won’t want to fly off to sunny climes for two weeks and come back to crops that have spoiled or been enjoyed by your neighbour who has dutifully been watering them. Think of the savings! Both to your budget and to the planet - and - no hours and hours of wasted time in airports, terrible food in flight, tummy bugs abroad or a myriad of problems that can beset the dream holiday.
What skills do you have? What stores do you have? Medications, candles, matches. Think about your daily life in detail, how would you manage, what could you do without, what would be essential. How will you ensure that this is possible? It is no good thinking anymore that these things won’t happen. Even if it is not from malicious intent but from severe weather events, accidental damage, episodes like the pandemic. We have experienced all of these things in the recent past yet we still revert to the life we had ‘before’.
No power from the grid equals no card payments, no electronic scanning and tills equals no food or fuel, transport or communications.
No power from the grid equals no heat, no cooking, no freezing, no hot water. What would you do? No, seriously, what would you do?
All of the things I describe in my various Substacks have come about in my lifetime. With the risk of sounding like my grandparents I can say, no-one went abroad for holidays when I was young unless they were film stars, no-one bought food in a supermarket as there weren’t any really until the late ‘60s and certainly not the super stores we have now. People bought clothes in specialist shops, not along with the ‘big-shop, strawberries were only available for around 6-8 weeks from early June when Wimbledon started and nobody had three weeks holiday over Christmas and New Year!
A great deal of this is, of course, the fault of my generation. The true emancipation of women, as far as it has been achieved, was not down to Emmeline Pankhurst but to the arrival of the birth control pill in the mid ‘60s. For the first time women could control; their lives without having to stay at home with the unavoidable consequence of marriage looking after a, sometimes quite large brood of children. They had freedom and choice and we chose a 13.6 cu.ft chest freezer. At weekends there would be trips to a farm shop to buy joints of meat and sausages and all sorts of baked goods would be made ‘for the freezer.’ We grew rows of runner beans, blanched and bagged for Winter use - except we tended to put lots of things into the freezer but were not quite so efficient at taking them out again and using them!
Another consequence of this was that our thoroughly modern homes did not accomodate the bottling and pickling and jam making that we had grown up with. We were too busy going out to work and shopping on our way home in the newly opened J Sainsbury - located on the High Street, no out of town with drive and park facilities. Laden with a couple of carrier bags we got the bus home to prepare and cook our convenient dinner in our convenient kitchen. Still no, what I would call, processed food - it was still recognisable regular food, just packaged semi-prepared - no outside leaves on the greens, no dirt on the potatoes. That kind of thing.
Life is very different now and we need to take account of the effect of ultra processed food and chemicals in household products which are a real and present danger - without all of the other threats! We would all be healthier and better off if we made some effort to save the knowledge from the past while there are still people around who remember it.
Back to the Future for sure.
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