Tuesday, June 18, 2024

What does food production in a dysfunctional country look like?

We don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Link (I skipped ahead to cut out 3 minutes of bread-making)

For instance, Lebanon has been a dysfunctional country for the last 30 years. The 2020s have not treated it well. An enormous explosion leveling much of the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020 kicked off the decade. Covid happened. The government gridlocked. The currency crashed. Fuel became unavailable.

Currently, the southern part of the country is getting pounded by the Israeli. No judgment. Just one more thing to make life of the little people harder.

People adapted. There are lessons that can be learned, pain that we can avoid if we are smart.

The link shown above is to a video of an extended family collecting and preserving food during the summer and early autumn. If time is tight, then scroll ahead to the 7:24 mark and watch five seconds.

I learn something new in most of these kinds of videos. In this one, the men are using poles to knock the ripe walnuts off the tree. I imagine this frustrates the squirrels and more walnuts end up in the store room.

I also see things that make me shudder. For instance, they are filling glass jars with hot, rendered tallow over the open container of tallow. If the jar breaks, then the tallow in the pot is contaminated with shards of broken glass.

Between this video and two other "Lebanon village life", I identified the following locally grown foods:

  • Tomatillo (!)
  • Figs (lots of figs)*
  • Apples
  • Jujubees (a guess based on shape and size)
  • Grapes
  • Citrus (lower elevations)
  • Walnuts
  • Wheat (shown as flour)
  • Pine nuts (cones for sale at a market)
  • Olives (lower elevations)
  • Peaches and Nectarines
  • Cucumbers
  • Tomatoes
  • Eggs
  • Mint (?)
  • Broccoli (chopped, salad with yogurt for dressing)

I get the sense that most village people don't try to grow EVERYTHING they can grow but focus on a portfolio of heavy-lifters that produce abundantly in their location and tag all of the nutritional bases. For example, even if it were possible to grow oil-palm, coconuts, avocado, olives, hazelnuts, walnuts and pecans at the same location it only makes sense to specialize in the one that grows/produces best and maybe have a few plants of a back-up species.

Lots of cats. Very, very few dogs. Chickens are fed kitchen waste as one last chance to glean a few more grams of protein and a few more calories out of food that would otherwise end up on the compost pile. 

---Added later---

Hose included for size reference

 

We picked our first Illinois Everbearing Mulberries yesterday. Quicksilver approved. I dug some new-potatoes today for one of Mrs ERJ's friends who is on a restricted diet. I wish she liked nettles, rabbit and raccoon meat. I could supply her with a LOT of that.

Canadian Thistle, Chicory and St John's Wort starting to bloom. 950 GDD b50.

*Figs: one of the remarkable things about figs is that once they start producing in the season they produce a steady supply of fruit until frost shuts them down. That means you can have fruit with every meal for 4-to-6 months without having to store it. When you have a super-abundance, it dries well in climates that are not humid. Figs are not a viable option in much of the US due to short summers, cold winters or excessive humidity. But they are rock-stars where they can be grown.

10 comments:

  1. What can be grown locally that keeps my family alive.

    A similar video could have been created from Vietnam when the communists were running it into the ground with socialism and collective farming. Food rationing of rice in a country that EXPORTED Rice during the Vietnam war..

    Total failure and loss of the Soviet Unions "support" allowed capitalism to make it a rich country again.

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  2. Figs were one of the great mainstays of the Ancient Mediterranean diet.

    Thanks for the video, ERJ. I will definitely give it a look.

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  3. During the Soviet Union food production was so irregular (distribution issues and foreign sales) that everybody that could had little family garden plots as well as off books agreements for raising food animals.

    This inefficiency actually saved a lot of the population of Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union.

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  4. Desert King figs seem well suited for the PNW climate.
    Also tomatillo grow very well even in cooler areas of that climate. They will grow where a tomato will ripen slowly, if at all.
    They also seem to be very bug resistant,with a sticky surface under the sheath- often one finds earwig excrement on that surface, but very rare to find anything burrowed into the fruit.
    IME, anyway.

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    Replies
    1. Mr Tumnus, I presume. Thanks for chiming in.

      I went on a fig kick a few years ago. After a year I decided that they were a lot of work to grow in Michigan.

      "Mt Etna" types (includes Chicago Hardy as well as a dozen other, very similar figs) seem to be the fig-of-choice in marginal areas.

      Violette de Bordeaux types seem to be popular where figs are easy to grow.

      In the deep-South, LSU releases seem to be popular due to splitting resistance.

      In rainy areas, some people really like Verdino del Nord.

      The best bet is to find somebody local who is passionate about figs and let them "force" you to taste-test examples from their collection.

      Delete
  5. I don't think any of the jars were filled to hot. They held them with bare hands when they were filling them.
    sam

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  6. During and after WWII my grandma would can in glass jars pork sausage. The pork was ground with sage and salt then cooked in a large pan rendering the fat. The jars were boiled in water to sterilize then quickly dried and filled with the sausage balls and then filled with rendered fat. The jars were stored in a cool caller and used over the next few months. It was not unusual for mold to grow on the surface of the fat. This was spooned off, the sausage was then reheated to be eaten.
    Ole Grump

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  7. Raccoon meat tastes like mild roast beef. Leave one foot on the skinned carcass so your prospective buyer can see you are not trying to sell a dog.
    I grew up eating delicious wild rabbit. Many decades later, I discovered the local Woodman's Food Mart carried rabbit from a local , um, rabbitry(?). I bought some, cooked it, and almost gagged trying to eat a fluffy bunny. Sigh. Wild = food. Fluffy = pet. I guess. Woodman's doesn't carry wabbit anymore.

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  8. Just had my first brown fig this morning, Yum ! Looks to be a good year.

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  9. As an Israeli, figs are indeed amazing and keep on giving in our climate. As for squirrels- I dont think there are any in Lebanon.

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