Duck and Hubbard; Let's Hear It for Latvian Rye

[jonsinger]

A while ago I bought a small Hubbard squash. With Hubbards (and various other kinds of winter squash, if I understand that term correctly) “small” is a relative term. This particular critter probably weighed less than 10 lbs, so it really was quite modest, as such things go.

Comments

[oakmouse]

A druid friend of mine who is sick of being told that as a druid she ought to be enough of an environmentalist to eat a strictly local diet has posted a couple of entertaining and informative public explosions to the effect that for most Americans, a locavore diet also means a very restricted diet. In her case, too restricted a diet for health; she would miss several major nutrients and a couple of entire food groups.

If we only ate locally produced foods, we'd be limited to chicken, some beef, some pork, apples, pears, peaches, green beans, butter beans, zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and the produce from our own garden --- and our diet would only be that varied for six months of the year, when fresh produce is in season around here. No grains, no dry beans, no sweet potatoes or yams, no turkey, no seafood, no berries; and no root veggies, brassicaceae, or greens except our own. This just isn't a big or varied agricultural region, yanno?

In short, very much with you on the idea that the locavore diet plan has some huge, huge flaws and just isn't practicable for a wide range of reasons. Our specific reasons are different from yours, but hey, same conclusion.

[jonsinger]

Uhh, told more than once that she "ought to be" "enough of an environmentalist to eat a locavore diet"? Gaaahhhghhhh!! Sounds to me like some yutzes need to be clue-sticked firmly enough that they begin to engage the thought process. Not that it tends to work with dedicated yutzes. (Helps a whole lot if the person[s] being cluesticked actually want to get their consciousness[es] raised, eh?)

On to details:

No dry beans? Don't we have a long enough growing season for those? I mean, Tom Jefferson grew "Max J. Runnerbean" [obscure Harlan Ellison reference] ...uhh, scarlet runner beans.

No yams? I could have sworn that there are a few species of weirdo yam or similar root-veg that are hardy as little rocks... Also, if people in places like Nebraska could grow parsnips and turnips and the like, and hang onto some in root-cellars through the winter, would that not also be possible around here? (...Or am I missing something? I mean, people in the Midwest did have root-cellars and did grow root-veggies, no?)

Maple Lawn Farms (a little west of Laurel) grows nice organic turkeys, and I've actually seen a wild turkey or two along one of the roads in this area, though I will grant that any yutz who can't or won't engage the thought process is unlikely to catch any of those. (I've heard a story about a wild turkey pecking the butt of a guy with a shotgun who thought he was hunting them. He couldn't even turn around to do anything, because the bird was too close to him. I think he may also have been inside a blind that was small enough that he didn't have enough room to turn. Bwah-ha-ha-ha. There's a reason why Ben Franklin thought the wild turkey should be our National bird. Franklin may have been something of a maniac [see history, including snide references to "the father of our country"], but he was not stupid.)

But, so, anyway, yes: being fully locavoracious (is that a word?) is clearly not practicable for the vast majority of folks in this country today, which brings up the obvious question: if you read Charles C. Mann's "1491" you find pretty good reason to believe that the east coast locals, up until the Europeans showed up, were a whole lot healthier than the Europeans were, but they sure as hell didn't have supermarkets where they could buy Venezuelan apples or Chilean quinces or nice fresh Napa & Gai Lan or lovely bottle-grown Maitake [etc.] in the middle of the winter! Were they locavores, and simply sufficiently expert at it to manage; or did they trade for some of the things they ate (dried beans, frex); or ...?

[oakmouse]

Ah, I see you haven't encountered the popular pagan sport of back-stabbing one-upmanship coupled with a lust for unearned power. I love druidry dearly but it's not exempt from that insidious pastime. There are fewer druids who are ready to try to publically humiliate and guilt-trip people who don't follow their prescriptions for What All Druids Should Do than there are generic pagans who try that game on All Pagans Everywhere, but nonetheless it does happen in druid circles too. Yes, she's been told several times that she's Not A Real Druid because she doesn't take the environmental steps that her critics insist All Druids Should Do If They Want To Call Themselves Druids In Front Of Me.

Yeah, it gets interesting sometimes. Just as now there's a big blowup brewing in the pagan blogosphere because an Academic Pagan With A PhD insists that the pillars of pagan values are A, B, and C, B being social justice activism and C being environmental activism (can't recall what she chose for A), and a whole lot of pagans are saying, umm, no, those are not the core values of the paganism I practice, thankyouverymuch. This kind of crap is why I avoid the pagan blogosphere. (I got linked to the current imbroglio.)

With regard to a locavore diet, I should probably clarify that I wasn't talking about what CAN be grown locally, I was talking about what IS grown locally. Our back yard may be all garden, but it's not big enough to produce all of our veggies for an entire year, so to follow the 100-mile locavore diet we'd have to stick to what local farmers grow for market plus what we can grow. So yes, although it's possible to grow dry beans, sweet potatoes, root veggies, etc, and we've grown all of those except sweet potatoes, local farmers don't grow those for sale at the farmer's markets here.

I'm sure that Native peoples traded for food long before the white folks hit America; native peoples all over the globe have historically traded for food and other desirable commodities, sometimes across thousands of miles, so why not this bunch too?