War, Work, And Food

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For any regular readers of Raw Milk Mama, you know that food and farming are my first love and the main topic I write about here. But a close second is great literature. As my children were growing up, we read together a lot.

One of these books was a wonderful young adult historical fiction book, The War That Saved My Life. I highly recommend it, btw.

Predictably, it’s set during WWII.

It tells the stories of complex, fictional characters set in a realistic setting of the English countryside during WWII and asks some profound questions along the way. There are many teachable moments in this book for youth and adults alike.

It’s been a few years since I read it, so some of my minor details might be mixed up, but the overall scene is etched in my memory.

Here’s the scene: two extremely impoverished children from London are evacuated during WWII to the countryside.

Our hero–a preteen girl–befriends the young gentlelady about her age from the wealthy manor there. The war and all the rations, and the poor girl’s new arrangements have put them on much more similar grounds.

And then this happens...

The food rations during the war have required that all possible land at the manor be turned into growing space. (The UK did, in fact, encourage everyone with access to land to grow produce to help with the war efforts.)

So they grow potatoes.

Thousands of them. Enough to sustain their families through the extreme food rationing, and more to distribute. There’s a striking scene in the book where all able bodies must come and help with the potato harvest before the frost.

So we see the young ladies–one of which has barely known this kind of hard work–digging the potatoes out of the ground for hours.

Their hands are bleeding part way into it but they must continue digging. The adults around them know that this isn’t a matter of luxury or want, this is the food that will feed all of them through the coming winter. They dig on, long into the night by the light of the lanterns.

It’s a riveting scene in an extremely well-written book.

There are so many powerful lessons in this scene alone.

It speaks to the importance of food security, of hard work. It is about grit, determination, and discipline.

And, somewhere in there, is the subtle lesson that, in order for our children’s generation to have the knowledge and ability to grow their own food in emergencies, they have to know how. In fact, we have to teach them.

Transition to Modern America…

I was meeting a friend at a farm last summer and heard something striking.

This was, by any standards, a luxury farm–not a subsistence farm growing food.

It was a high-end winery growing their own grapes “more sustainably” and offering the full winery experience for locals with plenty of disposable income.

I asked a question about their grape harvest. One of the young farm hands gave me a look I couldn’t quite decipher and said sheepishly that they hired immigrant workers for that job.

“No Americans are willing to work that hard in this heat.” He said.

I almost laughed because I was there with a farmer friend and we both spent hours pulling weeds in her fields in the same brutal heat…

But, I also knew exactly what he’s talking about and what it means.

His response was a little too broad.

I might put it this way: anyone willing to work that hard for a harvest is, most likely, already a farmer, and already doing that hard work for themselves, possibly for little or no pay. Or, to put it a different way, most Americans are simply unwilling to do that hard work for someone else’s accumulation of vast wealth.

Do we, as a culture, have an issue with hard work and grit these days?

Maybe, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that.

So many of us don’t know how to do the things that could save our lives.

If we found ourselves in another war in the coming months, or other extreme situations (don’t tell me it’s highly unlikely), and we were suddenly facing rations a la WWII, would you be able to grow some food?

What would that learning curve look like?

How resilient could you be in the face of adversity? Who would you turn to for knowledge of how to do these things? How many mistakes could you afford?

Look, I’m an apocaloptimist. (That’s someone who believes the future can be good if certain threats are avoided and focuses on solutions to environmental issues rather than doom and gloom.)

So, no, I don’t think we’re all doomed.

But what will it take to inspire us to prepare so we don’t get doomed?

Preparation looks different for each of us.

But, frankly, I’d rather have bloody hands from digging up thousands of potatoes before the winter frost, than an empty belly and nowhere to get food.

The past couple of weeks have been a shock for many, including our farmers.

Egg shortages, spending freezes on farms, massive instability for federal workers…. Many people are near panic. I understand that. Yet some economists might explain it that a false economy must fail in order for the real economy to come back to center.

I’m not an economist and won’t be able to cover more than a couple of points. I’m writing about my observations in the food system and conclusions based on these observations. I don’t intend to tackle this issue comprehensively. (For a broader economic perspective, I highly recommend Brett Scott’s writing on

Altered States of Monetary Consciousness

.)

Before panicking about missing eggs, or what’s happening with the farmers who are not getting the money promised to them, let’s put some things into perspective. The spending freezes alone doesn’t mean that we’re headed towards starvation. There are many factors converging that will lead to famine and/or food shortages as I wrote about last week. It’s not just the spending freeze or the potential implications of the tariffs.

Right now, the food supply chain is not a chain. It's a twisted Gordian knot of complex ties, relationships, and policy that’s so convoluted I’m not sure anyone actually understands it.

But this does not mean we are powerless. In fact, I believe the opposite is true.

I believe we are the antidote to the crisis.

Here are the 3 main ways we can have immediate impact:

1. Produce/grow any of your own food. Literally anything. Yes, it takes work and it takes time.

2. Change your ideology and priorities. Chickens in people’s backyards? Fine. Cows and goats in common areas? Great! Rezoning residential to multi-use agriculture land? Perfect! Our mindsets and ideologies must change if we are going to use our land to produce food where we live, work, and play.

3. Change policy on the state level. Okay, I’ll admit something here: I’ve always been a 10th Amendment girl. As soon as I understood the beautiful simplicity in the 10th amendment, I was 100% on board. Not only does it make total sense to give states and individuals powers not relegated to the federal government via the Constitution, it’s so much more likely that we can make significant policy changes on the state level.

So there ya go! I am planting a seed. If you don’t want to be stuck digging up potatoes until your hands bleed, plant some food, and work to change policy. And change your mind about where livestock “belongs.” They belong in our neighborhoods and everywhere else that forage grows.

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