Yes, Reclaim Your Food Independence Today!
Over the last four decades, we as Americans have been conditioned to a point of haplessly giving away our Food Independence
How dare you say? Let me clarify… over the course of those decades, we have little by little stopped doing those things that kept us less reliant on the mass food distribution channels set up by the large food conglomerates. Houses got more technically convenient with microwave ovens over than over-the-fire cooking. House plots became smaller and smaller with no room to plant any garden that could feed a couple let alone a family.
When is the last time you heard of someone’s root cellar, a smokehouse, or dry goods storage efforts?
Who was the last person that you heard that was canning, preserving, or milling their own food in any way (beyond putting processed foods in a freezer)? “It’s been years!”, or, “my great aunt who’s still alive” are the common answers we hear to those types of questions
Growing fruits and vegetables, raising meat, hunting animals, fishing, and gathering wild berries and nuts for our family’s food consumption was a common practice, which for most nowadays haven’t a clue how to do much on that list. We have become too reliant upon what is at the local grocer, and if there is a lack of something on the shelf, or heaven forbid, there is a major disruption in the trucking of the goods there… people start to panic.
Back in the day, that just wasn’t so. If your local grocer didn’t have it, chances were that one could find it, or a close substitute for the food item in their own storage room. It took the whole family’s help to be that prepared, but they were independent producers of their family’s food. They decided what their family needed and set out about getting it. They raised animals; caring for their health and nutritional needs until that time that they were needed for a family feast. They grew and tended to plants, knowing, if treated correctly, they would produce food for their family and fodder for their animals. They made time to tend and take care of the food, and made themselves available for the prep, canning, and preserving that needed to be done in the family’s kitchen. They set aside days to hunt rabbits, deer, and other animals to provide meat for the family. They also set aside days throughout the seasons to gather herbs, berries, and nuts to supplement their meals.
They produced their own food because if they did not, they simply did not eat. If one happened to not provide for their family’s food, one was looked down upon as not being a good provider. Providing for your family’s needs is a source of pride and accomplishment. Today when I tell others that families worked together to grow and raise our food, I get strange looks and a lot of complaints that it would be too hard of work and too time-consuming. I am seen as an oddity. But, oh how wrong they are!
When you reclaim your food independence it can do so many things for you. It has given my family much better food quality than what I could afford at the market, a great source of exercise, extra money in my savings account, an appreciation of hard work, knowledge of skills that can be passed down to the next generation, and an appreciation of animal life and seasons.
Being an independent producer of our family’s food in today’s climate means we do not have to worry about food contamination of recalled meat and other food products. We do not have to worry about the high cost of beef at the supermarket. We do not have to worry about the scarcity of food on the shelves at the market in times of crisis. We do not have to worry about reading the country of origin labels and wonder if our food has been imported from other countries.
I say we all need to reclaim our food independence.
We can reclaim our food independence on a large scale, where we provide all the food our family needs to survive, or on a small scale, where we provide some of the food our family needs. We also need to teach each other, especially our families, about the honor and duty that we have in providing for our family’s nutritional needs. We need to bring back those practices that made eating in wintertime feasible and gained our confidence that no matter what happened, personal or societal financial woes, we were going to be able to eat well. We need to be proud that we provide for our family’s food and view it as an important skill to practice year in and year out.
I hope you are motivated into learning and remembering what it means to not have fear about what might be our next meal. Hopefully, you can get off your lazy toochus and start your own seedling shack and growing a garden or start an Aquaponics System indoors; where you can start a fruit orchard, keeping and caring for chickens and their eggs, raising pigs, slaughtering and butchering your own cows, preserving jam and jelly, canning fruits and vegetables, tending to your own honeybee hive, fishing, gathering edible foods and cooking food from scratch.
