Food Prices Increase - And the Recession is Coming…
When we see news articles about international food prices going up and bread riots happening in Egypt, Mexico and other places around the world, we hope it never happens here. But of course, with the recession looming, it could.
Prices are already up for food in the US, although most people can still afford their daily rations. Some of the items that have gone up the most, like meat and milk, were already beyond the reach of some of America’s poor.
So what’s the deal? Most food price increases seem to be blamed on the increasing price of oil. Not the oil that’s needed to transport food half-way around the world or across the country - that does affect food prices in the store, of course, but it doesn’t seem to be the main culprit. And it doesn’t look like we can blame it on the petroleum products that are used in such huge quantities on American farms for fertilizers and pesticides and running machines.
The problem is that the world is running out of oil, and governments are hoping our corn and wheat can make enough biofuels to take up the slack. Our own government here in the US seems to be particularly keen on this idea, and it’s making some other countries downright miffed at us.
Of course, when you feed grains to cars instead of cows and chickens, the price of beef, milk and eggs must go up. And if you feed grains to cars instead of to people, the price of bread goes up.
When grain prices rise, there isn’t much you can do to make cheaper bread, except to use something else to make your bread with. Potatoes have been used in times of war, and potato bread got many people through the world wars in the last century. Some grains may avoid the gaze of our new biofuel zealots, perhaps barley or rye, and they could be used for bread instead of wheat. Or, we can just skip the bread and enjoy our baked potato. Potatoes are easier to bake than bread, anyway, and are probably better for us.
But what about the cost of nutrient-rich eggs, milk and meat? These are the traditional foods that kept humans going for millions of years, along with a few roots and berries. Our bodies are designed to run on the fat and protein of these foods, and we need the fat-soluble vitamins that we can’t get anywhere else (my apologies to vegetarians who think otherwise). How can we afford to eat these foods if the prices double or triple?
My suggestion is to think back the time, just a few generations ago, when we didn’t feed our corn and soybeans to animals. We let these critters feed themselves on pasture, which is by far the healthiest way for cattle to eat. Pigs snuffled around under trees for nuts and roots, fattened on skim milk and whey left over from making cheese , and got the slops from our table. Chickens made do quite nicely with bugs, seeds and weeds they harvested for themselves, along with a few handfuls of cracked grain to keep them happy.
Animals are still raised that way, of course. Not the animals that turn into our supermarket meat, or our supermarket milk or eggs, but there are still farms in the US that pride themselves on growing animals humanely - and that includes letting them eat the foods their bodies were designed for.
Even before the recent increase in grain prices, it was less expensive to fill a freezer with grass-fed beef or lamb than it was to buy the unhealthy grain-fed meat from the supermarket. And I buy good fresh milk from a grass fed cow for much less than a gallon of milk would cost at the store.
And these less expensive foods come with a bonus - grass-fed grazing animals make their own conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA, which has been proven to help us regulate our weight, and that’s why they’re the most important foods when you’re looking for natural weight loss. Plus, the proportion of omega-3 and omega-6 fats in grass-fed animals is almost perfect, unlike the fats on corn-fed cattle. It stands to reason that a healthier steer or cow will produce healthier milk or meat.
With the recession expected to be worse than anything we’ve seen since World War II, and food prices going up because of the worldwide hunger for oil, we might want to start thinking about a few survival tactics.
When I was a kid my family told stories about what it was like back during the depression. The older folks in my family enjoyed making things up when they were talking to us kids, so I have to discount a lot of their stories - but some things I actually witnessed myself.
I didn’t live through the depression, of course, but when I was a kid we often visited my great-grandmother in her little hand-made house in Imbler, Oregon. My mother’s mother grew up in that house, and helped feed the chickens and hoe the garden and milk the cow. When I came along, the barn, the chickens and the garden were all still there.
The lot they lived on was much larger than most city or suburban lots - 1/2 acre. And the house was much smaller than the houses people now assume you must live in - probably less than 1,000 square feet. The house burned down a number of years ago, but I can still see it in my mind’s eye. A wood-fired cook stove and trash burner kept it warm in the winter. The cellar was always filled with bottles of home-canned apples, apricots and peaches from their own trees. The garden was so large my great-aunt Ruby sold extra produce to the local store. And the chickens kept the garden producing heavily without purchased fertilizers.
There was no cow any more when I came to visit in the 60s, but the barn was still standing - and is still standing now. The family story claims it was built by my great-aunt Ruby, although that may have been one of their more fanciful tales. The cow provided a major portion of the nutrition to their large family during the depression.
How can you keep a cow on 1/2 acre? You and your neighbors agree to fence in your gardens to protect them from grazing cows, and then you simply let the cow out of the barn every morning after milking. She’ll come home at night when it’s time to milk again, and after mowing the grass along the roads. It was an American version of the long-gone English commons.
During the last depression, your family thrived, or not, depending on two things:
Do you have a house that’s paid for? And do you have a garden, some chickens, and a cow?
I’ve already dug my garden bed. I did it last year, after buying a tiny house with cash. It may not be fashionable to live in a little house surrounded by veggies instead of lawn grass, but I figured it was time to hunker down and get ready for whatever the world might throw at us. Oil prices aren’t likely to go back down, the folks in the Middle East aren’t likely to start liking us, and the mortgage crisis isn’t likely to get much better any time soon.
That’s why local food is becoming increasingly important. My advice - get a few chickens if your city allows them, or if you can sneak them in. Buy Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, by Steve Solomon, and start digging a spot for those ‘taters. And find a local source of grass-fed beef and fresh raw milk from a local grass-fed cow.
Even if the recession never comes, and even if food prices start going down again, you’ll still end up healthier than you probably are now. And all that good, home-grown food tastes better than anything you could ever buy with your hard-earned cash.