Three excerpts from an article by Dmitry Orlov, dealing with food
production and distribution in two ailing economies...pre-collapse SU
and the struggling US economic situation which we are beginning to see
unfold....
Some good ideas and attitudes to gets one's head around.
--
Charlie
"A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling
experiences are survived with grace." -- Tennessee Williams
-----------------------------
Excerpts from article:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
by Dmitry Orlov
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Shortly before the Soviet Union’s collapse, it became known informally
that the ten percent of farmland allocated to kitchen gardens (in
meager tenth of a hectare plots) accounted for some 90 percent of
domestic food production. During and after the economic collapse, with
the government stores quite uncontaminated by food, and often closed
altogether, these plots became lifesavers for many families. The summer
of 1990 particularly stands out in my mind: it was the summer when we
ate nothing but rice (im****ted), zucchini (grown by us) and fish (from
a local lake, caught by some neighbors).
The dismal state of Soviet agriculture turned out to be paradoxically
beneficial in fostering a kitchen garden economy, which helped Russians
to survive the collapse. Russians always grew some of their own food,
and scarcity of high-quality produce in the government stores kept the
kitchen garden tradition going during even the more prosperous times of
the 60s and the 70s. After the collapse, these kitchen gardens turned
out to be lifesavers. What many Russians practiced, either through
tradition or by trial and error, or sheer laziness, was in some ways
akin to the new organic farming and permaculture techniques. Many
productive plots in Russia look like a riot of herbs, vegetables, and
flowers growing in wild profusion. In the waning years of the Soviet
era, the kitchen garden economy continued to gain in im****tance. Beyond
underscoring the gross inadequacies of Soviet-style command and control
industrial agriculture, the success of the private kitchen gardens is
indicative of a general fact: agriculture is far more efficient when it
is carried out on a small scale, using manual labor.
Excerpt:
In addition to small-scale farming, forests in Russia have always been
used as an im****tant additional source of food. Russians recognize and
eat just about every edible mushroom variety and all of the edible
berries. During the peak mushroom season, which is generally in the
fall, forests are overrun with mushroom pickers. The mushrooms are
either pickled or dried and stored, and often last throughout the
winter.
In spite of the monumental failures of Soviet agriculture, the overall
structure of Soviet-style food delivery proved to be paradoxically
resilient in the face of economic collapse and disruption. The
combination of local food stockpiles administered by politicians
conditioned to treat bread riots as career-ending calamities, the
prevalence of government institutions that attended to the sustenance
of their employees and plenty of kitchen gardens, meant that there was
no starvation and very little malnutrition. But will fate be as kind to
the United States?
Another excerpt, showing the contrast:
In the United States, most people get their food from a supermarket,
which is supplied from far away using refrigerated diesel trucks,
making them entirely dependent on the widespread availability of
trans****tation fuels and the continued maintenance of the interstate
highway system. In an energy-scarce world, neither of these is a given.
Most supermarket chains have just a few days’ worth of food in their
inventory, relying on advanced logistical planning and just-in-time
delivery to meet demand. Thus, in many places, food supply problems are
almost guaranteed to develop. When they do, no local authority is in a
position to exercise control over the situation and the problem is
handed over to federal emergency management authorities. Based on their
performance after Hurricane Katrina, these authorities are not only
manifestly incompetent, but also appear to be ruled by the ethos that
it is better for the government to deny services than provide them, to
avoid creating a population that is dependent on government help.
Many people in the United States don’t even bother to shop and just eat
fast food. The drive to maximize profit while minimizing costs has
resulted in a product that manipulates the senses into accepting as
edible something that is mainly a waste product. Under strict process
control procedures, agro-industrial wastes, sugar, fat and salt are
combined into an appealing presentation, packaged, and reinforced by
vigorous advertising. Once accepted, it beguiles the senses by its
reliable consistency, creating a lifelong addiction to bad food. The
chemical industry obliges with an array of deodorants to mask the
sickly body odor such a diet produces. Immersed for a lifetime in a
field of artificial sensory perceptions, dominated by chemical,
man-made tastes and smells, people recoil in shock when confronted with
something natural, be it a simple piece of boiled chicken liver or the
smell of a healthy human body. Perversely, they do not mind car exhaust
and actually like the carcinogenic “new car smell” of vinyl upholstery.
When people do cook, they rarely cook from scratch, but simply re-heat
prepackaged factory-produced meals. When they do cook from scratch, the
supposedly fresh ingredients come from thousands of miles away and are
selected for ease of ****pping rather than any actually desirable
qualities, making them woody or pulpy and only barely edible. Since
good taste is no longer on the menu, the focus ****fts to quantity,
resulting in appallingly sized ****tions of undifferentiated protein and
starch drowned in fat, administered in national festivals of pathetic
gorging, of which Thanksgiving seems to be the main one. But this is
all good for business and keeps the cancer, diabetes and heart disease
industries humming. This is all very unhealthy, and the effect on the
nation’s girth is visible clear across the parking lot. A lot of the
people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared for
what is coming next. If they suddenly had to start living like Russians
they would blow out their knees. Most of them would not even try, but
simply wait, patiently or impatiently, for someone to come and feed
them. And if that food arrives and consists of a styrofoam box
containing a puck of pseudo-meat between two pucks of pseudo-bread and
a plastic bottle of water laced with pseudo-syrup, they would be
satisfied.
But the food may never arrive. There is already a fair amount of hunger
in the United States and many families are forced to choose between
food and gasoline. Gasoline is the greater of the two necessities,
because it is necessary for them to drive to buy food: their car always
gets to eat first. In the future, the choice will be made for them:
they will be priced out of the market, their food used to produce
ethanol, so that the more fortunate can keep driving their cars a tiny
bit longer. The process of starving them out might go by one of the
euphemistic terms economists seem to favor, such as the somewhat
sinister “demand destruction,” or the more bland “load shedding.” This
process is already underway in Mexico, where corn masa producers who
provide a staple purchased by the poor are squeezed out by the ethanol
producers. The United States is next. Who is that skeleton driving a
pickup truck? Let us hope it is not you, but someone else — someone
less fortunate than you, with whom you are not acquainted.
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