In article <c17624h213oio30560ve8gcg7gtd5s0rn4@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Charlie wrote:
> 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.
Sort of reminds me of US good will giving to the SU sometime about the
dates you mentioned. So US good guy sent them legs of chicken, thighs
and backs. This was roundly perceived as very helpful by the SU. The
white breast remained here but the real nutrients were warmly gratefully
embraced.
Once again Omnivores whose dad will not eat white meat first and knows
that real gravy should have hearts etc. I've got a call in to him for
the naming proper of the gravy.
Bill
--
Garden in shade zone 5 S Jersey USA
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