Food Bank Drive

The Bigs' school runs a food bank drive every year in December. The first week of the drive is a competition between classrooms. The classroom that hauls in the most donations wins a pizza party.  It's a pretty stiff competition, too.  Some of the teachers encourage their students by matching the donations they bring in.  #1 took about three cans to school every day of the drive last year.  They were running out of room in the classroom, and his teacher was starting to worry about how much it was going to cost her to match it.  They ended up coming in second place!

The second week of the drive, students go door to door around town collecting donations.  Their gym looked like a small grocery store when they were done.  It was an amazing accomplishment!

This year it's an even stiffer competition.  #2 just happens to have the same teacher #1 had last year.  And #1 just happens to have the teacher whose class won last year.  The pressure is on.  Starting in my cold room.  lol.

Last year I suggested a few things that I wouldn't miss to #1.  After he took those items, he helped himself to a couple of cans of whatever he felt like.  He didn't make too much of a dent in our supplies, but it was noticeable.

This year, this morning, I went to the cold room with them and picked out a variety of items that I won't miss. 

Some things I planned for- like the evaporated milk and assorted coffee pouches.  They were offered free with coffee purchases earlier in the year, so I saved them for the food drive.  Some things were a bit of an excess here, like BBQ sauce and salad dressing.  The rest was just a can of this, a can of that.  We won't miss it. 

So I told the boys to take what they wanted out of this selection.  If they haul it all off to school before the end of the drive I'll have to pick out another box full of goodies.

I told the boys to ask when the food bank pick up would be, or if the school has any freezer room.  I have two store bought turkeys that I bought on sale, probably last Easter., that I'd be happy to donate.  I told them to ask if home canned goods would be accepted as well.

Please support your local food bank. 

A long, long, time ago, when #1 was just a baby, and #2 was on his way, we were in a car accident.  Husband suffered acute whiplash and was off work for several months.  We had no food storage.  We had no savings.  The food bank saved us.  It could happen to any of us.  Please give.

Meatless Mondays versus Raising Meat

I was up at some ridiculous hour the other  morning, and decided to go look up some videos on youtube (because we have crappy satellite internet with a 200MB/day cap, except from 2am to 7am.  If you want to do anything fun online- games, videos, music, etc- you have to get up in the middle of the night around here).  Anyway, I came across this documentary, Meat the Truth.  I don't know how to imbed videos, but hopefully the link will get you started.  If not, just search youtube.

Again, not a lot of new to me info, but still thought provoking, and worth watching.  As a general rule, when folks start talking about vegetarian or vegan diets, I just do the smile and nod.  Whatever.

We have a running joke around here, that we are raising carnivores, except for #2, who we like to call 'the rabbit'.  When #1 and #2 were little they'd each eat half their supper, then sit and whine.  You could literally switch plates between them, and they'd both be happy.  The Carnivore and The Rabbit.  Times have changed, and I no longer have to pull teeth to get #1 to eat vegetation, or #2 to eat meat, but their preferences are definitely still obvious.

So I'm watching the movie, and I get it.  I get the whole 'vote with your fork' concept.  I understand the issues with 'factory farms'.  But that's not my life.  Not even close.

And then, "You can't call yourself an environmentalist if you eat meat".

I am insulted.  I am annoyed.  I am really pissed off.

It's like those carbon foot print calculators that you can find online.  No consideration for heating your home with deadfall versus live trees versus oil.  No consideration for not even owning an air conditioner.  No consideration for growing your own food.

I have a big family, I have a big car, I have a huge carbon footprint.  End of story.  No consideration for the attitudes I instill in my children.  No consideration for at least 95% of their needs (clothes, toys, furniture) coming second hand.  No consideration for my car sitting in the driveway constantly for all but 1 or 2 days a month.

So, yeah, throw this at me too.  Why not.  I eat meat.  I am not an environmentalist.

I raise meat.  Not in any way remotely similar to factory farming.  I live in an inhospitable environment for growing my own food, and yet I garden.  Most of my summer is spent in the garden, for very little return.  Raising meat is much more natural in my environment than growing tomatoes.  My animals will eat the grass, the weeds, and the bugs.  I will not.  And not one of my critters drinks any where near as much water as 'they' say is required.  I have no manure overflow issues.  We call that stuff fertilizer.  The cows even walk around and spread it for us.

By 'their' theories I should give up on the chickens and the turkeys, whom I currently have to buy grain for, and eat strictly home raised, grass fed beef.  But I digress...

I do buy a bit of meat from the grocery store.  I don't ask where it came from.  I don't want to know.  Because in the back of my head, I already know.  But it's very little, compared to the whole of our diets, that it's probably doing more harm to me than to the planet.

So what if I stopped.  What if I just stopped buying grocery store meat cold turkey.  What if we ate only what we raise and hunt.   I could be a better environmentalist.

But I'm still insulted.

Cheap Food

 Linda, over at Practical Parsimony wrote an interesting post, with this link, an era of cheap food may be drawing to a close.  I was going to comment there, like I usually do, but then I realized that I was going to be rambling and long winded, like I usually am, but, you know, more, so maybe I should write here rather than hijack her post. 

The article starts out by telling us that "U.S. grain prices should stay unrelentingly high this year".  It goes on to tell us about the weather and natural disasters that have ruined crops across the world, and the effect it's had on imports and exports.  The bottom line, is that the store houses are low, "dwindled to their lowest level in decades".   So prices will go up, up, up...  because when you only have a little of something, it makes that little bit ever more valuable.

Of course, the article doesn't mention, how low is low? 

I keep a 50 gallon drum of chicken feed.  It holds almost six bags of feed.  I like to keep it full. 

If I have a bad pay week, or a snow storm, or I forget that the feed store switched over to winter hours and won't be open for three days, I don't want to run out of chicken feed.  So when it gets to about half, I know there's only a week's worth of feed left, and I need to go to the feed store.  I consider half to be 'low' in my chicken feed supplies.

I keep three rubbermaid bins for rice in my cold room.

  I am considering adding a fourth.  Each bin holds 3 8kg bags of rice.  That's 72kg of rice.  I replenish my stock piles every 6 to 8 weeks when it goes on sale, for about half of the regular price.  Since we eat a lot of rice ourselves, as well as rice being one of the main ingredients in doggy stew, we use a lot of rice.  In my last two 'cycles', I've run out of rice before the next sale.  So I'm considering adding a fourth bin to store another 24kg, so my stock piles will only be 'low' and not empty when the next sale comes.

In my examples here, I'm only talking about the needs of my family, my critters, my needs.  I am not trying to feed the world.  I'm not even trying to feed us for the whole winter.  I'm merely stockpiling for convenience and price savings.  Still, low has to mean something.  What does it mean when they say the stocks are low?  Will starvation set in before the end of next growing season?  Will we stop exporting to foreign countries and feed ourselves?  How low is low?  Here are some Canadian numbers, of how the 2010 season ended.

"Total stocks of durum wheat rose 42.3% to 2.7 million metric tonnes."  Astronomical numbers.  What does it mean?  How many people will it feed for how long?  And what else do they have to eat?

In the first article, they suggest that raising prices will encourage farmers to plant more.  Really?  Do we have a lot of farmers with a lot of open fields these days?  Just not bothering to go out and plant because they didn't need the cash last year?  Hmmm.  Me thinks not.  There's a lot of info here about subsidies.  They quote "Thomas (Tom) Walkom, National Affairs Writer for The Toronto Star who wrote a lengthy and well researched article on how subsidies support Canadian farmers."

"The international pricing and subsidy system is so out of whack, according to figures compiled by Statistics Canada and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, that it costs Canadian consumers and taxpayers more to keep agriculture alive in this country than it would to pay farmers to do nothing. Between 1999 and 2002, for example, Canadian farmers received support, in the form of either artificially inflated prices or direct subsidies, to the tune of $24.9 billion. Yet, over the same period, after all costs were accounted for, these same farmers made only $8.8 billion in net income."

Raising prices might encourage farmers to plant more of one thing, if the farmers saw an increase in pay.   But planting more of one crop will result in less of another.  Is that what we want?  In this age of eat local, shop local, support your local community, 100 mile diets?  Do we want the farmers to grow more corn because it's cheaper to buy Mexican tomatoes?  It's also cheaper to buy Brazilian corn.  What's the point?


Some time in the future we may colonize another planet for agricultural purposes.  We may have huge fields of wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, etc, growing there.  We may ship it back to earth in huge space ships.  We may charge the same price as each storage bin is filled across the globe.  We may end world hunger.  That day is not today.

Today we have issues with rising food prices.  Rising fuel prices.  Rising fertilizer prices.  Government subsidies.

Food is not cheap.  It never was.  Cheap food was a myth, brought about by heavy equipment, cheap fossil fuels, and minimal labour.

I was at a pioneer museum once, and someone asked the farm helper threshing the wheat how much he got paid.  It was some mere pittance by today's standards.  Then someone asked what he could buy.  That, of course, seemed like an awful lot.  But the labourer looked at us, and summed it up simply and quickly.  "Why would I pay 35 cents for soap, something I could make myself at home, for free?"  When did we change?  When did we decide it was ok to pay other people instead of doing for ourselves?  And when did we decide that we wouldn't work for what we were willing to pay them?

Seriously.  Cheap food.  Everyone should grow a garden.  Plant some seeds in your backyard, on your balcony, in a pot.  A tiny investment.  Seeds, pot, potting soil.  Track how many hours you spend watering, weeding, tending your crop.  Multiply those hours by minimum wage in your area.  Nearly ten dollars here.  Then subtract the cost of your initial investment.  Then divide it by the amount of produce you grew.

When you make yourself a sandwich with that delicious, locally grown, organic, $50 tomato, relish every sumptuous bite.  Then complain about the rising cost of food at the grocery store.

The problem is, we, as a society, have no idea what food actually costs.  Some of us don't even know where it comes from.  We want more.  We want variety.  We want better quality.  We don't want to pay for it.  We want to keep more of our money to buy cheap plastic Chinese junk- which also isn't cheap.  We want more time to play with our toys, that we buy with our money, that we're not spending on the real cost of food, toys, or leisure activities.  We want more for less.  And we want it now.  But that's not the option.  It never was. 

The options are simple.  Pay for it in cash.  Or pay for it in labour. 

Save the Penny

Some days I think I either live under a rock, or my news channel just doesn't report things that I actually care about.  I spend half my time online looking up stuff that you'd think they'd mention.

At any rate, the Canadian penny is now an endangered species.  The senate has recommended that the penny be removed from circulation, and that guidelines be established for rounding off purchase prices to the nearest nickel.

I am appalled.  First, because I love my pennies.  Pennies were meant for wishing wells, charitable donations (cash boxes), penny candy, and luck.  Pennies are great for nurturing a kid's love of coin collecting.  And pennies are money, too.

It annoys me when I go somewhere that has one of those "Have a penny, leave a penny, Need a penny, take a penny" dishes sitting beside the cash register.  I have a penny, almost always, and I will gladly spend it.  And even if my change is just a penny, I want it back.  You know the old adage, "Take care of the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves."  Well, I don't want to take care of the nickels if the shop keepers get to rip me off 3 cents for every purchase I make.  I want my pennies.

I figure if pennies are so annoying to some folks, they have the option of using debit pretty much everywhere they go.  Leave the pennies for those of us who care.

One of the reasons the government is considering taking this action, is that we Canadians hoard our pennies, so they, the government has to keep making more.  Think about that for a moment.  We are hoarding our pennies.  We must like them or something?  And why is it ok for the mint to continuously produce 'collector' coins- poppy quarters, veterans quarters, olympic quarters, provincial quarters, etc, ad nauseum, which are purposefully designed to be kept as keepsakes?  Why are the jars of quarters people are keeping not contributing to inflation?  Seriously?  This doesn't make sense.

Don't we pay enough in taxes now?  Aren't prices for everything high enough already?  Commerce got the HST, let the people have the penny!  We need a break somewhere.  In these tough economic times, arbitrarily deciding that rounding off to the nearest nickel will all 'balance out in the end' just isn't good enough.  Face reality.  The businesses will work out the prices to make sure they don't lose one red cent, while we, the consumers, will be donating to their profit line!

If pennies cost a cent and a half to produce, why not redesign them?  Make them cheaper.  Make them smaller.  But don't take them away.  Save the penny!  Contact your MP!