Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

Afternoon all.

Just interwebulating whilst cooking, eating and digesting me tea, then off to the allotment for an hour or so.

fuddle, I think a lot of the problems with self-sufficiency in the UK is that we were the first country in the world to industrialise, and the 'spare' countryfolk were essentially forced into towns to work in the new industrial economy. And I do mean forced; the various enclosures acts made it impossible to have even a subsistence-level income, one the access to the commonwealth of woodland, common pasturing etc was denied. 'Five acres and a cow' was the cry for a minimum substance. You can get away with less than that if you have access to grazing on common land, but not if your personal property has to include both the grazing for beasts and the veggie plots.

Most of our ancestors would have made the progression over the centuries from serfdom under Celtic warlords, to Roman masters, to serfdom under Anglo-Saxon warlords and The Church, then to more serfdom and villienage under our Norman French conquerors and The Church. Until they eventually became free labourers on the land, labourers in factories and mills and mines, for a pittance. Free to move about, but only able to sell their labour for a bare subsistence wherever they went.

Only a minority would ever have had sufficient landholdings to be sturdy peasants who stood straight in their hand-knitted stockings and looked their version of The Man in the eye. Some, of course, would have taken advantage of economies which had surpluses and could practise division of labour, and adopted specialised trades or become merchants of various ilks, if they could get in past the guilds.

Did you know the origin of the phrase sending someone to Coventry? It was the distance you'd have to relocate to, should you have fallen afoul of the London guilds. That's approx 86 miles as the crow flies, a long reach in the days of horse-drawn transport.

I think the legacy of a post-feudal society is with us still, as well as the historical disconnect from the land. With my only family, I'm the first generation not to have done land-work, bar a bit of fruitpicking. My Dad did farmwork from 15-21 but the generation prior worked their whole lives on farms. Mostly other people's farms, in our case. And were dirt-poor and barely scraping a living.:(

You also have to consider the manipulation of planning policy to deliberately exclude poor people, and people who wanted to be small-holders, build-your-own-house-on-your-own-land types from the rural areas. The endless supply of landless peasants (I count myself one, am not being derogatory here) to serve as workers in the cash economy suits TPTB very well. Too many independant people would mean too few workers willing to sell their time cheaply, and cause wage-inflation, which wouldn't please the ruling castes at all.

The trick for the ruling castes is that you must give just enough sustenance to the peasantry to allow them to live and work another day, but not so much that they can ever get themselves into a position of financial independance.

Should a period of rising wages look like giving some of the peasantry ideas, you should do several things to keep a lid on it. Firstly, pick a fight with organised labour, i.e. the trades unions. That Woman and her shower drew up a shortlist of powerful unions to provoke, and the mineworkers were the ones which rose to the bait. Then clamp down very hard on what unions can and cannot do. You must also take the opportunity to re-write labour laws, to the great detriment of those who sell their labour. This is to be an ongoing project, btw.

Oh, and last but not least, you must make sure that everyone is up to their eyeballs in debt and too scared to agitate for better conditions. You don't want the beggars in cheap council housing on secure tenancies going out on strike, you want to offer them the 'opportunity' to buy them, and once they're mortgaged, they'll have to behave. All other forms of endebtedness are to be encouraged, too - the more the merrier.

I used to be a cynic but I'm just flipping angry about it now.

thriftwizard

I think it's ludicrous that as a society we are a million miles away from even dipping our toes in self sufficiency.

Ludicrous is exactly what it is, Fuddle, but there are a lot of people beavering away in the background to keep it like that... there's too much money being made by keeping us dependent, unsatisfied, unhealthy and unable to think clearly for ourselves, for TPTB to want it any other way. But it does leave us dreadfully vulnerable if any cogs fall into the machinery that keeps it all ticking along...

Frugalsod

fuddle wrote: »

Hmm scandinavian cooking. I will look into that Frugalsod. I'm a 'back to nature' kinda girl with my food and although I can't call myself 100% pure with it we try very hard. I am favouring Italin cookery at the moment - simple, cheap, wholesome and don't need a vast variety of different ingredients.

I am also looking at making my own plain rye crisp bread. I originally gave up on the idea because I was unable to do the low heating after the initial cook, but when I saw what the temperature range of a dehydrator is, that looked to be the solution I needed. So that will probably be one of the main reasons for me to get a dehydrator.

Longer term I think canning foods is a really good solution.

fuddle wrote: »

Eldest DD has come asking if there is going to be a WW3 because of the troubles in Iraq and that so many people hate British people. I didn't know what to say so have dodged the question. I want her to be mindful that anything can happen at anytime from any corner of the world but I don't want to scare her. I'm thinking the best course of action is to use the WW2 cook book (We'll eat again) as a base for talking about coping in WW2.

I doubt that global war is likely. They are far too unpredictable, and everyone loses once nukes get used. Though I suspect that the real problems will be the economy again. In places like Tunisia it caused the start of the Arab Spring, and rising food prices will cause significant problems in many countries particularly the price of food will destabilise many nations and that will impact us here.

fuddle wrote: »

Talking about how we really want to live our life a few pages back I would like to say that I wouldn't want DH or I to have to work and be paid for our labour but to work in order to be self sufficient in our lives... but I would like to have money behind us because being a crofter fan I know that that way of life is extremely difficult. I think it's ludicrous that as a society we are a million miles away from even dipping our toes in self sufficiency.

This idiotic government is not even taking us in the right direction for self sufficiency. Far too many of them are paying lip service to climate change and the impact that will have on us. Only this morning on one of the BBC World Service Business Daily podcasts "Future of Coal"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p021m2w6

an analyst warned about the problem of our current CO2 level which guarantees sea level rises of 75 to 85 feet but warned that unless we do something significant that CO2 levels could reach 750 to 1000 ppm which would be so catastrophic that sea levels rising to 200 to 300 feet would actually be the best news. It would be acidification of the oceans and toxicity of the sea to cause extinctions of the same order of the Permian Period, which wiped out 90% of life in the sea and 70% of life on earth. Imagine 70% of all humans dying as a result of what we are doing today, and wonder how the governments might try and spread the little food out then, and what your chances would be.

C

mardatha

I wouldn't believe anything any "expert" told me about anything. They are all just halfwits who can't join up the dots on a kids colouring book.

RAS

This make disturbing reading in more ways than one http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/01/uk-food-security-threatened-complacency-mps-report

I think we need to recognise that there is food security as a nation (percentage of food intake required that we can produce in the UK) and food security on a community or household basis. The biggest issues for the latter is access to land; not only is it harder to obtain the larger the settlement becomes but in some areas land that is capable of producing food is withdrawn from agriculture (not just golf courses but also things like watershed protection for bottled water supplier).

With respect to history one of the issues with enclosure was that those who owned large holdings could impose it on all land holders in the township but that the responsibilities and costs were disproportionate for those with very small holdings as the had to pay thier share of communal costs like roads and the higher cost of hedging/walling/fencing a small plot. I recall research showing that the majority could not afford these costs and has to sell up to the bigger landholders.

Butterfly_Brain

Love Russell Brand

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiaEGox0BmE

GreyQueen

There's also the economic phenomenon referred to as the tragedy of the commons, whereby some individuals tend over-use a resource held in common (a pasture, a fishery, a forest, the whole blessed planet) and despoil it for the many. The profit is theirs alone, but the consequences are experienced by everyone.

On a village level, this could be one household deciding to run 5 cows on the common, whereas the carrying capacity of the pasture vs the number of households would only support 1 cow per household, with some households being cow-free and pehaps trading goose eggs for dairy, or something similar.

Take smoking, as an example. I don't smoke and never have. I don't own a car either. Yet the city centre I live in has air pollution from motorised transport which imposes a burden on my lungs reckoned the equivalent to a 10-a-day habit. So those who want to work or shop where they won't live, or who won't use public transport, or who are too lazy to walk a mile, get to despoil my 'commons' - the air I breathe.

Equally, those who wantonly waste resources, by despoiling them in such a way that they cannot be repurposed by others or reduced to their worn-out components for recycling, waste the resources which we should be husbanding for the generations coming up behind us.

Tell ya, they'll be looking back on these days with justifiable rage at our profligacy.

fuddle

See that story RAS has the cynic in me bubbling out. MP's warn then on next paragraph Mp's urge the embracing of GM crops and robots that weed fields. Money making ideas for little effort and cost under the guise of less backbreaking work for our farming populous or the real truth of trying to feed our folk in these lands?

[Deleted User]

FUDDLE if you want Scandinavian ideas I've got 10 scandi cookbooks, some swedish, some danish and one norwegian also a couple of really good german books and I'll be very happy to send you some recipes if you want them. I won't post actual recipes from the books as they are all still in copyright but I'll happily give you my adaptions (as some of the ingredients have to be swapped for the english version as that's all that is available here) and you can try some and see if you like them, Lyn xxx.

Blow using robots, they'd be so much better off taking some of the people back onto the land to cultivate and grow crops for the english markets, the trouble is that most of the people who would be good at it wouldn't touch manual work with a bargepole because they have been conditioned to think they are too good to work on the land and think they should be white collar workers. It would make so much more sense to have real people keeping track of what needs doing and reduce the unemployment figures substantially. I'm sure that the wages for farm hands would be very much less than buying in new mega machines at eyewatering prices to farm the increasingly large farms that are emerging in the UK.

Frugalsod

fuddle wrote: »

See that story RAS has the cynic in me bubbling out. MP's warn then on next paragraph Mp's urge the embracing of GM crops and robots that weed fields. Money making ideas for little effort and cost under the guise of less backbreaking work for our farming populous or the real truth of trying to feed our folk in these lands?

I suspect that this is going to be used as an excuse to allow GMO's. This technology is still too new for us to be sure of the outcomes. I am concerned about the spread of genes to other plant species. Also in Bangladesh and India where they are using round up resistant rice they are finding that the Round Up pesticide is becoming next to useless, yet they cannot exit the GMO usage because of debts and inability to get Non GMO seeds. And guess who owns many of the worlds seed banks? Monsanto of course.