What's happening in Ireland is part of a much larger trend affecting every Western country, so this is an important story with a lot of moving parts, and I hope to report on more in the months to come.
Similarly, In Great Britain, 60 percent of food was imported when World War II
began, and most of that food now had to be grown locally – and everyone pitched
in. Radio programmes, magazines and movie newsreels showed families how to save
grease for machinery and bones for fertiliser, how to turn their yards and neighbourhood
vacant lots into gardens into an allotment garden. They explained how to clamp
potatoes under mounds of hay to keep them for the winter, and how to save
energy when cooking food by setting stews in hay-stuffed boxes to slow-cook.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the victory gardens worked. They allowed most
people to grow their own food, and spend less money. They put to work the
precious space that is now being used simply as lawns or landscaping features.
In a time when energy was scarce, they allowed more trucking and food to be
used for the war effort. They ensured that millions of people became
self-sufficient, and were insulated from the chaos of energy shortages and
supply chain disorder. In the event of a crisis, every gardener makes your
neighbourhood more secure. The gardens meant that people spent less money – the
less money you need to spend on food, the more you can put away for paying the
mortgage or eliminating the credit card debt. They created more beautiful
neighbourhoods, gave people exercise, and brought communities together.
Victory gardens meant that citizens ate better food as well – fresher than can be bought at any
store, with the maximum nutrition and no chemicals. A now-forgotten 1977
Congressional panel observed that heart attacks and strokes went down in the
war years, even with the stresses of war and a demographic shift toward the
elderly, because of more fresh vegetables in their diet.
Such gardens also reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, which are currently
used to plough fields, make fertilizers, create pesticides, harvest, process
crops and transport them to market. Gardens eliminate all those steps at once,
reducing a 10,000-kilometre diet to a 10-metre one. While Ireland never entered
into World War II, the same thing was done here – council estates gave families
as much land as a cow needed, and it was once common, I’m told, to see cows,
pigs and chickens in many yards in Dublin. Even schools and hospitals had their
own gardens to feed those inside.
Writer and former Soviet citizen Dmitri
Orlov wrote that most Russians had kitchen gardens, and that 90 percent of the
country’s food was grown in such plots. Even though they were formed from
necessity, because of the poverty of the nation and the incompetence of
centralized agriculture, they ended up being a blessing – as the nation
collapsed, the people could still eat. He warns that many nations in the West
are now heading for a crisis, but are not as well prepared.
Could we feed ourselves again? We have in the past, and with less knowledge and
technology than we have now. Australian ecologist David Holmgren has estimated
that his country’s cities could not only feed their own population, but become
net food exporters, if the yards and golf courses were replaced by everything
from leeks to cardoons to turnips. Presumably the same could be done in similar
cities in Europe and America.
Some people are doing this now – still a small group, but in an emergency they
could be the ones who teach others, as a similarly small fraction of the
population could teach others when World War II began. Within only two years,
though, Americans were growing almost half their own food. It could happen
again, and if the next few years were to bring another fuel crisis, or a civil
war, or an economic crash, or any number of other possibilities, every backyard
could be an ark that could carry people through the storm.
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| Dublin a few nights ago. |
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| The same scene during the riots. |
From the article:
"Most other attacks had been rural or in poor areas, easier to sweep under the rug. This was in the heart of the city, the main shopping district at Christmas season, in a square named for a national hero, in the neighbourhood where the Irish Revolution began a century ago. It was next door to where Irish icon Oliver St. John Gogarty once lived. It was around the corner from a memorial to the innocents killed by an IRA bomb in the 1970s. It was at an Irish-language school, favoured by people proud of their heritage, in neighbourhoods now populated heavily by migrants."
Between going to Budapest to visit Rod Dreher and dodging the riots in Dublin, I've been a bit busy lately -- and I'm preparing to go back to the USA at Christmas. Thus, I'm late in posting a link to this, but Rod Dreher gave me a generous write-up on his Substack blog, and I'm quite chuffed:
https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-last-who-remember
I've finished the book and am searching for an agent and publisher, so I'll keep you posted.
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I'm writing about it at the moment, and will be doing an interview -- details to come soon.
Photo: Irish Independent.
Sourdough is a kind of bread made with naturally-occurring yeasts and lactobacilli bacteria, already floating in the air all around you. Because the lactobacilli create lactic acid, it has a slightly sour taste compared to breads made quickly with dried yeast powder from the store.
The preparation of sourdough begins with a starter of flour and water, which can be a solid, liquid or somewhere in-between. The starter carries the yeast and bacteria, and when you mix the starter with the rest of the dough you are giving the micro-organisms much more food, enabling them to spread throughout the dough. The bacteria and yeast have a symbiotic relationship: the bacteria ferment sugars that the yeast cannot digest, and their by-products are metabolised by yeast, which produces carbon dioxide gas, which leavens the dough.
First take a tablespoon (about 10
millilitres) of flour and a tablespoon of milk and mix them together – exact
quantities aren’t that important. Then you leave it sit out – say, on your
kitchen shelf – and stir it every morning and evening for about a week.
When this gooey, pale mix begins to bubble and smell sour and tangy, it has
become sourdough starter. If it smells pongy, it pulled the wrong kind of
bacteria out of the air, and needs to be thrown out -- there’s really no way to
ensure either result or predict ahead of time.
I added some organic grape peels to the mix; the grape’s sugar is food for the
yeast, and grapes are often covered in yeast themselves – that is the powdery
coating you see on the surface of grapes, one reason ancient people so easily
discovered they could make the juice into wine.
Once you have a good batch of starter going, you keep feeding it a little bit
every day. Keep it at room temperature – say, 20-25 degrees -- and take out a
portion every week or so to make the bread. Some people keep their starter in
their refrigerator, where it ferments more slowly and only needs to be fed once
a week.
Sourdough needs to be stickier and wetter than other doughs – the wetter the
better. Generally it should double in size within six hours of each “feeding,”
and it should be full of bubbles. One tip I got from the Prairie Homestead
blogger was that “if you place a teaspoon of the starter in a cup of cool
water, it should float on top of the water.”
To make the bread itself, you bake it as you would bread in general, except
that instead of a packet of yeast you use some of the starter – don’t use it
all, of course. I use about half a cup of starter – 120 ml -- to about 300 ml
lukewarm water, and then add a teaspoon-and-a-third of salt, or about eight ml.
I then mix in 720 ml of flour; I use about 20 per cent rye flour to about 80
per cent wheat. I mash it together until it’s somewhat stiff, form it into a
ball, and let it sit in the bowl for about 30 minutes.
When this is done, I stretch and fold the dough a few times, cover it with a clean dish towel and I let it rise overnight until it’s doubled in size. The next morning fold it over a few times and let it rise for about three hours, or until it’s doubled.
Preheat the oven to 230 degrees Centigrade. Sprinkle cornmeal in the bottom of a baking pan lined with parchment and place the loaf into the pan. If you have a Dutch oven, bake it for about 20 minutes with the lid on, and about 30 minutes without. Wait until it’s cool before slicing into it.
These figures and this recipe are meant
to be approximations; people have different tastes, different kinds of bacteria
and yeast in their homes, different room temperatures, and different luck. Some
bread-makers advise novices to get someone else’s sourdough starter first, in
order to see what one should taste and smell like. Some “proof” the starter
before making bread dough; that is, mixing it with three parts flour to two
parts starter, letting it rise about an hour, and then mixing in the rest of the
dough. Sourdough does have more of a learning curve than most kinds of bread,
so it takes a lot more tries to get it right, and of course every culture of
sourdough has its own rules. That's part of the fun; you get to feel your way along your own path.
Most of the clothes we wear today are made of oil, or coal, or gas, mixed with chemicals and turned into mylon or rayon or some other synthetic. They will not decay as natural fibres do, and when bits of them come out in the wash – almost every wash – they flood into the sea. Scientists recently said they expected the ocean to soon have more plastic per weight than fish, and we have no idea what effects it will have on life there as it disintegrates into chemicals.
Once, though, Ireland made its own clothes, giving thousands of people useful work – raising sheep, of course, but also growing flax to turn into linen. Flax – ‘lint,’ they called it – made linen cloth and canvas, string and rope. It was “a money-making crop because there was very little work with it,” said Davy McCrory, but that was just to grow it.
Turning it into linen was a long and complicated process that involved uprooting the plants, removing the seeds (“rippling”), soaking them (“retting”) in a bath (“dam”) until the outer husk rots, drying them again, smacking the stalks to remove the rest of the husk (“scotching”), and combing them (“heckling”). The end result was long yellow fibres of flax that became linen cloth and canvas, and a lot of short loose ones called “tow” – the reason long blonde hair is called “flaxen” and blonde children are called “towheads.”
Flax had to be pulled out of the ground rather than cut, and here too neighbours assembled to help. “You went to the neighbour to their pulling and they come to you, so that you had eight or nine men to attend and to pull it, all in one day,” said Annie McKillop. Then the plants went into the dam to be soaked so all but the fibres rotted away, and “oh the smell was wild altogether,” Francis Quinn said.
“It was the custom for the farmer whose flax was being dressed to call at the mill with a bottle of whiskey, for all the workers to share a drop on breaks,” Maurice McAleese said. “If this custom was not upheld, that farmer could count on his flax being treated with less care than the rest. The workers took two breaks, at 10 am and 3 pm, for a snack, shot of whiskey, and a smoke.” (Back Through the Fields, 112)
Women handled the scotching and heckling, said Martin Keaveny, “but scotching wasn’t all work for them! They did a bit of match-making as well, planning who would make suitable partners. There was a party atmosphere and a singsong.” It also seems to have been an opportunity for community organising; flax workers had a reputation for being political independents who talked back to public speakers, something we still call “heckling.” (Growing Up with Ireland, 24)
“It was the custom for the farmer whose flax was being dressed to call at the mill with a bottle of whiskey, for all the workers to share a drop on breaks,” Maurice McAleese said. “If this custom was not upheld, that farmer could count on his flax being treated with less care than the rest.” (Back Through the Fields, 112)
Once the linen was taken to market, “it was taken to the linen halls in Ballymena,” Harry Hume said, where cloth buyers had strict standards and long experience examined them carefully. “The buyers came along and pulled out the flax and they knew by the fibre whether it had been properly retted in the dam, or properly scotched, or dried or hadn’t been dried properly and hadn’t heated in a pile or anything.”
In our time, we have become accustomed to clothes just showing up in stores, made by slaves somewhere and travelling around a planet for us. We have become so used to cheap fabric that we have stopped mending clothes when they have holes. And we have become accustomed to widespread rural unemployment. All these problems, though, could solve each other if we brought back some of the industries that sustained small farmers and villages across Ireland for hundreds of years. We would also have clothes that did not make us dependent on Middle Eastern nations where the oil is found, or Third-World dictatorships where the clothes are made. We could clothe ourselves again.
A syllabus from the early 1900s in American schools included plant diseases, erosion, insects, surveying, engineering, glaciations, and geology, all to improve their farming. Touring dirt-poor rural America in the early 1900s, Clarence Hall Robison found that agriculture and floriculture were required courses for all students – 320 hours for boys – in addition to botany, zoology, physiology, physics and chemistry.
Robison describes a “typical Ohio village” in which gardening was introduced as a class and the children threw themselves into it. Nor were these students just bringing home a seed in a paper cup, as a few students might do today – in one class the 12 students could not use the standard textbook, for “it proved too easy, as the boys already knew most that it contained.” The boys’ plan that year – just the boys, mind you, so perhaps six students – was to experiment with varieties of corn in “288 hills.” Some boys read about how beehives were made and immediately went home and constructed some of their own, and one child described how he caught two wild swarms of bees and set them in a hive.
In some cases the students lobbied for these classes themselves. After a school heard a lecture on poultry, a group of sixth-graders, Robison said, was “in a class studying Shakespeare, taught as it happened by the instructor in agriculture, [when] one of the girls suddenly exclaimed, “Mr. Button, why can't we study poultry?” The idea was so popular that a class was immediately organized.”
This wasn’t just in schools; some Midwestern advocates of modern farming practices, wanting to popularise them in rural areas, began after-school “corn clubs” that became the 4-H. The Boy Scouts, in one of their earliest manuals, lists a badge for agriculture. To receive it scouts had to “a practical knowledge of plowing, cultivating, drilling, hedging, and draining,” show “knowledge of Campbell's Soil Culture principle, and a knowledge of dry farming and of irrigation farming” and “[g]row at least an acre of corn which produces 25 per cent, better than the general average.”In the 19th century, it was all the rage in Europe to turn school-yards into teaching arenas – “child-gardens” or in German, kinder-gartens. In Ireland, Horace Plunkett, who helped found many co-operatives across the Irish countryside, urged that “Children should be given elementary notions of science and a training in the faculty of observation through illustration … drawn from the physical surroundings of rural life.” In 1917, H.S. Sheridan wrote that school gardens teach children “to observe and to think, to use their hands, eyes and minds in conjunction. Concrete facts are presented, and the pupils are taught to think in realities and not in symbols.”
By learning how to grow their own food, children learn the basic skills needed to provide for themselves and their families in a crisis, and lets them live with fewer expenses and less financial stress. They learn that food does not magically show up on store shelves, that we depend on fragile things to stay alive. As a classroom activity, it is a perfect way to demonstrate how plants and animals depend on and fight each other. It teaches chemistry: some plants do better in boggy soil or chalky, can better tolerate warmth or chill. It teaches world history: the limestone under your feet is a coral reef hundreds of millions of years old, mountains made of the shells of a billion billion creatures.
It also teaches a patience needed in this age of texting and Snapchat. An entire generation grew up knowing the world mainly through a glowing rectangle -- the television, a computer or the text screen of a mobile phone. But life is not inside the screen, and neither is childhood.
Photo: Gardening class in the UK, courtesy of the Garden Museum.
We currently get much of our heat from fossil fuels – coal, oil, gas – or from electricity that comes from burning fossil fuels. In a few decades we will see many more people in the world and far less fossil fuels, and we will have to warm ourselves in some other way. We could turn to building wind farms, solar arrays or nuclear plants, turning their power into electricity and then into heat, but that would be a long and complex process. It would be much simpler and cost-effective for people to use the oldest method of heating, fire.
Using fire, though, presents a few
problems. For one thing, we destroyed most of the world’s forests when we only
numbered in the millions, or hundreds of millions. Now there are seven thousand
million of us in a world with a fraction of the forest we used to have, and
what remains – the great rainforests of the world, for example – are
needed as the home of much of the life on Earth.
We could coppice trees (cut them off at the base) or pollard them (cut them at
man-height) and let them grow back. It is an old, and still valid, method of
preserving forests, but trees like hazel still take a decade or more to return.
Also, traditional fireplaces were spectacularly inefficient: A fireplace and
chimney send only 10 percent of its heat to the room, and the other 90 percent
goes out into the sky. Old buildings in Ireland will have the fireplaces
stuffed with newspaper the whole way up, and there is still a draught.
There is, however, a little-remembered method that was used in Central and
Eastern Europe until the beginning of the fossil fuel era – the masonry oven, also called a Russian stove or tile stove.
It relies on a simple concept: it is a hearth surrounded by a thermal mass like
cob, brick or tile, which heats up with the fire and slowly releases heat
throughout the day.
Instead of having a single vertical flue that takes the heat directly into the
sky, masonry ovens have a flue that winds around several times before heading
outside -- the smoke is typically cold by the time it reaches the outside. All
the heat is transferred into the mass, and thence into the room. Since the smoke and heat rise inside insulated ducts which do not conduct heat
quickly, interior temperatures rise very high, and makers of masonry stoves claim their products
are 85-90 percent efficient.
Fires in masonry ovens do not need to be tended and kept going, as it is not
the fire itself that keeps the house warm but the thermal mass – most oven
owners simply set one fire in the morning, and then let the heat radiate
through the day. As they release the heat slowly, so they tend to be warm but
not hot to the touch – some old Russian ovens were made with spaces where children or elderly could sleep.
Perhaps most importantly, since the ovens need only a brief and quickly-burning
fire, they do not require chopped wood for fuel, but can use faster-growing and
more common material like straw or sticks. The fast-burning straw creates
little soot to build up and block the flue, so their users say they require
little cleaning.
Masonry ovens, like thatched roofs, bale-building and cob, is an old method
recently revived when more people began to realize its advantages. If it takes
off, millions of people could build sustainable heating systems out of nothing
more than clay and stone, and heat themselves with material that is renewable
and almost free.
For more information check out David Lyle’s excellent Book
of Masonry Stoves, or an
article on the subject by Low-Tech Magazine.
Photo by Wikicommons.
The forge this time was an old metal
hubcap, with small holes drilled in the middle, and the blower was a
refurbished Electrolux vacuum motor. You don’t even need the electricity; on
another course we sculpted a forge out of clay and horse manure, and turned
some old fertiliser bags into bellows.
We began each day by lighting a small fire in the middle of the hubcap, right
over the holes. Once the fire was going, we placed charcoal delicately over it,
and then a ring of coal around the charcoal, and the crank fan blew air through
the middle to keep the fire hot. Iron-working only appeared in the last 5,000
years or so – the final 0.3 percent of the time humans have had fire – because
ordinary wood fire does not heat iron enough to work, and large amounts of
charcoal and air are needed.
We quickly learned that you need to spend a great deal of time standing over
the fire, with the metal part in just the right place – in the middle, above
the blower and slightly buried in charcoal – to get the right temperature. Too
little heat, of course, and the metal cannot be worked, but too much and it
begins to “burn,” liquefying and sparking. A lot depends on the size of the
metal piece – the tractor axel we put in took ages to heat, but I accidentally
burned off the tines of my fork in short order.
Once the metal was glowing orange, we had to rapidly move it to the anvil
without yanking it out and sending hot coals everywhere, and without burning
the people standing shoulder-to-shoulder with you. Once at the anvil you had
only several seconds of BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM ... until it was black and solid
again.
Also useful are steel vices and hefty pliers, which allowed us to grip metal
while turning it – hence the twist in the fork handle. None of us wore gloves,
but leather aprons and goggles were recommended against flying sparks and coals.
This time, I took an old car part and hammered it into a straight bar, flattened it into a knife-shape over the next two days, and a bit of cutting and polishing did the rest. I cut a handle from a hazel branch, heated the “handle end” of the metal until it was yellow-hot, and seared the hot metal into the handle, with a gust of steam and a few bursts of flame from the wood.
Blacksmithing is one of the dozens of
professions that were widespread until just the last century, now is kept alive
only by a few aficionados. For thousands of years in metalworking cultures,
smiths were a vital and respected role – look how common it is as a surname
today. They might become vital again if the coming decades bring the turmoil we
anticipate. With charcoal and tools, a smith could turn landfill scrap and old
car parts into useful tools again – and as far as I know, there is no end to
the number of times metal can be recycled.
When the world is no longer able to mass-produce new materials at its former
rate, when there is no new plastic and fewer forests, we will have billions of
tons of landfill waste. Movies like WALL-E posit garbage covering the
Earth, but in real life much of that garbage would not only be reusable, but
precious. Some of it will be metal, and all the landfills we have created in
the last few decades could become our mines in the next few decades.
Top photo: A forge. Bottom photo: The knife I made.
