YOUR FOOD SECURITY

This Radio Ecoshock - with something you can't live without: food. No, we haven't invented edible radio - but we'll introduce you to a homesteading woman who's brought out her second book on surviving the worst of times.

Are you worried about the way the world is going? Our top financial institutions turned out to be hollow Ponzi schemes. Nobody is too sure of their job. The Earth's climate is unstable. Even the bees are dying. Meanwhile, grasping men at multinational food corporations want to own every seed and everything you eat. Did I mention the end of cheap oil?

That is when I want to know how to ensure enough food for my family. How will I get enough to eat, despite violent storms, an earthquake, social disruption or an epidemic? How can you eat cheaply, even if food prices soar as predicted?

[Robin Wheeler interview]

We've done a series of radio how-to's here at Radio Ecoshock. Ways to stockpile grains and beans for ten years or more. How to get going in canning. Find that on the "Ecoshock Features" page, right in our Audio on Demand menu, at ecoshock.org. There's nothing to sell or buy there, just helpful free mp3 downloads.

As you know our guest is Robin Wheeler. She runs a homestead, now turned into a home business, in Roberts Creek, along the Pacific Coast of British Columbia. Find her on the Net at ediblelandscapes.ca. Her new book is "Food Security for the Faint of Heart, Keeping Your Larder Full in Lean Times."

Robin was speaking at a small library her in Vancouver, listed in a community newspaper. Improbably, outside there was a New Orleans style jazz band, and rows of tables loaded with organic foods, community support kiosks, and alternative knowledge. On a rare happy say of sunshine, would anyone turn up for a talk on Food Security?

Waiting at the back, a 50 something woman began a conversation about climate change. "You know what I think," she said, "the climate has already shifted." I felt a slight chill, knowing that the public really does know. We are in for a wild ride.

Despite the sun and fun outside, all the seats filled up. I recorded Robin's Wheeler's Food Security talk for you.

This speech is like a series of topics you need to know. You could almost make a box of index cards for each resource in the speech - as a jumping off point for your own research on the Net, and locally.

We've all heard about scrap booking as a hobby for stay-at-home Moms. Now I'm thinking a survival scrap book or binder is a really good idea. It would have print outs of the key useful information you discover. Maybe you can print out Google maps of your area, and your fall-back retreat spot, with your notes added on where the wild mushrooms are, the will-trade-for-food local farms, that stream with cleaner water.

Imagine the power has gone out, and the food system is breaking down. What do you need to know, without access to the Net? Or what if inflation and job loss combine to threaten your supermarket dependence? What can you do for food security, from a condo, house or camper van - homesteading where you are?

Here is a short shopping list of topics I heard in Robin Wheeler's speech. Most of it comes straight from her book "Food Security for the Faint of Heart". Robin touches on:

Earthquakes
Supermarkets closing down
Power out - what freezer food to eat first, and
How to prolong meat with cooking oil, or salt brining.
Emergency cooking
Stockpiling
The importance of community
Organic or not?
Start a food Co-op
Cook for yourself
Work at a grocery store or food warehouse
Community supported agriculture
Gleaning - like nut trees or fallen fruit
Gardening as though your life depended on it
Eating weeds
Using food waste
Storing the abundance
Leave root crops in the ground
Curing foods for longer storage
Dehydrating food
Canning
Packing in sugar
Teas for pleasure and medicine
Flowers you can eat.
Gardens for renters
Super-fast growing vegetables
Container gardens
Wild foraging
Food from the beach and sea.
Emergency herbs
Emergency water
Power out lights and heat
Working co-operatively
Food activism: fighting off multinationals like Monsanto & Codex Alimentarius
Local food subversion.

Here is Robin Wheeler, recorded in the Britannia Library May 13th, 2009.

[speech]

This is Radio Ecoshock with Alex Smith. You are listening to a speech by Robin Wheeler, developed from her new book "Food Security for the Faint of Heart." It's from New Society publishers, and a real value for just $17 bucks in paperback. She has an easy reading style peppered with humor.

You may want to start up a scrap book or index cards to research the food security ideas that will work best for you. As the economic crisis meets peak oil and climate disruption, we all need to get a lot more active in local food sources. Learn how to work with Nature's timetable, and store away for leaner times.

As Robin shows, the coming times don't need to be all that scary. In fact, they can be empowering and more righteous. Why are we treading toward obesity on factory foods laden with chemicals? Can we really keep colonizing land from the world's poorest people to grow our soy and hamburgers? How many carbon miles are in your cupboards?

When we stabilize our society to our own place, sustainably for generations, a whole load of stress and lies will fall away. Food is one good place to start, the roots of a civilization we could be proud of. For a change.

Speaking of change, next week we'll visit a unique un-conference. It was called "The Great Turning" - hosted by Be the Change Earth Alliance. Hundreds of people turned out for an all-day gathering around circular tables. They talked and plotted the big changes needed to save the Earth and ourselves. That and more, next week on Radio Ecoshock.

DEAD MALLS, GLOBESITY & SIMPLICITY

[Opening clip: I just want to get a megaphone, and yell to people entering the Mall "It isn't in there."]

That is Cecile Andrews - and she's right. Happiness is not in the shopping mall, never was.

I'm Alex Smith, this is Radio Ecoshock.

This program is loaded. You'll hear retail expert Howard Davidowitz. He's the shopping expert who says 200,000 American stores will close - and the great days of consumerism are dead. May they rest in peace.

Following that interview from New York, we go to France. Michelle Holdsworth is co-author of the new book "Globesity, A Planet Out of Control?" We explore the relationship between obesity and climate change. Can fat warm the world?

In the second half hour, 15 minutes from a new speech by Cecile Andrews. She brought us "Slow Is Beautiful". Her new book, perfect for tough times, is "Less Is More". It's all about the simplicity movement, and how simple human community saves lives.

I'll wrap up the program with a survival project: one day canning, how to eat better for half the cost.

READ MORE....

LIFE AFTER THE CRASH

Holy Hanna - the wheels are coming off the gilded wagon of capitalism. Part of me is excited that the zombie system killing the planet has cracked open. My other side is fearful. I like peaceful streets and grocery stores with food in them. Damn it, I'm cheering and weeping for both sides!

Let's have a little chat.

In addition to surviving, we'll also talk about whether you should homestead where you are, or plan to eco-migrate. The show includes an interview with Eco-migration expert Dr. Norman Myers of Oxford. He practically founded the field with a paper written in 1993. Myers is author of 19 books and winner of many prestigious awards.

After last week's program, where I realized the climate has already tipped, I briefly considered ending Radio Ecoshock. Part of my mission was to save the climate, to stop the change. Now, with the latest science in, I don't think that is possible. We have inadvertently tripped a switch that will end up, as James Hansen says, with a different planet. Just with the greenhouse emissions already released, and committed by our dependence on coal and oil, the irreversible melting of the Polar ice has begun, along with the world's glaciers. It's just a matter of how fast, how bad, and can we adapt.

In this time together, I'll give you my best guesses, and my own puny plans, and chatter from the Net.

Is it co-incidence that the financial world has collapsed just as we learn our climate fate? I don't think so. The same people who looted our pension funds and banks were allied with the fossil fuel and automotive lobbies that quashed the early warnings on climate. Even deeper, three out of four Americans now know how serious climate is. They've seen it in the fires, floods, droughts, and storms. A poll done by Rasmussen Reports found 23 percent of Americans, one in four, say it is somewhat likely that global warming will destroy human civilization within the next century.

You and I need to prepare for turbulent times - on two different but related paths. We hope to stay fed, in our homes, in the short term. Yet some of us may have to move, as climate migrants, in the coming decade or two. We'll call it the three month strategy, and the three year plan. That is coming up, along with another installment of my audio blog on long-term food storage, where Alex finds out not everything goes as expected.

READ MORE

MUSIC PLAYLIST AND CREDITS: song clips from reggae master Jimmy Cliff, "The Harder They Come", Mark Knopfler and Emmy Lou Harris "Beachcombing", and Canadian artist Shane Philip, "See You In the Sun" Leonard Cohen with "Closing Time". Check out You tube for The Monster Crash with lyrics by Martin Eiger, and the comedy bit Greensumption from nuganics.com. If you need more time for station ID, cut in at 29:55 and then take time from end song.

EARLY DEPRESSION DAZE

Forget Madoff. Wall St. is the giant Ponzi scheme.

The former NASDAQ Chairman and investing icon Bernard Madoff admits he ran a giant investment scam that lost $50 billion. Everyone, the wealthiest and wise, were taken in. Even the Rothschilds were hit, not to mention Swiss banks, British Banks (Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC), hedge funds (for a cool ten billion), Jewish charities, university endowments, pensions funds, municipalities. Lots of pain - but it's also illustrative of the much bigger landscape. Wall Street and all the big banks were just Ponzi operations, paying out old investors from new suckers. Can you say "sub-prime"?

Hear, in his own words, audio of Bernie explaining why fraud just isn't possible these days, due to stiff regulation. Yeah right.

It gets worse. The CDS/CDO asteroid is set to strike Earth in 2009. Bets totaling at least $50 trillion dollars come home for settlement. But that is more than the net worth of Earth. As Max Keiser points out - even if every American home and business were sold off to the Chinese and Saudis - the debt still wouldn't be paid.

That is the black hole the American Treasury and the FED (read: the same bank nuts who got us into this mess) are trying to fill up with your childrens' tax money. There isn't enough money in the world to settle these gambling debts. The idea any of it is going to be paid back is ridiculous. It just goes into the hole, and is never seen again. That is called "deflation".

Why doesn't the government give the money to the people instead? Or at least start up some productive industry, like building alternative energy plants, and more trains. Sadly, the gangsters/bankers are in charge of our government now, scaring the politicians worse than Osama bin Laden. And paying them off too.

Alex explains.

Then we interview Michael Byron on surviving the Crunch. He's the author of the Infinity's Rainbow series, and a professor in the San Diego area. His last book is:
""The Path Through Infinity’s Rainbow: Your Guide for Personal Survival and Spiritual Transformation in a World Gone Mad."

Finally, at the request by a couple of listeners, Alex comes clean about his food storage project. How much things cost, how long will wheat last in buckets, why is bulk food so hard to find all of a sudden? Getting in ahead of the curve, as the world food situation - even in plentious America - gets scary.

You will also hear a song I love, capturing the times "Clearcut" by Ethan Miller and Kate Boverman. And, of course, "Food Storage Blues" by Mormon Brother Thompson and the bean sisters.


Alex's food storage audio blog. Bit of music and fun. Radio Ecoshock 081219 1 hour CD Quality 56 MB or Lo-Fi 14 MB