Dusting off the old food blog

*cough* *hack*

In light of what's happening in "America's breadbasket", I'm going to make an effort to actually write in this thing.

I'm hearing more from people who are actually there than from the news media. I read it in someone's blog first, before the media considered it newsworthy. We can't sit around passively and wait for the media to spoon-feed us information; we need to network and talk to each other. One thing I've been hearing is that people want more recipes for what to do with cheap raw staple foods. If you have a request for information on a specific food, post it here and I'll see what I can come up with.

I'm not going to talk much about growing food, because I know a better site for that. Gayla Trail's You Grow Girl website and book are primarily aimed at urban gardeners -- people who want to grow food in a small yard, on a balcony, or in an allotment garden. The information still applies to people who own larger plots of land, of course, but if you're in a city you still have options. The most useful part of that site to me has been the online community, where you can pick the brains of hundreds of other gardeners around the world. (If you see Indefatigable hanging around in there, that's me.)

We don't know how far this will spread or how bad it will get before it starts to get better, but people have had to do this before. Google "victory gardens" if you want to see how people fed themselves during World War II, when a lot of industrially-produced food was being rationed. The only difference today is that in the 1940s, Americans, Brits, and Canadians were used to eating a lot of fresh food anyways. Today we might feel lost at first without prepackaged frozen dinners, but we'll get used to it. We still have access to soil and water and seeds, and we have kitchens.