It may seem strange, but I follow the tradition of fasting in Lent, not for self-mortification, but perhaps for self-abnegation. It is a good practice to deny the selfish maw of want every now and then, and spring – which is what “lent” means – is a good time to practice. This is the time when food stores are running low in temperate climates. That our grocery store shelves never reflect this is purely a function of ridiculously long distance shipping, mostly refrigerated. Those February tomatoes are coming from the equatorial regions, if not the opposite hemisphere. That, or they are grown in heated buildings with all the energy expenditure necessary to reproduce summer in the middle of winter, plus the added burden of moving all plant needs – soil, water, sunlight – into a building. We expend enormous amounts of energy to maintain summer abundance in the dormant seasons.
This is the central problem of humanity. We don’t follow the food like other animal species. We demand much from the resting seasons in every climate. This is why we began to farm, to nudge our environment toward producing enough food that we can eat in the dormant season. In less profligate cultures, dormant season food stores are dense with nutrition and resistant to rot, whatever that means in a particular climate. Seeds are best in arid regions. A dried bean in the desert is more or less indestructible nutrition. Roots are good in humid climates and have the advantage of preserving not just calories but many of the vitamins and mineral our bodies require. Sadly, leaves require processing and most do not preserve well in any climate. On the other hand, not much besides well-dried grain lasts very long in warm temperatures, whether dry or wet, where microbes are active and no shell is sufficiently impermeable to prevent desiccation.
If the region can support animal feed in the dormant season, humans discovered early on that domesticated or prey animals are the best store of nutrition — though this just transfers the hunger in the lean season. Most prey animals either hibernate or migrate to avoid needing food when plants are not productive. The animals we trap in fences and byres need to be fed with winter stores just as we do.
Fruits — those special seed carriers made by plants to bribe animals with a bit of sugar so that we become plant legs — are not designed to last. Fruit is made to be eaten immediately so that the seed will be carried away and buried in some fertile place before the dormant season brings its particular woes. Plants want fruit to decompose quickly, within the growing season. To keep fruit beyond the growing season, humans must work hard against the fruit’s fundamental nature and purpose.
Humans have found many ways to store foods against the hungry season. We add salt and acid to some fruits and leaves, pickling cucumbers and cabbage. We dry others, removing the water necessary to spread rot in tomatoes and herbs. We ferment some, which is really just a specialized decomposition and transforms grapes and wheat into something else entirely. We use cold, dark, moist places to store potatoes and carrots, trying to mimic the stasis conditions of winter soil. All of these make the harvest last longer, though all interfere with seed viability and, therefore, reduce what will be productive next year. And no matter what we do, nearly all plant tissues will decompose after a few months — many becoming toxic as they rot. Only seeds are designed to last.
These are the time-tested ways in which we have mitigated hunger when plants are resting from their labors. Since the beginning of the fossil fuel bonanza, we have added two more: we ship foods from productive regions and we refrigerate foods to slow microbe activity and desiccation. Both of these methods of “storing the harvest” are energy intensive. Both also feed into overproduction because both toolkits are expensive. Much fruit must be sold to pay the costs of transporting and refrigerating it, much more than what is necessary to pay for traditional methods of preservation. In fact, most producers can’t afford the costs of shipping, and these energy intensive toolkits are usually paid for by huge corporations, all of which are seeking to bring in more money than they spend. So the goal is to sell as much as possible, regardless of need.
And that is exactly what happens. The total caloric output of our global system of food production is somewhere around twice as much as the cumulative caloric needs of every human body on this planet. We grow twice as much food as is necessary to amply feed everyone because industrial — and financialized — agriculture must sell so much to both pay the increased costs and make profits. When agricultural production aims at profit rather than food, then overproduction is not only rewarded, it is necessary. Moreover, waste is also necessary — because obviously people can’t consume twice as many calories as their bodies need each day, and all that overproduction is, by design, wasted.
If farming is geared toward producing food, then long-distance shipping and long-term refrigeration are minimized. These are unnecessary costs that are mostly not recovered by the smaller scale farms that produce food. There are bellies that need food in every community; there is no need to ship it elsewhere. There is also no additional profit in that energy expense. Most foods will sell at the same price in any market. Here or there makes no difference to a summer melon. The only things that command higher prices are those that are both rare and desirable in a given market — like fresh winter strawberries in our culture.
And here is the kicker… we have to want this. There has to be a market. We have to buy into it, to actively support this system with spending, for it to survive. Quite a large number of our dollars are spent on fresh strawberries in winter. We have to pay for this waste, both with our wages and with increased degradation all around the globe. We have to willingly give our wage hours to corporations — that do not need it in any sense of the term — in order for this waste to happen. We are paying them — a lot of money — to ruin our lives.
Maybe strawberries doesn’t seem like ruination, but you aren’t just buying strawberries. Most of the money spent on winter strawberries is buying the shipping and refrigeration and the overproduction and the exploitation. You are buying the whole system, without which there are no strawberries in the dormant season. (Or in regions that can’t produce strawberries at all.) To be blunt, if you buy winter strawberries, then in very real material terms you are paying for sociopolitical and biophysical collapse. You are paying for the hurt that you feel in this world.
So don’t buy winter strawberries?
The scary thing is that unless the whole harmful system is viable and profitable — unless enough people buy winter strawberries — the whole system will break down. There will not be revenues to cover the costs of this expensive system. And right now, in many places in our culture, most particularly in cities where food has to be transported and refrigerated all year long, there is no alternate system for feeding people. We have transformed our culture to be dependent upon this kind of agriculture, and this kind of agriculture has eliminated those that are less profitable, less able to produce huge quantities and pay the necessary costs of preservation and transportation. So if we stop buying winter strawberries, will there be any food at all on urban supermarket shelves?
I worry about these sorts of things… nearly everyone I love lives in places where, at best, there is no food production for about half of the year. Most live far from any production at all. What happens when shipping and refrigeration are unprofitable even at scale? Because this will surely happen within my lifetime, perhaps within a decade.
Being of a practical nature, I try to find things that I can do and that I can do for others that will ameliorate predictable harm, chief of which is to support a localized, needs-based economy. Spend money on what is produced by people I know. This has the double benefit of reducing my dependency on the system that will fail and of building up an alternative, hopefully sustainable, system to replace it. If you have the capacity, then be a producer in that alternate system. Grow food. Make clothes. Build shelter. The more you produce for yourself and your community, the less you need to worry about unmet needs. But ultimately, this is inevitably what you will be doing in a culture that does not have vast energy resources to consume. You will not be a consumer; you will be a producer. Might as well learn how to do that, preferably in ways that make your life pleasant.
Producing is great. This is the fun part of powering down our system. The less fun part is making up for what can’t be produced in a given region or in a given season.
Gardening can be glamorous. There are whole walls in libraries and bookstores devoted to glossy picture books filled with growing abundance. But preserving the harvest is never pretty. If you are lucky, your library might have a county extension agency manual on canning or drying produce tucked away on a lower shelf in the cooking section. (Though this is changing somewhat… there are a few publishers that are making things like fermentation and pickling attractive, at least in print…) Yet, growing food is pointless, it is waste, if you do not make use of the harvest. And since it is nearly impossible to eat all the harvest as it is coming out of the garden, this means that preserving food is a necessary part of gardening. Preserving food should have at least as many dedicated books in the library as growing it. But it doesn’t. Because it is not fun, food preservation remains a fringe skill.
And it is a skill, a whole skill set! Preserving food is more than just canning tomatoes and piling up apples in the root cellar. It is food production. It is all the steps necessary to turn raw materials into edible and durable food. In gardening, it begins with planning out the garden in time as well as space. It is knowing what foods can be stored in your region and how each is best preserved. It is planting what you want to eat or what you can reasonably expect to distribute to others before it rots. It is knowing when any given harvest will be ready and allotting time to do that necessary work after the gardening parts are done. It is allotting space to grow the right amount of any given thing and then allotting space to store it. It is making contingency plans to handle surprises and disasters. It is knowing when the preserved produce will no longer be food and managing the stores so that they are used up well before they rot. It is knowing how to manage those stores, from keeping things clean and accessible to cooking food that will be eaten, preferably with some degree of joy. It is knowing when the harvest stores will be running out and planning on having new foods available when the pantry is exhausted.
And sometimes it is accepting that there will be scarcity from time to time.
Early spring in temperate climates is a time of scarcity. There is almost nothing growing in the plant world. Much of the preceding harvest is reaching its fresh storage limits. The apples are shriveled, the potatoes are sprouting, the beets and carrots are flaccid and probably moldy. There is still a good amount of food in jars, but it’s hard to live on pickles and sauces. If you have managed things properly, there is plenty of grain and all the things made from grains, all providing plenty of calories. But human bodies need more than calories, and stuffing our bodies with carbohydrates doesn’t make for good health.
So in early spring, in Lent, I have taken up fasting. This is not about giving up pleasures… or not only that. This is training my body to live with spring scarcity, to live within my region’s productive capacity, to thrive even in the dormant season. I don’t pick out a few things that I won’t consume. I consume what is available. Some luxuries, like winter strawberries, I may cut out altogether (though at this stage in my life, I hardly ever buy such oil-dependent things). I may eat less overall, but I don’t starve my body. I usually have plenty of winter calories stored up around my middle. All I really need is nutrition — proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals. I do follow a rhythm, choosing to eat little on Fridays ahead of the weekend, but I don’t follow that strictly. It’s not about Friday itself; it’s about what my body needs and when it needs it. If there is a horrible winter storm with subzero temperatures or if I need to be physically active for more than a few hours, I skip the fasting.
I treat spring like a flu virus… When it has me in its grip, I eat little and only when I am hungry. I also eat simply and largely without much variation. Because complexity and variation are just not available this time of year.
As you can see, I’m not following any rules or admonitions — except my one constant precept of minimizing the harm I do in the world. Unlike most forms of fasting or proscribing certain foods, my fasting is not focused on maintaining purity and avoiding contamination. I will eat anything my body can digest — as long as I can acquire it locally. That first part is more limiting in my body than it is for other bodies. I can’t comfortably digest and metabolize a large number of things that make up the average diet in this culture — animal fats, synthetic sugars, stimulants and alcohol are all unusually bad for me. But it is more important to eat what is available in this place, maybe specifically in my own pantry, than it is to worry about what that food is. (Happily, much of the most unhealthy stuff is not and can not be produced locally, certainly not in my own kitchen.)
This is also not really about my body, per se. I am not on a diet with any specific body goals like losing weight or building up muscle tissue. And I should say that if you have body image issues, then fasting may not be a healthy idea. I don’t care what I look like as long as I feel good. And a spring fast makes me feel good, physically and emotionally.
But that’s not the main reason I took up this practice. I am really just learning to live locally, within my ecological limits. Our ancestors did exactly the same thing, though they didn’t have as much choice. Either move to follow the food or tighten the belt when the winter stores run low. They created traditions that gave structure and meaning to these imperatives, so that they could know how to live well in their place and then pass on that knowledge. They feasted at midwinter to eat up the fresh harvest and store it in their bodies. They ate bitter herbs at the vernal equinox because fresh greens were finally available and their bodies needed the nutritional boost after the long winter. They centered holidays on whatever food was flowing at that time of year — dairy at Candlemas, eggs at Easter, and apples at Halloween. And they fasted in Lent. Even when winter stores were plentiful. Because sometimes they weren’t… and it was good practice to be ready for those days of dearth.
And, it must be said, because fasting makes the body appreciate and long for the coming abundance of summer all the more.
So I am being traditional. I am learning what our ancestors knew. I am trying to fit my life within the natural flows of material and energy in my homeland. I am fasting in the spring…
… and I am busily working toward producing — and preserving! — the next harvest.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 