Guest Post by Demeter
Friday the thirteenth. According to this morning’s headlines, the US annual inflation rate is only 6.5%. The “core” inflation rate (excluding the volatile food and energy sectors) is 5.7%.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the price of organic apple juice at the local Walmart was $2.29 for a half gallon until a couple of months ago. Now it’s $3.27 for that same half gallon. That’s an increase of 43%.
On January 14, 2022 I bought a 25 pound bag of California grown organic brown basmati rice for $68.09. Today that same bag of rice sells for $90.53. That’s an increase of 33%. Fortunately, a long grain organic brown rice grown in Missouri is available for less. At least until they divert the Mississippi River to California.
As prices have gone up, quality has gone down.
I buy organic when I can, so my experience may not be the norm. I buy potatoes at the local farmers’ market and I usually have some available in storage until around Christmas. Last year, in January when I started to buy potatoes at the supermarket, they were wrinkled, rubbery and had eyes. They could not have been from the 2021 harvest. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, there was not a single potato available around here for months. Someone had bought them all up. I figured the ones offered for sale in 2022 were the ones purchased in 2020 and hoarded for two years.
Last summer, one of the farmers at the market told us he was selling a lot of potatoes to local restaurants. The restaurant owners were telling him they were paying $50 for a 50 pound bag of potatoes from their conventional sources and half of them were rotten.
When I made my first trip to the store after the “two weeks to flatten the curve” lockdown announcement, the only thing available in the produce department was 5 pound bags of carrots. The other departments were similarly desolate. Frozen food took a very long time to recover. I can’t remember whether potatoes or toilet paper reappeared first.
Back to the issue of quality.
I buy dried fruit in the winter. Last year it was simply not available. This year I bought one bag that was “rehydrated”. The fruit was damp and sticky and not very satisfactory. Then I bought some that were not rehydrated. The fruit is very dry. Now I know why the first one was rehydrated. I’m guessing all this fruit was purchased by a hoarder after the 2021 harvest and released to us peons a year later.
My preferred apple juice is organic and unfiltered with no additives. There is a brand produced in my home state of Pennsylvania that I have bought for years. Last year, it was unavailable from early July until early December. When I was able to buy it, some of the bottles had started to ferment, even though it was pasteurized. I could not find an expiration date on the bottles. This juice could not have been from the 2021 apple harvest. This year that brand is not available at the store where I usually buy it. I would wish for Biden to release some like it from the Strategic Apple Juice Reserve, but probably he would only release fermented bottles.
The orchard that produces this apple juice is in the eastern half of the state near the Maryland border. It’s relatively convenient to DC. I speculate that the government is buying it up. It might be stored in the Continuity of Government complex which is rumored to be in (or under) Greenbrier County in West Virginia.
And finally, there’s honey. I buy mine locally. Although the price has gone up, the quality is still good. But with Biden at the helm I’m confident there will be mandatory “vaccination” of honeybees by the end of the year.
Because your unvaccinated honeybees cannot be allowed to endanger your neighbor’s vaccinated bees.
And then there’s the reason that will never be stated. If Covid vaccine uptake through the shots has fallen to disappointing levels, we’ll just have to put the vaccine in the food supply. And we can’t let any uncontaminated honey slip through to people.
When the rule goes into effect, I guess I’ll stop buying honey.
So what’s the food situation like in your part of the world?
Demeter once worked in medical research and market research. She now finds fulfillment as a conspiracy theorist.
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Prices up, quality down, selection down. We are looking to get a local quarter cow as meat is getting out of hand at the store. Everything is use or freeze by todays date and they mean it. Have been trying to hire a butcher for two years. Paid ten bucks for eggs this week. 9.89 to be exact. What in the serious fuck.
Spring time not far off so peeps be robbing pigeon and various birdie nests for eggs.
Maybe raise a few ostrich. Their eggs are enormous. One scrambled ostrich egg probably feeds 4-6. Oh. and ostrich meat. It ain’t beef but as I recall I believe it’s color red.
Peking duck eggs are larger than chicken’s (Peking on the left). Easy peasy to raise…mature at a tremendous rate.
Many to most of their eggs are double yoke, and so far my three females have produced two triple yoke eggs!
They are free ranged on my pond, it is fenced in on one end with motion lights and scarecrows (and scarecrows with motion lights) all around the pond, and have survived the coyotes so far.
Big drawback I did not anticipate was them eating the minnows. However I have three cinder block refuges, so hopefully many will survive?
The average female produces 300 eggs a year… that is about what we are getting.
They don’t fly and waddle around the pasture eating slugs, worms, etc.
Also makes for a quick comedy skit when my miniature Dachshund puppy goes on the waddle chase.
Thanks for this. Had not considered these.
Sounds good.
You bet buddy.
I built them a little winter hutch out of hay bales, with a tarp over it, held down with stakes and bricks on the corners for when the pond freezes over (cheap coop)…and hopefully that would be where they lay their eggs and it has been an egg collection/winter storm success!
Tractor supply and most feed stores sells them.
I love their eggs, a darker slightly more flavorful yoke, some say more pugent but I think that is too strong a word…I would say ‘richer’…definitely thicker whites, and BIGGER EGGS!
The most popular duck for eggs and meat in Asia.
(I also got a huge break on my insurance…so there is that too).
Duck eggs are ok, but have a funky flavor to them….just in my opinion only.
Salt of the earth Joe…you crack me up…
Those loafs of bread are shorter and cost 2 times as much. The chickens were probably mal nourished because of supply disruptions and then claimed another fake virus was killing them.
Various metal and chemical toxicities have symptoms matching every “virus caused” disease.
My grand mother ate a very healthy low fat diet . She lived to 87 years old . Only problem was she developed dementia and heart problems and her last five years she declined slowly and spent the last two in a hospital bed . No matter what it doesn’t end well..
Genetics will out. My mother lived to 99 and had problems because of a fall when she was 94. She had to have a modest level of care until her death. I am considered elderly and I am damn sure I will not make it to 99.
Prices are up because the currency is worthless. Good quality food (including organic) is still available with no sign of shortage.
Moar incentive for the Lumpen to be prepared to enjoy the upcoming compulsory nutrition of ze bugz.
LOL The ‘organic’ marketing wank.
The foods you are buying in a grocery chain labeled ‘organic’ are far from organic. Its a label to fool the ignorant into paying more for the same usual product. Many products like bananas, dates, carrots potatoes, etc can come with a label of ‘organic’ Bananas, dates, carrots do not require an sprays to control, pests, fungus and the like, they are ‘organic’ without the label.
Take eggs a market that people are very susceptible to marketing wank. To be labeled free ranged the producer can just have birds walk about an open floored barn a few minutes of the day. They are still caged and fed nothing but commercial rubbish. Brown eggs are no more nutritious than any other colored eggs and that bright orange yolk, its a dye added to their feed. Real farm fresh eggs do not vary in color or consistency.
Beware the ‘organic’ labels, they are mostly fake.
I had a co-worker who kept some chickens in a caged area (10×8 appx). Never let them out never moved the cage and fed them corporation produced chicken feed. She would sell them to other co-workers as cage free organic. I would just shake my head. In a picture of them she showed me I noticed a rooster or two in with the hens. I asked her if she new she was selling fertilized eggs. Talk about a deer in the headlights. I don’t fancy having chicken sperm with my eggs.
Ty. Can’t laugh any harder.
You don’t want sperm in your eggs but it’s okay with you that eggs are a chicken’s menstrual cycle?
Abortions on toast.
Fish sperm OK?
https://onthegas.org/food/shirako/
You rode that special bus when you were in school didn’t you.
I think it was DR. Berg on utube that said they color the chicken meat otherwise it’d be grey.
Farm salmon too. Meat is grey so the feed has colourants that make the meat pinkish.
Nobody wants to know how sausage is made.
Yea, I see your point…
Thankfully, we get eggs from our neighbors. 12oz. of local honey was $7.99 last week. Honey likes Campbell’s Tomato Juice. Within two weeks, it tasted acidic, so we dumped it. That never used to happen.
I’m buying a Garrett Valley ham nugget today at Earth Fare; late last month it was $2/lb. more than in early December.
The Xmas cold snap killed all of our 12 Bibb lettuce plants. A local hydroponic farm suffered the same, so Publix now sources from NY State. It gets discolored after 2-3 days.
This year I am going all “windowsill”, beet greens and romaine mini lettuces in those single use aluminum foily-type bread pans, and micro tomatoes in flower pots, I buy second tier grade A eggs and hard boil them, they last for weeks in the fridge, just put a schmear of creamy dressing on them mmm. Milk here still $4/gallon and real butter $5/lb. I noticed the loaves of bread are half as long as they used to be, been hitting the bulk bins heavily at Winco, instant mashed potatoes, dry pasta, rice. We are in potato country here so spuds are nice and inexpensive. Bought several of those large hard resin cafeteria trays and am going all in to dehydrate carrots, onions, celery, kale etc in the backseat of car on a summers day, for winter soup greens.
If you use any electric to heat your home, get some grow lights instead. They throw heat and grow plants. I have fresh veggies all year even when there is feet of snow outside.
Gonna be a slimmer, trimmer America.
Lamont – Same thing happened to my lettuce, greens and spinach when we went below 0 Christmas Eve. I noticed week before last that some of the smaller plants are coming back.
Long pig has been ruined by vaxx prions. So much for plan ‘C’
Feed them to the pigs.
Or feed them to the flies, feed the maggots to the chickens.
The more steps (stomachs) between you and the jabbed will probably help.
If nothing will stop the spike, no point in worrying about that you can’t change.
Nobody gets out alive.
Sardines are still cheap. Good for you. Put them on a roll with some lingonberry.
We have been raising and selling eggs, pork, beef, lamb, poultry and a wide variety of other farm products for years. I always priced them what I understood their value to be and for about ten years we were always above the prices at the grocery store. Slowly we began to attract loyal customers who were not only interested in a better quality of locally available food for their families, but who actively supported us because they wanted a farm to survive in the community. Most people kept buying their food at the local grocery or WalMart because it was cheaper, but lately we’ve been getting more people wanting to buy directly from the farm because we’ve reached parity. I can’t tell you how often I will get a text of a picture of a meal someone prepared from the food they bought from us and profound appreciation. I don’t think WalMart gets a lot of that kind of feedback.
There is simply no comparison between what you raise yourself and what is available commercially, even if you have minimal interest in cuisine. It’s so much better, and while I have never done a peer reviewed study, I’m guessing it’s much healthier.
Now we’re the ones closing our customer base down. Most of our most loyal supporters make larger buy ins so in effect, we raise entire animals for them, butchering year round and always having plenty on hand.
We use our meat as a trade good with people who come up and work on projects with us and it is always a fair exchange.
I don’t know how we were so easily led away from a connection to our sustenance, but like so many other things we outsource that we shouldn’t- child care, elder care, house cleaning, etc.- convenience weighed heavier in the scale than quality. I think that’s changing and people are starting to realize they made a mistake and now want to reclaim at least some of those more important functions for their lives.
All our eggs are sold now even before they are laid…
I’ve got three meat rabbit cages ready to go (no rabbits yet – but have all the needed books etc.) and a stall in the barn I can make into a home for goats…but I will need more fencing.
Expanding the garden and planting more berry bushes and fruit trees.
Two grape arbors are doing amazing.
200 Sweet Potatoes are boxed up, wrapped in newspaper (in the basement) with an apple in every box to retard budding with its decomposing gas.
We can like crazy.
Pork, beef, lamb, are on my wish list for the future. Have a neighbor with the fencing up (34 acres) we have talked about partnering.
Where do you get newspaper? The little town newspaper we have is about 10 pages a week. I’m not paying for a city paper just to have newspaper.
I ordered the Epoch Times Paper for my FIL…had to get him off the local liberal rag (he is a newspaper reader – no computer or phone)…the ‘Raleigh News and Observer’…called the ‘Raleigh News and Disturber’.
I also directed him to The American Scene channel for news on his bedroom Dish TV…we have lots of discussions and he has a sharp mind (will be 90 soon) but I had to get him away from the propaganda and the CO on Fox.
Grocery store ads. We get some delivered in the mail each Wednesday. I use mine to start fires in the grill or the fire pit. You can always pick up extras when you shop.
We buy rolls of newsprint. A roll lasts a long time.
What do you think about quail? Understand they’re bred to be in appropriate cages. Is our squeamishness about caging justified or just bunk?
Chickens are problematic because of predators. really miss them.
Not a lot on a quail. They are wild here and probably take about 3 – 4 to make a meal for one person.
You’d be better off getting smaller chickens like bantams or similar, just make sure to butcher the roosters tho. They crow all night and are very annoying. Guinea fowl but they can be hard to keep close to home and make a lot of noise on any intruders whether four or two legged.
I just read the following in a different blog. He’s in England, but I think describes what can be aimed for in local sourcing.
Jd755
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Jan 17, 2023
#294
The farming system that is in place today is a direct consequence of concentrating human beings into large groups where providing food and I must add water for themselves is impossible.
I have lived my entire life in the same town and have a ringside seat of this concentrating effort and the effects it has on all aspects of life, not least food and water provision.
As a boy there were no supermarkets in the town. There were three market gardens in the town boundary supplying vegetables mainly direct at the gate and to small shops in town.
Chickens seemed to be on every allotment that was under cultivation. There was at least a dozen sites of varying sizes full of allotments most as I recall were under cultivation.
There was a potato wholesaler, two fruit merchants, two dairies, bakeries, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers, grocers, over forty co-op stores of all kinds, a thriving indoor and outdoor market.
The milk from the cows grazing the land that began at the edge of town and ran out into then hinterland was collected locally and processed locally. The animals were slaughtered at at two abattoirs within 13 miles of the town. The furthest out was adjacent to a cattle market where all the animals from the peninsular farms and the grains, cereals, a large proportion of the farmed vegetables and likely fruit were bought and sold. I do not recall any orchards in town or on the peninsular but I do recall groups of apple trees band pear/plum trees in gardens, on allotments and around farmhouses though no commercial sized orchards come to mind.
There was three Italian run ice cream manufacturers making ice creams from local milk for local consumption.
There was three retail/wholesale seed merchants and two feed merchants.
There was a brewery in the town and there were numerous springs none of which I recall being used for drinking water by people so the water for the town must have been coming from the reservoir system and the diverted streams that feed them as it does today.
The population of my youth was around 60,000 and according to the official count is still around 60,000 today.
As I progressed through my teenage years everything began to disappear. A supermarket arrived in the mid seventies and the direct result was all the wide variety of shops selling local produce and groceries etc from further afield began closing. Even the co-ops entered what turned out to be a prolonged period of closing shops down.
By the time I was married in 1987 I had been here for 27 years. All that was left of the former diversity was one market garden the allotment sites, though the number under cultivation was much less, the brewery though it to would shortly after go, the co-ops own dairy, bakery, pork factory. Roughly two thirds of the co-ops.
The abbatoirs and cattle market continued. Local milk was now being sent on a 100 mile journey for processing.
The indoor market was demolished and replaced with a pale shadow of its former self. Then outdoor market all but disappeared.
The amount of locally grown produce that stayed local diminished year on year.
Today next to nothing that is produced locally on farms, the market gardens have long been covered in roads and houses, is processed locally or sold locally. One farmer has a green grocer stall in the indoor market where he sells vegetables from his farm but half his stalls produce comes from wholesalers many miles beyond the peninsular.
The population peaked at 75,000 in the early eighties as the government ran all sorts of schemes to attract people to live in the town by creating jobs by giving business incentives, usually cash, to set up here. Since then it has been in decline to today where it is hovering at 60,000 and falling.
The population may be broadly similar so the concentrating effort I mentioned above doesn’t seem to hold water but the town is very different. Everywhere I used to play as a boy and teenager has disappeared under housing estates. People that used to live in a house in extended families now seek to live apart from each other at the earliest opportunity.
Schools have been closing or shrinking for over forty years. Of the three schools I attended just one defies the housing estates and remains in use as a school.
The town centre went from roads and streets lined with shops, cafes, barbers, hairdressers, pubs, many pubs were run by local breweries including the one in town to an abomination of large units either purpose built in an arcade or by knocking two or three smaller shops into one.
It is an easy matter to walk the streets of the town and recall where shops once were out amongst the houses.
The big box stores joined the supermarkets and it is now their turn to begin closing and pulling out.
It is fair to say all but all the food consumed in this town of 60,000 be it in the home or in the business is trucked in from hundreds of miles away.
That is why industrial farming came into being. The state through its agents offered the people a way to behave differently and they lapped it up. Also the states constant devaluation of the currency helped enormously.
On YouTube there is a series of programmes called Jacks Country. They date from the eighties. The man presenting is Jack Hargreaves and he said something in one which struck me smack in the chops.
He said when he came back from the war in 1946 he did not recognise farming. All the labour had gone, some was trickling back out of the forces like he was but there was one change above the others that smacked him in the face. The horses were gone.
They had been replaced by petrol powered tractors in the thousands all sold to the United Kingdom government by the United States government.
In 1946 he watched a superb pair of shires win the last ploughing competition and the very next day the farmer sent them to the abbatoir to be turned into pet food.
Most farmers he said were happy to embrace the tractor as its running costs were lower than horses and their grooms and the tractor could keep going for longer hours and it was quicker than horses.
Around that time he said the farming landscape began changing as the hedgerows which are much more than field boundaries were being grubbed up by these tractors to increase the amount of cultivated area and make it even more economic for the usurpation of the horse by the tractor.
Farmers least all the ones I have known over the years concentrate on the bottom line above all else.
So to bring this ramble to some sort of end.
Over my 62 years of life in this town its people have gone from being able to be fed by and large from locally grown or locally produced produce to being 100% reliant on the articulated truck.
The population has fluctuated but not by much. The amount of children in the town has fallen through the floor. The older end people seem more or less stable the difference is in breeding age peoples behaviour. They are not having children at the same rate. They prefer to consume rather than procreate.
The available land for growing plants and animals on has shrunk and that shrinkage is accelerating as the town is now quite filled with houses so new estates are once again being built on gods farm land that industrial farming renders uneconomic to farm. And so the process rolls on.
Scale this up across this island and very very few towns cities and villages can feed themselves.
Not sure if all I have written has any bearing on the premise of the op but left to our own devices market gardening, orchards, agriculture, livestock farming, permaculture etc in other words small scale production for local consumption can easily feed the local population with highly nutritious food whilst providing highest quality water from springs and most importantly a beautiful environment to live life in.
Feed the soil is all we need to do but our individual and collective stupidity seems to be beyond bounds.
Edit to add;
The reason why the population has failed to concentrate is the town has since its arising in the early 1800’s has always been dominated industrially by a large corporation. All incentives to get people here run by the government over my lifetime have collapsed into failure with the businesses that do turn up literally take the money and run, at an appropriate time. Decorum in all scams!
Today the biggest employer is the shipyard. It employs at least twice as many office people than tool using people, which is a fact that repeats in the towns second biggest employer the NHS. So in actual fact the towns two major employers are in truth one, the government. The shipyard is run by a government approved contractor and the NHS is a government run operation.
Private corporations are of no size in employment turns although collectively their employees outnumber the NHS employee level and maybe even the shipyards. Hard to get a handle on things.
The money spent in the town is overwhelmingly spent in supermarkets and big box national changes so it all goes out of town.
A proportion stays in the employees of these chains but then they to patronise their employers store along with the chains and supermarkets.
Its really a giant ponzi scheme in operation.
The two big employers are in a constant struggle to get employees and to hold on to them. They are always running recruitment campaigns and that problem has spread in recent years into all the lesser government departments located here.
The shipyard operator has responded by becoming the sponsor of all manner of educational establishments in the town. From infant, through primary, secondary to college all receive sponsorship from the shipyard in one form or another and all without exception drive their pupils in the direction of the shipyard as the best future career path on offer.
Naturally lots of these young people have no interest in jointing a shipyard so they tend to up sticks and leave the town as they pass out of college and onto university or employment.
This is why the population does not become more concentrated at first blush.
Despite these efforts by these employers the town population of people remains in churn but as I said the towns population of houses goes up at a pace.
Last edited: Jan 17, 2023