Obsession with Hard Things

Over the past couple of months, in the run up to the election and fueled by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, American interest in preparedness surged.  Membership in Facebook preparedness and survival groups skyrocketed.  Rookie inquiries comprised the bulk of the posts.  And the next step beyond the “how do I become prepared for the zombie apocalypse this weekend” questions seemed to evolve into a desire, even an obsession, with doing thing the hard way.

Why this obsession?  Why the curiosity about making flour from zucchini or acorns?  Why the desire to learn foraging?  Why the hard way of starting a fire? 

The quick answer is that people asking these questions recognize that we’re on the path to collapse.  Plain and simple.  They know, as some Hurricane Helene victims in North Carolina learned, that the government isn’t coming to help.  (And what help does come won’t be offered to those of the wrong political persuasion.)

The problem is, they haven’t quite thought things through.  Everything is easy and quick on the internet.  Audio can be played at double-speed, and video much faster than that.  Unfortunately, mere mortals can’t do that in the real world.  We are going to be extremely zapped for time when things fall apart.  There will not be enough hours in the day, nor enough battery to juice our phones and the internet to do our work.

So folks deciding to prepare are faced with two choices:  Food storage or food forage.  Food storage takes so much money, buckets or cans, oxygen absorbers, or MREs, or commercially packed buckets at Costco.  And space.  Hmmm….  "Foraging sounds good.  Just going out and picking what the earth so generously yields.  And it’s free.  And natural." 

The foragers don’t realize that it’s not the Garden of Eden out there.  Food is not just springing up everywhere without any effort on your part.  Not the food you are going to be happy eating.  It takes a heckuva lot of time to gather food this way and lots of experience to make it palatable, especially when we’re going to be pressed for time just surviving in the new normal. 

I have never, ever had any interest in foraging, other than picking wild blackberries, because except for the Missouri years, I could never grow enough at home.  Seriously, that’s why I store food.  So I don’t have to go out and forage.  So my family can eat the foods they are accustomed to and avoid gastrointestinal upset.  It’s also because foraging takes a long time.  A very long time.  When I sautéed tumbleweeds and made tumbleweed rice a few years back, it took me at least half an hour to pick those tumbleweeds and another 10-15 minutes to clean them.  40-45 minutes for how many calories!?!?  Sure, there’s vitamins and minerals in there as well, but that’s a lot of time out of my day.  And those tumbleweeds were right in my yard, not far from the front door.  If I had to take a hike to gather them?  Remember, if we’re foraging, we likely don’t have gasoline, either.  I do wish to learn which wild plants are edible—so that I can point them out to those who chose not to store real food.

Why the obsession with something like zucchini flour?  Yes, it can sub in for some flour in baking and may be more nutritious.  But think about it.  The zucchini to be turned into flour is taking a lot of space in the garden, so something else can’t be grown.  If you let the zucchini grow to the recommended size, that’s going to shut down production/growth of other zucchini on that plant.  Wasted resources.  A waste of calories, nutrition, and food that could have been grown instead.  Then there’s the time spent processing it.  Shredding those giant zucchinis and spreading them on dehydrator trays.  Then the drying energy.  Then powdering the dried zucchini and storing it.  All that time, effort, and wasted garden space to replace something that costs less than 50 cents per pound right now.  Sure, knowing that it is possible is good.  But it doesn’t seem like a wise use of resources.  It’s the same with acorn flour, but worse.  It will take longer to prepare and won’t taste as good. 

Then there’s foraging food in general.  I realize that not everyone lives in a desert, but still.  How much food is really out there, calorie-wise?  And won’t everybody else be looking for it as well?  And then there are those people who say they will just go hunting for their protein. Don’t they realize there are a lot of other people with the same plan?  Do they not recall how wild game was hunted to almost extinction during the Great Depression?

If it’s something you enjoy, by all means do it.  I love spinning fiber into yarn and then knitting it into sweaters and mittens.  This is something I love right now, with all the modern conveniences that make food prep and cooking and cleaning easier, and I never have enough time to do it.  What happens when society collapses?  We don’t suddenly get more time.  We won’t suddenly have more time to forage, prepare, and cook meals.  We won’t have more time to store food for winter and against a time of famine.  We won’t have the time (or the ability) to consult Youtube University for a better way of doing things.  We won’t have time to be obsessed with anything.