Heart Reading … Day 90
Harvesting season and a thought about food security
I’m not going to lie, as much as I love the fall foliage and these warm October days, I can’t help but feel a bit of agitation knowing the cold winter is right around the corner.
When I first confronted this somewhat absurd fear, I focused on self care and on enjoying things like Smartwool socks, beanies, sweaters, etc. and I indulged in an infrared mat that I could lay on if the cold got really bad.
Harvesting season is such an important time of year and in my corner of New England there are still people who can vegetables and cache root vegetables for the winter … and knit sweaters and chop their own wood, etc. These are not things I do (though I have made maple syrup — and gave that up pretty quickly — and have canned tomato sauce a few times). There were farmers in my ancestry (as in all of our ancestries no doubt) but I have no memory or stories of people preparing food together for the winter months or harvesting the fields — other than the tobacco fields that my mother worked in.
My heart reading today brought up a sense of longing for the type of community that prepares food together. Maybe this longing is a result of the dinner conversation about vegan recipes I had with a friend tonight — or because of the acorns I gleaned for this heart photo above. (btw I’m not taking food from the squirrels, I put them in a pile by the trees, plus these were all from the middle of a dirt road surrounded by other acorns that were getting crushed by cars).
I want a sense of being able to feed myself without a dependency on grocery stores owned by billionaires. But I’m afraid we’re quite a few years away from that as a society — and I am incredibly grateful for Community Shared Agriculture and the regenerative food movement.
I want to not fear the cold or any sense of food depravity I have (which may or may not be irrational). Yet I know that I am a sensitive being unable to live off the land, completely dependent on oil heat and rising prices as well as industrial food production … and rising prices. And I have friends (at least three I know of) who have made their own acorn flour and turned it into cookies or pancakes. But like my short stint with maple syrup I believe they may have found the labor involved with acorn flour to be too taxing to make it a habit.
Hopefully lots of people are having important conversations about food security — not so much from a place of fear and depravity, but from a place of resilience, resourcefulness, and the kind of grit that produces mutual aid and a hefty serving of community connection.
