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Food Preservation-- Quick overview

3/20/2021

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This is the "Preservation" section of a presentation given at CSW 2021, the Convention on the Status of Women, typically held each spring in New York.  Cathy Mauluulu of Big Ocean Women and I taught the "Four Ps" of greater self-reliance when it comes to food:  Principles, Production, Preservation, and Propagation. (Our portion of the video begins at 1:23:45.)
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No matter who you are or where you live, there’s a way to better use the resources around you. 
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A few years ago I read a report saying that in the United States, 40% of the food grown is wasted, rather than eaten. Some of that happens in the field, some in warehouses or stores, some in restaurants or homes.  That’s awful.  And it’s not just a problem in wealthy nations.  Not even close.  It turns out that in developing countries, 40% of the food grown is wasted rather than eaten.  More of it spoils in the field, since it’s harder to get to market, or to preserve it for extended periods.  

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If you can get the food when it’s plentiful and in danger of spoiling if not handled quickly, preserving it is a way to not only save money and prepare for the future, but a way to reduce the waste in the world. And of course, reducing waste saves money.  One thing I do fairly often is buy several pounds of food when it’s marked down because of nearing its sell-by date, take it home, and right away preserve it for later.  It most often gets cooked, packaged in a useful size for my family, labeled, and frozen.  If it's meat, sometimes I’ll pressure can it instead for quick meals later. Either way, whenever we eat it, we’re eating at last month’s or last year’s prices.  And yes, in places where it’s legal to have a year’s worth of food on hand, getting that much basic food is not only doable, but saves you so much money! In times that the prices rise—whether because there’s a shortage, or because there’s high demand—if I have plenty of food on hand, I can hold off buying until the prices drop. This benefits everyone. It helps me because I’m eating on last year’s prices. And it helps my community because not buying the in-demand food then leaves more for those others who need it.

Waste less in your own home and garden, and don’t eat up everything right away.  It’s the food version of “spending less than you earn.” See what you can preserve for later. Even storing away a tablespoon of rice per day will add up. 

A cookbook from almost two hundred years ago explains, “The true economy of housekeeping is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost.  I mean fragments of time, as well as materials, … whatever be the size of the family, every member should be employed either in earning or saving money... and should be taught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has not been done to assist others.” (America Frugal Housewife, 1838)
One important aspect of preserving is to share, especially anything you don’t have time, space, or energy for. Whatever is around should be used to benefit someone.

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Some of the methods of preserving include dehydrating or drying, pickling or brining, smoking, freezing, dry-pack canning, pressure canning, boiling-water canning, or ‘root cellaring’—which doesn’t actually require a real root cellar.  Your area and circumstance will best fit with at least one or two of those.   How can you learn what will be best?  What are your area’s traditional ways of preserving? Find a mentor—the older and more experienced, the more wonderful it is on both sides. Create a ‘maternal economy,’ a sisterhood, a brotherhood, utilize the experienced home economists at your local extension office.

Some climates are warm and dry, which is perfect for drying foods.  When I lived in El Paso,Texas as a little girl, we dried apricot halves up on our hot black asphalt roof, with the fruit spread out on clean window screens and covered lightly to keep off bugs.  When we moved to a much colder climate, we dug a hole in the garden and buried a big, clean garbage can in which we stored our carrots through the winter. Eventually we bought an electric dehydrator—which is still one of my favorite tools.  In my previous house, we had very limited space to store foods, so I started drying some of the foods that I used to bottle.  Take tomatoes, for instance.  Six quarts’ worth of tomatoes could now fit into a single quart jar, once the tomatoes were dehydrated and powdered.  Tomato powder can be used in almost any recipe that calls for canned or cooked tomato products-- everything from tomato juice to pizza sauce to tomato paste. Now I make powders out of lots of vegetables- bell pepper, celery, tomato, mushrooms, pumpkin, zucchini. They thicken and flavor soups and sauces, or hide in smoothies or baked goods like bread or brownies. Powdered zucchini or pumpkin can be used in any recipe that calls for puree.
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There’s so much that can be done to preserve and use food instead of wasting it! Links to instructions and resources for dehydrating, as well as the other preservation methods, are below, as well as on my "Favorite Resources" page. ​
►How to Waste Less food posts: 
-Reducing Food Waste, and What To Do With Sour Milk
-Cutting Food Waste

►How to eat well and still spend less 

►Canning 101 -  Free video trainings from the USU Extension Office, for lots of kinds of canning, from marmalade to meat.
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►Canning Meat, from Backwoods Home Magazine
 
►"How To Can Anything"    You'll have to see this one to appreciate the treasure trove it is. It has step-by-step canning photos, how-to's, why-to's, why-not-to's, plus lots and lots of recipes.  Also has links for purchasing what you'll need.  

►Which foods can be safely bottled at home    
There's also a great FB canning group, called "We Might Be Crazy But We're Not Stupid"-- they are careful to stay within USDA safety guidelines. 

►Tattler reusable canning lids          

►http://www.dehydrate2store.com/  - how, what, and why to dehydrate.  Lots of videos, including one on building good-looking, shallow shelves for your storage jars.
 
►How to dry-pack foods  This link has several links within it. 

►Making and Using Vegetable powders 
 
►Storing Vegetables At Home --How to store them through the winter, even without a root cellar. 

►Storing Fruits and Vegetables at home:  see page 5 at this link for a chart of what foods prefer similar conditions.
 
►http://www.motherearthnews.com/modern-homesteading/root-cellaring-zm0z85zsie.aspx   Written by Mike and Nancy Bubel (who wrote the book on Amazon, considered the 'bible' of root cellaring!)

►http://www.nepanewsletter.com/cellar.html gives an excellent, detailed overview of what you learn in the Bubel's book

►“Return of the Root Cellars”-- great overview. 

►hows, whys, recipes, and supplies for making consistent quality pickled (lacto-fermented) foods. I haven’t tried these yet, but I have been adding more fermented foods to our diet.   Also this: https://myfermentedfoods.com/how-make-lacto-fermented-pickles/  
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Overview of Seed Saving

3/20/2021

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This is the "Propagation" section of a presentation given at CSW 2021 (Convention on the Status of Women, typically held each spring in New York).  Cathy Mauluulu of Big Ocean Women and I taught the "Four Ps" of greater self-reliance when it comes to food:  Principles, Production, Preservation, and Propagation. (Our portion of the video begins at 1:23:45; the seed saving/propagation part begins at 1:39:05.)
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The fourth of our four Ps is Propagation-- Tapping into the natural self-sustaining abilities of the plants you grow for food. That might include saving some seeds from your crop, or be as easy as saving some of your potatoes or taro tubers to plant next season. The simplest way to start is when you buy seeds, keep any you don't use.  They will be good next year if you take good care of them- keep them cool, dry, and dark.  They will last at least a few years if you store them properly.   I usually get a good four or five years out of my seeds.  After that, not as many of them will germinate.  You can use seeds from your pantry, too: the dry beans you buy will grow in your garden, though you might not know which variety they are.
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​Seed-saving is part of the expected, normal way of gardening in some cultures, and there are big reasons to do it.  One is the security of having the seeds you’ll need, without having to rely on local market conditions.  Last year, we had a cold, wet spring. I had planted pole beans, and after a month most hadn’t sprouted.  I went to the store to get more.  There were no pole bean seed packets for sale anywhere local anymore.  So of the ones that grew, I let some beans mature on the vine, dried them, shelled them-- and now they’re ready to plant when needed in a few weeks.  

Another reason to seed save is it helps create plants that are adapted to your garden and climate. That’s how we get ‘heirloom’ varieties. The best plants are developed by saving seeds from individual plants that have traits you want. Over the years, a better strain will be developed.

Traditionally, it’s been considered too cold in Siberia to grow watermelons.  Dima in Novosibirsk (NO-vo-see-BEERSK), Siberia, planted them anyway.  After a few years, one tiny tennis-ball sized melon matured.  It held two seeds.  He saved those and planted them the next year.  This time, more watermelons matured. He saved seeds from the largest of them, planting them the next spring. After ten years, he was consistently getting kilo-sized mature watermelons.  We got early-producing, cold-tolerant tomatoes from Siberia in the same way.  Plants in other places are selected to produce well despite heat, drought, or particular diseases.

There’s a huge advantage to the agricultural diversity created by individuals selectively saving seeds- eventually, pests and disease hit individual varieties. If we are relying almost completely on just a handful of varieties, results can be catastrophic.  There’s a potato blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the mid 1800s. In the early 1900s, the boll weevil destroyed most of the cotton crop for decades in the southern United States. Having a big diversity of location-specific varieties provides botanists great resources to find disease-resistant varieties.
 
Some seeds are simpler than others to save properly. Tomato seeds are in this category- put the jelly and seeds in a jar with a little water. Set it someplace warm for about three days, until it starts to ferment. The fungus that grows in it is a good thing- it breaks down a slippery coating on the seeds that prevent good germination, and the fungus produces helpful bacteria that help prevent some diseases when the seed becomes a plant.  Rinse and drain the seeds, keeping the ones that sink. Spread on a clean cloth to dry, then store in a labeled plastic bag. When they’re totally dry, store in a paper packet or plastic bag. Label.

If you want to learn more, where do you start? There are some great resources below.  

Where else do you go to learn?  The same as you do for producing food.  You don’t have to be good at it to start, just willing to learn. Find a mentor- a neighbor who knows more about it than you do. Grow a sisterhood of women who “gather and work harmoniously together in ways that bring about … goodness” and use the fruits of their labors to bless their community. 
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Resources:
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►Local growers and co-ops

►Your local/county/state/national Extension Office; here's one for Utah; all states have one, as well as many countries across the world.  https://extension.usu.edu/yardandgarden/​  

►www.seedsavers.org/mission    

►www.seedsave.org  

►Seed Saving instruction booklet, on Kindle, $5, by Bill McDorman  
https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Seed-Saving-instructions-wildflowers-ebook/dp/B01A83JYB4

Growing a garden without buying packets of garden seeds: 
►https://dontwastethecrumbs.com/regrow-food-water/
►Start thinking GARDEN! - The Provident Homemaker 
►More seeds from your kitchen - The Provident Homemaker
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    I'm a disciple of Christ, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a family-defending, homemaking, and homeschooling mom of eight children, two of whom sometimes can't have milk or wheat. Growing up on a farm in a high mountain valley, my parents taught me to 'make do', work hard, smile, and help others.  I love cooking, learning, growing food and flowers, picking tomatoes, and making gingerbread houses --which CAN be made allergy-friendly-- with my children.  I hope you find something to help you on my site!

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