SHARON ASTYK

Fermented foods are a huge part of food preservation, a bigger part that most of us know. I think sometimes we underestimate fermenting as a means of keeping things alive because it doesn't hold foods entirely in seeming stasis as canning or freezing do (yes, canned and frozen foods degrade too), which is what many of us really want. But what fermented foods do really well is work with the seasons to keep food cyclically - they are the ultimate preservers gift for people who want to be regularly engaged with their dinner.

Sandor Katz's new book The Art of Fermenation is astonishingly comprehensive and fascinating. Besides the incredible history, recipes, cool pics of the microorganisms you are playing with, ideas for experimentation and socio-culture of food, there is Katz's basic manifesto - we are not better off, safer, healthier or happier when we hand off the tools of food production and preservation to others.

So let us imagine that in fact, such a limitless source of energy does exist. Does it actually solve all our energy problems? Because this is a real and interesting and important question - and one many people believe to be the case. In fact, I would argue that the reason we need to talk about this is that the assumption that something being possible solves the problem is incredibly pervasive even among well educated people who ought to know better.

Just about every sustainability magazine on the planet, much less the food ones seems obsessed with no-knead breads. No-knead is trumpeted by everyone on the planet as the easy, awesome way to make bread, the thing that will convert non-bread makers into converts. Now don't get me wrong - I don't really have a dog in this hunt - I'm certainly not opposed to no-knead, but I don't see it as the miracle that some do.

Quite a number of readers suggested I respond to James McWilliams' piece in the New York Times "The Myth of Sustainable Meat." McWilliams has garnered quite a bit of attention by critiquing the idea of local food, and in some cases, some of his analyses, as far as they go, are right. For example, McWilliams is quite right that if everyone in America eats as much beef as they always have, but converts to grassfed beef his figures are roughly correct.

In this case, the call for sustainable egg production I made last week (in response to a rather better New York Times article, in fact) would seem to be insanely misguided. After all, as several readers pointed out, eggs would be more expensive, and we probably couldn't eat as many of them. Woah - so that means eggs are totally unsustainable, right?

Nobody needs to put 1 or 4 or 10 million chickens in one place - there simply is no reason for it, when you can have 300,000 households with 3 chickens each, and 100,000 farms with 100 chickens each ranging over them.

Industrial production by its very nature is inhumane - it can't be anything else.

In order to eat animal products ethically, we must choose to know where our food comes from. We will pay a little more (I'm selling my eggs for four bucks a dozen these days). The eggs don't have to come off our plate, though - the chickens simply have to come into the light.

The models and thinking about regional food have been too simple - either they fail to take into account the real and serious challenges we face because of an excess of optimism, or they leap, in an excess of pessimism, to disaster. The fact, for example, that New York City can't feed its present population or itself at all does not mean that New York City will cease to exists in a lower energy future. And yet, many analysts have stopped there, or allowed a long-term conclusion (ie, eventually we might find some kinds of shipping and transport interrupted by shortages of fossil fuels) to lead them to skip over the nearer term likelihoods (period interruptions, higher prices, less refrigerated shipping) and assume "we're all doomed."

Let's scrap the misleading language of "creating more resources." When was the last time you made a fish or some oil? Instead, let's try and get a real sense of what high oil prices are driving us to do - digging around in our couch cushions for loose change.

It is always impossible to distinguish between weather and climate, and I'm not making any claims here, other than humorous ones about my laundry. It is hard for a gardener like me not to be gleeful in some measure - I have daffodils, warm dirt, tiny spinach leaves, baby rabbits, clean laundry - what's not to love?...But just like there's some vague part of me that worries when the laundry pile gets empty - it is nice, but not NORMAL at my house, it is hard to love with a whole heart this world, whether this warming is momentary or meaningful. The long term predictions for my place echo in my head - like Georgia, only drier, by the end of the century. If we aren't having a Georgia spring, we are certainly having a Virginia one, and isn't without consequence.

Collapse is a scary word, and some people doubt it is even relevant to us. Obviously we are facing some major challenges in this century. Does that mean collapse? What is collapse, exactly? When societies have collapsed, what actually happened? How bad is it? Are there ways of reducing the badness? While historic events can't give a totally accurate picture of the future, they can at least give us some ground to stand on.

This was an important discussion back when I wrote it in 2007, and somehow, I've never re-run it (although it does appear in Aaron and my book _A Nation of Farmers_). It is definitely time to talk more about this model, and I'm hoping to enlist many of you in doing an evaluation of the real productivity of our home gardens and farms - using this as a model. So time to run it again, as a starting point for seeing how much progress the local food movement has really made in the years since it began!