#food preserving is solarpunk

[cognitivejustice]

Two men who were instrumental in creating a global seed vault designed to safeguard the world's agricultural diversity will be honoured as the 2024 World Food Prize laureates.

Cary Fowler, the US special envoy for Global Food Security, and Geoffrey Hawtin, an agricultural scientist from the UK and executive board member at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will be awarded the annual prize and split a $500,000 (€464,000) award. In 2004, Fowler and Hawtin led the effort to build a backup vault of the world's crop seeds in a place where it could be safe from political upheaval and environmental changes. 

The facility was built into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle where temperatures could ensure seeds would be preserved.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault - also known as the 'Doomsday vault' - opened in 2008 and now holds 1.25 million seed samples from nearly every country in the world.

[ahedderick]

Crabapples are kind of an extreme fruit. Sour and sometimes a bit bitter, they take a lot of sugar to be edible. Wild rosehips are nicer; you can eat them as-is if you like intense sweet-tart flavor. This fall I decided to make a small batch of crabapple-rosehip jelly.

The thing with crabapple jelly is that you don't need to add pectin (such as Surejel or Pomona's). I simmered the crabapples and rosehips in a 50/50 mix of apple cider and water, strained it twice, then cooked the resulting juice with an equal measure of sugar. I can't quite describe the very old-fashioned 'jelly test' I used, except to say that my mother taught it to me and it involves pouring a few drops of the mixture off the side of a large spoon until it drips "correctly."

Crabapples produce a jelly with a very different consistency. It's honestly more like pine tar. My uncle, who loved foraged foods and unusual jellies, called it "the La Brea jelly." I'd have been mad about that, but . . he wasn't wrong.

I ended up with a small quantity of extremely sticky, rosy-amber jelly with tons of sweet-tart flavor.

[ID: A small dish of jelly held up to the light to show its color. Also the same dish of jelly sitting beside a plate with a piece of bread and jelly.]

[solar-sunnyside-up]

Autumn and winter is a RUBBISH time for my love of solarpunk to be rekindled, because so much of what I can act on is guerrilla gardening. Alas, here I am, getting back to my solarpunk roots.

Do you have any suggestions for solarpunk activities we can work on in the cold months?

God I feel for this!!! Winter always feels like such a festering time to be in love with solarpunk. Not to mention how starved we are for winter content for solarpunk and lunarpunk in general. But yeah!! Here's some ideas to do in winter!!!

Out and about:

There are a lot more social clubs in your city then you'd expect! I know 2 different community associations in my city that have social clubs that go in adult field trips (like to farms and cafes ans boardgame places!!)! And have crafting clubs! And the best part is if their in your community, it's within a decent walk of you but it's almost always walkable!

Using a library!! For anything! Everything! In my provenance we got a saying "Use it or they

Graffiti- leaving kind messages or fun stickers all over the place isn't really a weather restricted activity for the most part. I know someone who made a Playlist filled with union songs and rebellion songs and put a code for it and links to how to unionize on stickers and did that.

Adopt a stop- more cities have these then you might think! But adopt a stop programs basically let you take care of a certain bus stop and this lets you add things (like good benches, shoveling and removing ice, asking the city to add heaters, etc..) you become the advocate for that bus stop. If your city doesn't have a program like it yet you can ask your city or community to start one since it saves a bunch of money on maitance costs!

At home:

Archiving and pirating - highly recommend doing it in a physical sense if you can afford it. Bc then you can give them out as gifts!

Create!! - Sewing, sewing for friends, knitting gloves/scarfs for ppl who might need it, make art to inspire others via writing or drawing or other mediums! Gift economies require gifts after all so make some!

Learn! - learning a new skill, like canning or how to install solarpanels. Researching in general, but also keeping up to date with local politics and what you can do on the ground there. Building up knowledge is such as useful even if it doesn't feel like your doing anything.

Connect! - Shoveling neighbors walkways, or in general connecting with the ppl in your immediate surroundings! They can help you out in ways you couldn't imagine, someone didn't bake often so they gave me 15lbs of flour!! And their extra pair of snow boots, I hadn't had snow boots since I was 12 years old and it meant the world to me. The pizza I taught her daughter to make and a cheap meal for them meant the world for them. These small acts really are what tie each other together.

Plan! - plan for next year, what kind of equipment can you gather? What do you wanna accomplish next growing season? Seed swaps are also a fun thing I know ppl will do in winter as they start preserving food!

[neosartorya]

So i was thinking about the whole solarpunk chobani oatmilk ad (as depicted here) and a comment someone made in a different post (that I now can't find) where they said something along the lines of (paraphrasing) 'the marketing people at chobani being unable to imagine a future where their brand had ditched single-use containers in favor of a sustainable alternative'. And I started thinking how will food packaging look like in the solarpunk utopia?

Modern food packaging responds (mostly) to the needs of the globalized supply chain, where food products need to be moved great distances without being damaged and while taking up as little space and energy as possible. Packaging also needs to be made of the cheapest materials available, hence the preference for disposable containers made of light materials (cardboard, plastic, aluminium, paper, etc.). You don't want your package to be worth more than what it contains (although with some food products, that is close to being the case).

The comment I referenced earlier suggested using reusable glass containers as an example of a sustainable alternative to single-use containers. That makes sense, and there is historical (and current) precedent for such kinds of food containers. Just ask your parents (or grandparents, I guess) how milk used to be delivered to homes in the good ol' days.

In a more recent example, some places still use reusable (returnable) containers for products such as beer and (even!) Coca-cola, where you pay an initial fee for the container and get reimbursed once you return it, or you can exchange the empty container for a full one by paying the price of the product minus the container fee.

This solution, however, is still within the framework of the global supply chain of modern capitalism. In the solarpunk utopia, the goal would be to reduce (reuse, repair, recycle) the breadth of our current supply chain by prioritizing local consumption and disinsentivizing long-distance trade.

This train of thought led me to the question of wether processed, pre-packaged food would even be a thing in the solarpunk utopia. After all, if we are trying to consume only what is locally sourced, one of the main purposes of preserved (and thus packaged) food goes away. No need for bottled orange juice when you can just go to the commons bin and grab a kilo of fresh oranges to make your own.

Further, once there is no capitalism, the "convenience" angle of processed, packaged food also appears to go away. You don't have to work 9 hours a day, 6 days a week anymore. You have the time and resources necessary to make your own damn fresh orange juice, so why bother with the bottled stuff?

Well for one, not everything is as easy and convenient to do by yourself as orange juice. Fermented foods (cheese, wine, beer, soy sauce, even pickles and yogurt), bread and pastries and cakes, carbonated drinks, jams and marmalade, butter, mayonnaise, cured meats and fish, and (yes) almond milk are all tricky to make properly, take a long time to be made and/or are energy and resource intensive. The need for these kinds of foods will remain as long as we are human and find pleasure in eating and trying new things. Also, the need for mass-produced food does not go away with capitalism, after all we have a population of 10 billion humans with different dietary needs that need to be fed. Food safety standards must still be enforced and probably will be even more stringent when corporate profits are no longer standing in the way of progress.

To add to this, a localized supply chain will make food preservation even more important. After all, if you want your population to survive mostly on what can be produced in a 100 km radius, you will have to prepare for food scarcity. Droughts, floods, earthquakes, blizzards, accidents, and even just regular ol' winter (once we've rescued it from the clutches of climate change) don't care how solar your punk is. They will wreck your food supply and your utopia needs to be ready.

So the need for packaged food will remain. The need for food that can stay in a cupboard undisturbed for months (if not years) and remain edible (and reasonably palatable!) will continue to be there.

With all this in mind... what does food packaging look in our solarpunk utopia? Single-use plastics have gone the way of the dodo, as have single-use paper, cardboard, aluminium, glass, and steel. What has replaced them?

I have some ideas, but this post is already ridiculously long, so I'll save them for later. All I'll say for now is I think glass containers are not the way to go. Glass is heavy, fragile, a poor thermal conductor (so heating and cooling processes with glass containers are energy innefficient), and takes up a lot of space. It is also very resource and energy intensive to produce and recycle (so not the most environmentaly friendly in that regard either).

What does a reusable aluminium container look like? That'd be cool I think.

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Ecofascism and Rewilding: A Conversation With Ariel Kroon and Christina De La Rocha

There’s no question that the biosphere is in crisis right now thanks to human-driven global warming, our hostile takeover of most of Earth’s land area, and our pollution and overfishing of the seas. Slowing down—never mind outright stopping—the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystems and the mass extinction currently gaining pace calls for aggressively protecting the environment, or possibly even giving half of the Earth’s land surface back to nature in a process known as rewilding. 

But how will we manage to share the Earth with the rest of the biosphere when history shows that we’re pretty terrible at sharing it with each other, with some states even going so far as to have used the preservation of wilderness as a tool of genocide and white supremacy? There are still those who would use environmental protection as an excuse to block immigrants, reject refugees, and expel “undesirable” people from the land. What will it take to value human and non-human life and the land all equally, without using one as an excuse to persecute the other?

Getting urgently-needed environmental protection and rewilding right requires facing the evils that have been historically committed in the name of conservation, so that we don’t repeat those grave mistakes, even with the best of intentions. As solarpunks, we need to learn from the past in order to shape futures that are intentionally better than our pasts and presents.

And that’s a wrap for season 2! Season 3 will be coming along in the last week of June for Patreon supporters, and to the public in the first week of July. Until then, keep dreaming, and keep up the good work!

Links

Reframing Narratives with Ecocriticism, with Dr Jenny Kerber 

Against the Ecofascist Creep webzine teaching resource and explainer

Read about the 100-Mile Diet book and phenomenon on Wikipedia

Read about the locavore movement on Wikipedia

A great article on philosophical questions with The Sneetches from the Prindle Institute for Ethics

Some articles on food forests

The Half-Earth Project 

[uselessmicrowave]

hey i wanted to request a match-up since i saw your match-up requests are open, if that's alr!!! id prefer MTMTE Lost Lighters and/or G1 or TFP Decepticons

Appearance: thick 2C/3A curly dark blond & purple hair at shoulder length. buglike blue eyes and lip piercings ; vertical labret + dolphin bites. 2 tattoos, one of my passed away kitten and 1 of a praying mantis on my arm. im tall and awkwardly portioned due to ehlers danlos. lots of keloid scars and a bit fuzzy. slight baby face. pale as frick frack and translucent skin with veins showing.

Pets: 7 CATS. 2 dogs. 1 ball python and a small colony of madagascar hissing cockroaches. i am an avid animal lover and a nerd about all their behaviors, biology and habitat preservation.

Fav foods: RAW GREEN BEANS, vegetable fried rice, hashbrowns and eggs, s'mores, pesto pasta ; not vegetarian / vegan but prefer ethical sourcing of food and have my own garden.

Style: flexible but usually comfortable hippie goth / casual 70s . almost everything i own is green and brown, but I also have lots of purple stuff (fav colour)

Hobbies & interests: chalk art, painting, drawing, metal bands lead by girls, dubstep, entomology, mycology, dragons, robots/ai, TRANSFORMERS, aliens/ufos, lucid dreaming, tarot cards, a solarpunk society, anti-capitalist

Smarts: bugs, animal and human health + biology, fungi, symbiotic relationships in nature, communication, being a mediator, giving advice

Bad habits: I've picked at my skin since I was a baby, as I have ocd + dermatillomania. because of it i am littered with bumps, scars, and can't shave due to ingrown hairs or risking making a scrape and then scratching until im sent to the er weeks later with cellulitis. i also have problems focusing and have a dissociative disorder that makes me not myself. i have bad anxiety that i cope with well, but if i stay up late i can overthink myself into a sobbing fit for no reason.

My personality: my friends describe me as WEIRD. my mom says im an alien. i would say that the people i know and i all agree i am creative, artsy and kind of an old soul. im patient sometimes but also get overwhelmed by certain situations because im autistic and can't multitask. i love helping others and when spending time with friends i like to make them gifts or play outside with them and look for bones or cool plants, or roleplay warrior cats with my besties. i have "childish" interests but am mature and independent, and am a caretaker. i had a rough upbringing and as an adult i feel like i heal my inner child everyday by living as autistic as possible.

whew that was long. anyways, thank you, feel free to ignore!!!!!! just wanted to shoot a shot bc these match up things always look fun lol. thanks!!!!! XP

Hello! Apologies I only wrote for one of the continuities. I’m matching you with TFP Megatron!

Megatron

He’ll get you more purple clothing to match him.

Grabs your hands and holds them when you’re picking at your skin, then he’ll carry you to the medbay for Knockout to patch you up.

Megatron believes that seven cats is a bit… obnoxious, but nevertheless will make room for all of your pets.

Jokes about your bug colony being an army… he thinks it’s hilarious that you have an insect army of your own.

Megaton holds you close to his spark when you overthink things/start to cry.

Everything is weird on the Nemesis, so you’re not out of place on the ship to him.

He does his best to appreciate and support all of your interests, even if he sees them as childish.

At least once a week he’ll take you to a new foresty area, where you can “observe all the different types of mushrooms and squirrels you want.” He’ll usually sit in a clear-ish area and watch you frolic through the trees.

[nunmalich]

To preserve food from the garden of your loved ones is the future! 🍅☀️

(in a solarpunk, not a tradwife way☀️)

[diysolarpunk]

Solarpunk vs homesteading

On the surface, homesteading and solarpunk share many similarities: low cost or diy solutions, responsible stewardship of the earth, lower impact living etc. But I don’t think the continued survival of our planet will happen even if everyone begins implementing the homesteading ideals of Mother Earth Magazine (for instance). Which is where solarpunk as an aesthetic and framework becomes so important.

For example:

Homesteading: how can you build a root cellar in your home to preserve your homegrown vegetables throughout the winter?

Vs

Solarpunk: how can we build a root cellar or series of root cellars so that people who live in apartments or don’t have access to land or run out of food can still access food on a community level?

H: how to built a passive solar panel for your house?

Vs

S: how can we build a passive solar panel to warm community buildings? Or schools?

There is so much work (both learning and unlearning) to be done at a personal level. But there is even more work to be done at a family, community, or societal level as well. And solarpunk - more than most low impact, ecological living- opens the door to that discussion.

Which is beautiful.

[is-solarpunk]

Solarpunk Writing Prompts #2

Here you can listen to original podcast

Here is the source of the podcast's transcript you can read below

Solarpunk Prompts - The Refugee Camp

Hello world. I'm Tomasino.

This is Solarpunk Prompts, a series for writers where we discuss Solarpunk as a literary, artistic, and activist movement.

Or, as RoAnna Sylva describes it: Solarpunk is a genre of ecologically-oriented speculative fiction characterized both by its aesthetic and its underlying socio-political vision.

In each episode we look at one story prompt using that genre lens, offering commentary on the prompt, some inspirations from the world today, and some considerations for writers.

Most importantly, we consider how that story might help us to better envision a sustainable civilization.

If this is your first time here, I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what Solarpunk is, why you should care, and why this series came into being.

This episode's prompt is titled: "The Refugee Camp".

There is a full-fledged town built from a refugee camp which was set up there two decades ago. The inhabitants speak their own creole, a mix of more than five languages, and have very shaky relationships with their neighboring communities or states, each of which considers it a lawless territory and might be plotting to take over.

I think the refugee camp is a fitting place to start our prompts. They are the standard setting in our world for communities just coming through tragedy. When there is war, famine, flooding, or any number of challenges to a people they often find shelters in foreign lands, sometimes thrown together with other groups fleeing their own hardships.

Refugee stories are also plentiful in science-fiction: Superman is a refugee from Krypton, The Doctor is a refugee from Gallifrey, or Arthur Dent, a refugee from Cottington in the West Country. These are all individual stories, though, and not the camp and community we are striving for. Instead we might look to Battlestar Gallactica, or Babylon 5, or the Nantucket trilogy for examples of entire communities of refugees. And, indeed, those are vibrant and capture a bit of the colorful characters and internal conflicts that arise in such places. But Solarpunk can depart from this view of refugee camps as places of despair.

In our prompt the camp has grown into a full-fledged town. That suggests a thriving regrowth emerging from this mixed culture and reflected in their creole dialect.

Is that a realistic vision to take, though? Is this just Solarpunk being naïve and blindly optimistic?

Let's take a look to real refugee camps in South Sudan and Uganda, where the r0g_agency, a Berlin-based nonprofit, has been working with communities to help them develop innovation hubs. Five of these communities have linked together to form #ASKnet, a program that offers training in open-source hardware and software, entrepreneurship, media production, gender equality, and financial literacy. They also run repair cafes, giving hands-on experience and learning, and reducing waste and preserving natural resources.

This is just one program that is built and run by small community organizations.

How about Communitere? It was founded by individuals who saw the amazing rebuilding efforts after natural disasters like the 2004 earthquake in the Indian Ocean which caused the deadliest tsunami in history. The world responded with one of the greatest relief efforts in record time, all at once. But then medicines spoiled before they could reach the sick. Food rotted before it could find the hungry. This failure of local logistics is what inspired the organization.

What do they do? Well, they don' “intervene”. Instead, they provide spaces where communities can implement their own plans and choose from a variety of tools and models that Communitere makes available. They provide training, processes, toolkits, and space. They empower the communities to build their own futures. And now they're up and running in Haiti, Nepal, Greece, and the Philippines.

These are both stories of information sharing and empowering local communities. They succeed by building together both local talent and infrastructure and focus on sustainability.

And they mean sustainability in many forms:

environmental sustainability - processes that work with the unique local environment

economic sustainability - processes that can continue without ongoing external funding

and cultural sustainability - respecting and empowering local cultures

When you start thinking of these refugee camps as places where people are building new things, new homes, new lives, new opportunities, then the writing opportunities open up for you as well. Gone are the two dimensional sketches of a dirty camp full of broken people. These people are alive and empowered!

In a different genre setting we might lean into the shantytown aesthetic, or the lawlessness of the area might become an easy setting for crime stories. I challenge you, with this prompt, to steer clear of those well trodden paths, and focus on the community as a vibrant, living thing.

Speaking of shantytowns, I'm reminded of Cory Doctorow's setting in the book, Makers, with it's unique community of hackers, and the unique way they used language… Which brings us to the next aspect of this writing prompt: Creole.

According to Collins English Dictionary: A Creole is a language that has developed from a mixture of different languages and has become the main language in a particular place.

These are fascinating growths of blending cultures and can powerfully illustrate the fundamental aspects of a community:

who they are

what they believe in

and how they respond to a changing world

Think of the unique flavor of the Belter language in the Expanse. Every odd word choice, or word borrowed from Chinese or Indic or Slavic, is a reminder of what these people are. In some cases this unique language use even extends to meaningful gestures.

The way these languages develop is so interesting in its own right that there is an indy card game where you collaboratively create one with friends. It's called Dialect, and it won IGDN's Game of the Year in 2019 along with a host of other awards. In that game you 2-4 of your friends will create what's called an Isolation, basically a community set apart from others for some interesting reason, and then play out their history across three different ages. The game then ends with the Isolation no longer being isolated, whether for good or for bad.

As the game descriptions says: "Dialect is a game about an isolated community, their language, and what it means for that language to be lost."

It's a fascinating way to spend 3-4 hours with friends, and incredibly insightful into this exact process.

Now, before we go let's take a look at that prompt one more time:

"The Refugee Camp"

There is a full-fledged town built from a refugee camp which was set up there two decades ago. The inhabitants speak their own creole, a mix of more than five languages, and have very shaky relationships with their neighboring communities or states, each of which considers it a lawless territory and might be plotting to take over.

Okay.

It's time to wrap up, but before we go, lets review our guidelines for Solarpunk writing one more time:

Community as Protagonist (No "Chosen One")

Infrastructure is Sexy (No simple solution)

Human/Environmental Context (Not Man vs Nature)

Thanks for staying with me today. I hope you'll join me for the next Solarpunk Prompt.

Links mentioned:

r0g_agency

Communitere

Dialect

Music from:

ExMemory - Solar Grid

[cognitivejustice]

Agroecology—a science, practice, and movement that seeks social, political, economic, and environmental sustainability in the global food system—is gaining momentum in the U.S., according to a new Dartmouth-led commentary in Nature Food. As the co-authors report, the approach requires coordination among scientists, farmers, and activists.

"Agroecology is different, as it strives to achieve both ecological and social sustainability of food systems without sacrificing one for the other. We cannot save biodiversity and ecosystem integrity without also preserving farmer livelihoods and ensuring that the food systems we create provide food that is culturally relevant to local communities, and not simply meeting a calorie quota," says Ong.

Supporters of agroecology say the U.S. food system is dominated by industrial agriculture, which is characterized by monoculture production, reliance on agrochemicals like pesticides and fertilizers, and advanced technology and machinery that depend heavily on fossil fuels.

Prior research has found that challenges facing global food systems—which include food insecurity, public health crises, biodiversity loss, and climate change—are perpetuated in part by the U.S. food system and the political influence of its big players.

//Granny's comment: Agroecology is solarpunk AF

[ahedderick]

Good LORD I am a sucker for unusual or decorative canning jars, and I found these at half price at Southern States this morning. Canning jars in general SEEM pricey, but that cost is offset by the fact that they are good for decades of regular use. I do not *need* any more jars for jam/preserves. but. I wanted these. And my aunt enabled me (by agreeing that they were hella cute.)

I also found a needed thing; spice packets for

salsa and chili. It is possible to make those from scratch, but the packets are nice and I'm consistently happy with the results. I had never found the salsa mix in bulk before, only single packets, so that was a good thing. In a good tomato year I make 12-18 quarts of sauce, 20 pints of salsa, and an indeterminate number of jars of chili base and regular canned tomatoes.

Let the games commence!

[solar-sunnyside-up]

Honestly for me this is apart of solarpunk where we Re-sync with the rhythms of the world.

We have had lots of preservation techniques that have perfected, how easy it is to have a dehydrater work these days! Canning has never been safer or easier to do!

We have never been closer to understanding the conditions in which trees create mass nut resources and how to care for livestock in extreme weather! We don't have to use that to force trees to do it on our schedule but rather set up festivals to welcome them in.

That being said, yes a return to seasonal based foods would be important but I def think it would replace things like Nationalism now. People need categories to organize themselves and I think a food competition and preservation techniques would be a good way to not fight that part of our nature while straying away from when it makes us hostile to each other and our planet.

"This region is so well known for their late winter potatoes/squashes. Come to our towns winter soup festivals!"

"This biome is known to spontaneously burst with pecans and maple syrup and walnuts! Come to our nut harvesting festival where we jam and perseve things with your neighbors!"

"This area is well known for thousands of years as the home of the Seal! Learn all the food surrounding the worship of this life sustaining food and how it can be made into not just food but clothes, fats, and other materials!"

It might sound a little weird but honestly? I can think if several towns in Japan that their entire identity surrounds a quirk like this. Aomori Japan hold a massive Apple festival every year full of puppets and parades and apple cider and jams and its beautiful! They also partipate in the Sakura festivals where citizens are encourages to picnic in parks and drink and hang out with friends to literally just watch Cherry blossoms bloom.

Rural towns and even places in the UK still have Veggie and animal ribbon competitions. Soupalious is an internation soup competition that takes place yearly. Have you ever seen a table setting contest in the mid west or southern Canada? Oof those get heated!

It totally is possible! Though I agree. I think we should focus more on winter and what it looks like to walk with the cycle of the year more in solarpunk. Mostly bc it's so COOL!

Solarpunk Autumns. Solarpunk Winters.

Solarpunk as a genre exists in a state of a permanent summer. Both as a genre, and an aesthetic. Solarpunk pictures usually show us worlds that have everything in so many shades of green. Green bushes. Green trees. Green everything. Fields in Solarpunk are always filled with ripe corn and wheat. And trees in Solarpunk are full of ripe fruit.

But if we look into Solarpunk worldbuilding there is also the fact that of course at some point at many places of the world it will become autumn, and winter.

I mean, I am feeling it right now, sitting here in my bed with three blankets and shivering, as the summer has very suddenly ended.

Sure, Solarpunk originated from Brazil. And while I do not know a whole lot about Brazillian climate, I do understand that it is close enough to the equator to be fairly warm yearround.

But I honestly would love to see more stories and artworks set in Solarpunk worlds during the autumn and winter. Especially because it is a very interesting topic when it comes to both the renewable energies and the food systems of Solarpunk worlds.

Now, admittedly, the renewable energy is less interesting to me, but we still should talk about it. In winter and autumn a lot of the renewable energy sources are a bit less viable. The sun has less energy and the further north (or south) you go, the less sun you get during the winter. Wind turbines also often struggle because there is in fact too much wind - and some older turbines do not do too well during harsh winter conditions. Water usually has less of a problem, unless the water energy is created in shallow conditions where the water freezes. But of course, there is nuclear energy to take care of most issues, even if everything else fails - even though some people still do not want to hear about it.

The food aspect is a lot more interesting though, especially from a modern point of view.

Because we people today are very used to eating the same stuff year around. Like potatoes, carrots, bellpeppers, tomatoes, cabbage, oranges, apples, pears, and bananas are usually available in the supermarket no matter when you go there. But of course we also know that those only are there because of the rather destructive ways we use to cultivate food and bring it to us. These things usually are grown somewhere closer to the equator and then are brought to Europe/North America via plane, emitting a lot more CO2.

Of course, this is a fairly new development. For the most of human history, nobody - or only the very richest people - had access to imported food like that. So instead they would only eat was either was available in their own country and their own fields right now, or that they could conserve in some way or form.

And frankly... I think that is something I would like to see some more off in Solarpunk media. In people not needing everything to be available all the time. And people also working to conserve food in one way or another to make it last longer.

Also I do want to bring it up again: There were a lot of well known "winter vegetables" in Europe during most of our history there. Stuff that would get ripe in late autumn and would keep rather well. And a lot of those vegetables have been forgotten.

So... Yeah, I really would see that issue discussed a bit more.

And sure, we might be able to worldbuild around the issue in some degree with greenhouses and stuff. But I think it would be nice to just question our relation with the always available foods.

[reportsofagrandfuture]

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Human AF

[bomberqueen17]

mondays

i’m wearing accidentally too low-cut a dress to work today, and i had a shirt on with it and it looked ok at home but it’s hot in here so uhhh tits out for monday, i guess. hi! 

[image description: what-was-i-thinking.jpg: the author, a white woman, sitting in a desk chair in a cluttered room looking slightly down into the webcam with an unimpressed expression, cut off at the forehead, and the central focus of the photo is how her cleavage is framed by the very cute but far too low sweetheart neckline of her royal blue dress, which a large ornate costume necklace does really nothing at all to fill in.] (bonus: whenever I move, my bra pokes out on the sides there and is glaringly non-matchy. whoops.)

It was really hot yesterday, unrelentingly so, which was hard for me because last week at the farm it never got above 70 and it was so cold at nights I was bundled up and had a wood fire going, so it’s like, seasonal whiplash. I did manage to have ice cream for dinner, though, down by the Niagara River, and we ate it while looking at the sunset, so that was nice and I think an apt celebration of the solstice. Errr, equinox. Whatever it was. 

Then it was unrelentingly windy all night, which doesn’t really make for fantastic sleep. Going to be thunderstormy today, which has the nice bonus of making me not feel bad about not walking to work. I haven’t been, because my fucking foot has been fine if I don’t use it and cranky as fuck if I do. I keep thinking I should try again, now that I have better insoles, but there’s nothing worse than being a mile from home and half a mile from work and realizing I fucked up and should get off this foot, and there’s nothing I can do, and if i limp to try to spare the foot, I’m going to fuck up my hip again, and then I get to work and it sucks and I can take ibuprofen but then you know I’m going to have to walk home again. It’s the concrete, I think; I can walk miles in a day at the farm, but that’s on dirt and there’s climbing and walking and pausing. A long monotonous unchanging walk on concrete is a different animal.

I should just start riding a bike, but I suck at bikes and am a little scared of them, and I really really don’t want to ride a bike in traffic but would definitely have to, at least a little. I should do it, and I don’t even need a bike lock I can just cram it next to the closet up here and nobody’d care, but. Ughhhhh. I don’t like bikes! Something’s wrong with me and I don’t like bikes. (And rollerskating is out of the question, the pavement’s too cracked in too many places.)

ANYHOW I did can literally an entire flat of tomatoes yesterday, sweating over that dang stove-- ok, I didn’t can them, I cooked 1/3 of them down into tomato soup, and the other 2/3 I cooked down and froze in quart bags and a couple of old Tupperwares. So I’ve got tomatoes now for winter. I saved out four (4) tomatoes to cook half a chicken in a bed of vegetables with the tomatoes for liquid, and we’ll see how that goes-- we accidentally parboiled a chicken during packaging, and I nabbed it and cut it in half and froze the two halves separately, and so I’m going to make it for dinner for I hope two nights this week. (A whole chicken is like, four dinners, so I figure a half is two? Fair enough? And maybe the stock for risotto for a third? I have these fantastic golden beets for the risotto, and their greens, so...) 

Dude had to go to the grocery store, and he went to two different stores for a total of six items, what even is our life. (ironically our food co-op does not have good granola bars, so he had to go to wegmans to get, of all things, granola bars. weird.)

I brainstormed my next upcycled garment but did not cut anything out. I’m taking apart an old silk Hawaiian shirt of Dude’s that’s somewhat damaged, and making it into the silk lining of a wool vest I’m going to make. It plus a damaged silk scarf. We’ll see.

[queer-ecopunk]

Nothing more satisfying than air drying herbs that you've grown or foraged. I also had thai green chilis from work that I wanted to save, which I dried in the oven.

Image 1 and 2- rosemary

Image 3- sage

Image 4- spearmint

Image 5- thai green chilis