Our culinary lives and futures happen in community, whether or not we’re aware of that community or its many layers.
Think of how many hands went into harvesting each vegetable in your crisper right now. Who planted it, watered it, harvested it, boxed it up, drove it to the store, rung it up at the cash register?
Who created the fertilizer that enriched the soil? What more-than-human beings, the fungi in the soil or the cows who fertilized it, participated in growing that bunch of carrots or bag of greens’?
You may not even know, or be able to know, the answers or to see the full complexity of the food webs that surround you:
But one thing each of us can do is to strengthen our own resilient food practices and to think about food in our immediate communities.
Whether that’s feeding hungry neighbors, strengthening interpersonal ties through shared food or shared food making, or prioritizing purchasing from local farmers, we can each make decisions that shift our food ecosystems to be more resilient and community-minded.
There are so many ways this can look, and here are a few resources from the archive to get you started:
Choosing a food preserving technique based on available infrastructure
I share different food preserving techniques you can try based on what infrastructure you have available (e.g. electricity, running water, etc.) It’s useful to save and have handy if your own infrastructure goes out, to understand how best to support neighbors with limited infrastructure, and for being intentional about resource use.
Learn more with low-cost food preserving practices and what food preservation technology to use, when.
Reducing food waste
Practical tips for reducing food waste, which is useful for saving money but also helpful in my work with food insecure folks (and from my own experiences with food insecurity) for finding new ways to stretch unexpected gluts of random vegetables and other foods from food banks, food rescues, and other sources.
For more on this, check out building a low waste pantry, practical low waste tips, stocking up without freaking out, and my class Preserving Abundance, which will completely reshape your relationship to food waste to incorporate excitement and abundance rather than scarcity and fear.
If you want to go deeper, join me in my self paced class, Resilience and Community Care through Food Preserving. In this class I give you some basic how tos for food preserving, plus ideas for how to weave food preserving into your community care practices.