060: On Food Resilience

On gleaning and "putting food by" + Jean Craighead George, Wendell Berry, and Doodle Dispatches + keep scrolling for Brandon Taylor & The Austen Connection

“I am well and healthy. The food is good. Sometimes I eat turtle soup, and I know how to make acorn pancakes. I keep my supplies in the wall of the tree in wooden pockets that I chopped myself.”

My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George

The instinct for doomsday prepping comes naturally to me.

There are a lot of tributaries: the Christian eschatology of my family and childhood friends; the Mormon eschatology of my other childhood friends; the rugged, ranching culture of my hometown; the fierce, fight-to-protect-my-children instinct that just will not go away; the three decades of coping with military deployments, dotcom crashes, near-continuous job transitions, regular relocations, drunken bosses; and every minute spent on the NYC transit system.

The training in poetry is also part of it. A hyper sensitivity to patterns and connections is great for creating poems and, bonus (!) useful for seeing trends in culture—NFT fashion is going to be big, you guys, seriously; politics—omg don’…