“It’s time for America to get very serious about food security and hunger.” That comment came from U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, in response to a USDA report that more than one in seven American households struggled to get enough to eat in 2008. That’s about 49 million people, or 14.6 percent of American households, and a 31 percent increase over the previous year. We’ve become accustomed to seeing pictures of starving kids in faraway places, but can you imagine? Americans, including 17 million children, not getting enough to eat, in what used to be called the land of plenty.

If that’s not bad enough, the report emphasized that the numbers from 2009 are almost certain to be worse. A survey of food banks last summer showed another 30 percent increase in demand.

Experts say the biggest culprit is unemployment, abetted by rising food prices. President Obama called the USDA’s findings “unsettling,” and said “the first task is to restore job growth, which will help relieve the economic pressures that make it difficult for parents to put a square meal on the table each day.” Meanwhile, Secretary Vilsack is pressing Congress to expand programs such as food stamps and free school lunches, which currently consume about 70% of the ag department’s budget.

To a homesteader who doesn’t have much use for high-fallutin’ academic economics, but who greatly appreciates common sense and simple solutions, this “Establishment” reaction is both typical and self-defeating, to say nothing of being unnecessarily complicated.

Restore job growth? Doing what, making more stuff that uses up energy and resources, then overloads landfills, and which nobody really needs anyway? Or would they be the kinds of jobs where workers don’t actually produce anything… like maybe on Wall Street?

As for “free” lunches, how can it be that some people still don’t realize that there is no such thing, when most of us learn that in grade school?

While the daily newspapers were all headlining the ag department report, and the Establishment response, a little quarterly magazine from the University of Wisconsin Alumni Association arrived with what would seem to be a very logical alternative. Justin Mog’s essay in the Winter 2009 On Wisconsin told how he and his wife had worked for three years in agriculture and nutrition in the Peace Corps, in Paraguay. On their return home in late 2008, they thought it would be fitting to send a letter to President-elect Obama, “urging him to plant an organic kitchen garden on the White House lawn as a model of sustainable living and healthy eating. To our delight, we weren’t the only ones who thought this was a good idea, including the Obamas themselves.” The Obamas broke ground on the garden in March, 2009. And not incidentally, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack started a “People’s Garden” at the USDA.

Mog went on to say that in today’s world, “poor” can mean a dizzying array of things. “Helping people get out of ‘poverty’ requires the opposite of the all-too-common, one-size-fits-all strategy. But thankfully, one thing was universal in my Paraguayan community: no matter how poor, no one goes hungry.”

The reason, of course, is that they have food security, by producing their own, on a surprisingly small amount of land.

Americans do not.

How much imagination, or even common sense, would it take to put all this together? For those who still don’t get the picture, we could add tons of details: the amount of water, gas, fertilizer, and time and labor, wasted on useless lawns; the vacant lots and other unused spaces that could become community gardens; the joys of gardening, or raising chickens, or learning to cook “from scratch,” compared with the depressing and dehumanizing effects of being unemployed, and on and on. Obviously it’s not all that simple. And yet, the more data I apply to the problem, the more ways I connect the dots, and the longer I play with the pieces, the more sense it makes. (I could go on and on, but I already wrote a book about it: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living will be out in December.)

There should be no need to worry about unemployment — or hunger — for anyone involved in self-sufficient living, even if it’s not beyond the sidewalks.

—Jd Belanger

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Words fascinate me. I’m intrigued by the many ways they can be used, beguiled by subtle differences in meaning, tantalized by how they can be joined together to form different ideas. I’m delighted to learn a useful new word I wasn’t previously familiar with.

At the same time, or perhaps consequently, I abhor their misuse.

As a writer, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to misuse words (and phrases and grammar) myself, and as a reader, even more occasion to see others misuse them. And as an editor, I’ve developed some “favorite words to hate.” Many, of course, involve aspects of country living.

At the top of the list is “baby chick.” A baby chicken is a chick. A grown-up chick is a chicken. So to me, “baby chick” is as grating as saying “baby baby chicken.” It drives me up a wall, especially when I don’t have the editorial power to change it. And it seems to be becoming more common, even in ads.

This type of use or abuse first came to my attention with the term “hot water heater.” Why on earth would anyone want to heat hot water? It’s already hot! You heat cold water.

Back on the farm (or more likely, in the classified ads) we encounter such gems as “bails” of hay. Bails are the handles on pails, or what people pay to stay out of jails. Hay and straw are made into bales.

A tricky one for many people, apparently, is the difference between the weather outside and the castrated goat or sheep wether in the barn. (Another question is whether your spell checker knows the difference: Mine won’t accept wether at all. But spell checkers are another topic altogether.)

Apostrophes are in a class by themselves. Sign painters in particular seem to think that every word that ends in “S” deserves its own apostrophe. However, the most jarring transgression involves its and it’s. It’s means it is, plain and simple. The possessive its does not have an apostrophe. This mistake has become so common you’d think that even a grizzled old editor would be getting used to it, but it still has the power to drive me mad.

Some words are hard to spell because we learned them by hearing them spoken, not by seeing them written. My all-time favorite is this category is the lady who wrote about her “toboggan bird” goats. (For you goatless readers, the breed is Toggenburg.)

Does any of this make any real difference? I would have to say yes, not only from the standpoint of having spent a lifetime of stringing words together to convey certain ideas, but also in the interest of clear communications under any circumstances. And then there is the simple question of protocol and propriety: misusing language seems somehow uncivilized, even impolite.

And yet, most people really don’t know the difference. I still do a bit of magazine proofreading, and by force of habit, I “proof” everything I read, which is often maddening. But I recently encountered a paragraph that helps put my problem into perspective. If nothing else, it demonstrates why proofreading is such a strenuous job.

I cdnuolt blveiee ?taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The ?phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at ?Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ?ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the ?first and last ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a ?taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This ?is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by ?istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanig huh?

What’s even more amazing to me is that I can’t type “Taht’s all for now from byeond the sdiewalks,” without over-riding my computer. The thought of a stupid machine correcting an intelligent human is just a bit frightening to a guy living with as few machines as possible, beyond the sidewalks.—Jd

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What we eat is very often dictated by the culture we live in. Most Americans would gag at the thought of eating horsemeat: in France, it’s a delicacy. Bugs? Yuck. But it’s said that more than a thousand species of insects are an important protein source for about 80 percent of the world’s population.

Some people reading this have never tasted pork, many don’t eat meat at all, and the rest of us can usually accept that. But as for rats, cats, and dogs, let’s not even go there (or to China, and a few other places where many people think they’re yummy).

I bring this up because of an interesting article in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal: “Let Them Eat Dog,” by Jonathan Safran Foer, who has just written a book, Eating Animals.

He somewhat facetiously suggests that euthanizing three to four million cats and dogs every year represents a tremendous waste. These animals are produced without any agribusiness infrastructure, and their disposal is an ecological and economic problem. “But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it too.”

This interests me because my latest book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living, touches on the same topic, albeit from a somewhat different perspective. (Unlike Jonathon Safran Foer, I am not a vegetarian.) Yes, food is cultural, not rational. But what if — just supposing, don’tcha know — what if changing climate and/or water shortages or any of a myriad of economic factors made it impossible for average Americans to eat beef, chicken or pork? After all, those factors are already present in much of the world, and account at least in part for the food cultures we consider bizarre. We might not think much of entomophagy (the practice of eating insects) today, but what if we were starving? Once we got used to it, how long would it take to discover our favorites?

You can look at it from the other side, too. Vegetarians have notoriously disgusting descriptions of “eating flesh,” but you can make anything sound good, or bad, depending on your culture.

To a gourmet, a cheese might be smoky, velvety, creamy, tangy, bloomy, and as many other adjectives as might be applied to fine wine. Clifton Fadiman called cheese “milk’s leap to immortality.” Caseophiles can rave about the subtle flavors the local forage contributes to true sheep milk Greek feta, extol the delicacy imparted by cave aging, and marvel at what various bacterial cultures can do for taste and texture.

On the other hand, if you wanted to discourage the consumption of cheese, you might take a cue from the Ugandan native who watched Andrew Zimmern (of the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern”) slicing some Cracker Barrel cheese — after a hard day of sampling flying ants, big grasshoppers, and lungfish from muddy brackish waters. The Ugandan shuddered with disgust as he said, “I don’t know why you Americans let your milk rot and dry it into little squares.”

Or you might just say that cheesemaking involves the use of mammal stomach lining (rennet), different strains of bacteria that are injected and smeared onto the spoiled milk, and of course, mold.

I also pointed out in my book that “you have probably eaten a lot more insects than you realize: Guess what happens to all the flour beetles, weevils, and other insects found in granaries. Insects are said to be common in canned fruits and vegetables.

“The U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a list of allowable ‘unavoidable defects’ in foods that you ain’t never gonna see on the nutrition label. Tomato juice can legally have up to 10 fly eggs per 100 grams, or five fly eggs and a maggot, or two maggots. Ten grams of ground thyme can contain up to 925 insect fragments and two rodent hairs. In eight ounces of golden raisins there might be the equivalent of 10 whole insects and 35 Drosophilia eggs.”

Maybe it’s best to just not know, or even think, about such matters. And yet, when I read about how many people are out of work (and money), how many of those have already become homeless, and wonder how many more will follow, it’s difficult not to speculate on possible outcomes. Carry this out a few more years with climate change, water shortages, overpopulation, soil depletion…

How loyal are people to their cultural beliefs and arbitrary taboos when they’re starving?—Jd

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There wasn’t a great deal of job printing in our small, southern Wisconsin village. Most of my income came from a monthly public relations flyer, or bill insert, I wrote and produced for small, mostly rural, Independent (non-Bell) telephone companies around the country. That’s why Diane’s nurse paycheck was important! This left me with ample time to be a Mr. Mom and cub scoutmaster, write, run a homestead, and play around with a little newsletter that connected me to other homesteaders.

The newsletter didn’t even have a name. It needed a return address of course, but I just used our business logo: a nice clip art drawing of a crowing rooster, followed by “the Countryside Print Shop,” leaving off the “Print Shop.” Pretty soon people were referring to it as “Countryside.”

I thought that was an awfully lame name, especially compared to a cool one like “The Mother Earth News,” which appeared at the same time. I only changed my mind some 20 years later, when the giant Hearst Corp., with the resources to find the very best magazine names in the world — think ”Cosmopolitan” and “Esquire” — came out with a “Countryside” magazine. But that’s a story for another time.

It wasn’t intended to make money. The subscription price — $1 a year and a letter asking or answering a question about self-sufficiency — would hopefully pay for the paper and postage and fill the pages. I was more than willing to provide the editing, typesetting, printing, mailing etc. in return for the knowledge I was sure I’d get from the readers. I wasn’t disappointed.

Some people still refer to Countryside as a reader-written magazine. I liked to call it participatory journalism. Today I think it was uncannily like the web, where just about anybody can share their ideas and opinions. Some people don’t like that aspect of the web today, and some didn’t like it in the magazine back then. For example, I could always expect an outburst from “experts” and professionals after I printed a letter from somebody who used mayonnaise jars or the water bath method for canning (which was much more common in the 1970s than it is today), as well as plenty of old wives’ tales. While I was accused of neglecting my duty as an editor to protect people from false information, I saw it as providing an open-minded soapbox for the little guy. It was the Extension expert who laughed and told me “People don’t make bacon: Oscar Mayer makes bacon!” It was the elderly neighbor who showed me how to make bacon. Countryside readers were my new neighbors, and added a lot more.

At the same time, there are certainly foolish people in the world, and I didn’t ignore my job as an editorial gatekeeper, either. I thought of myself as a sort of master of ceremonies: My job was to keep things moving, on track, and civil. I knew very well I was no expert on anything, and the letters from readers who were, made it easy to be humble. It was amazing to see how much expertise, on how many varied topics, was available for the asking, from people who most often didn’t have fancy degrees or titles. I learned that everybody is ignorant about many things, but everybody is an expert on at least one thing. Countryside was fortunate to be able to tap in to all that knowledge and expertise from beyond the sidewalks.

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Old men like me have favorite stories we like to tell, retell, and then tell again. That often drives people crazy, especially those who are nearest and dearest to us and can’t escape.

You, on the other hand, don’t know me from a stone. You might have read one of my books (the most likely being Storey’s Guide to Raising Dairy Goats or Homesteader’s Handbook to Raising Small Livestock), but those were written many years ago. And it’s been 10 years since I, and my Beyond the Sidewalks column, dropped out of the pages of Countryside magazine, so either you’ve never heard of me or you’ve forgotten all my favorite stories. Which means I get to start over again!

One of my all-time faves is how Countryside magazine began.

I had dreamed of homesteading all my life, although we didn’t call it that back then. In the 1940s it was simply “farming.”  My uncle’s farm was typical. He milked about a dozen cows, by hand and lantern light. The milk was cooled in cans in the springhouse, which was “refrigerated” by cold water, and hauled to town by the horses, which also provided power for the field work.

There were chickens, producing eggs to eat or sell and an occasional chicken dinner. One sow furnished piglets, enough to keep the family of 12 in pork, with some left over to sell.

There was a huge garden, of course, and an orchard and berry patch. We slept on crinkly corn-husk mattresses, pumped water by hand, and hauled in wood for the kitchen range. An older cousin recently reminded me of how I hated to pick beans, but I don’t remember that: To me, everything on our summer visits was just wonderful. I wanted to be a farmer. (When I hated to pick beans was as a migrant laborer in California; but that’s another story.)

World War II changed everything. Some genius decided that all those factories making bombs and gunpowder from ammonia could just as easily make fertilizer. Many factors contributed to replacing the horses with trucks and tractors. Electricity came to the farm, chickens and pigs became specialties not to be bothered with on a dairy farm, and dairy farmers needed fancy equipment and larger herds in order to stay in business. By the mid-fifties, when I graduated from high school, the farms of my youth were nearly extinct, it took a small fortune to even get started, and it wasn’t the kind of farming I was interested in anyway. I obviously had to find some other way to make a living, and hopefully, one day I could “farm” the way I wanted to, probably as a hobby, or a sideline.

So I became a journalist, flying around the country until all airports and hotel rooms looked the same, and I decided it was time to take action.

Diane, who had been a stay-at-home mom, made use of her RN degree by getting a job in a hospital, while I quit my magazine job and became a Mr. Mom. With a home-based business, the Countryside Print Shop. And a garden, and then rabbits, and chickens, geese, goats, sheep, a pig, and a hive of bees, all on one acre, on the edge of a small town — just beyond the sidewalks.

Everything went swimmingly, and we had all of the usual first-homestead adventures: the call from the post office that the chicks had arrived, and later, a more urgent call about the bees, several of which had escaped; the thrill of the first pullet egg; the first rabbit butchering experience; the goat milk, the cheese, and all of the other pleasures and delightful experiences that come with what we began to call “homesteading.”

Then came time to butcher the pig. I had a general idea of how to do it, but couldn’t find any information on such topics as curing and smoking bacon and ham. Using my journalism experience, I did a little research and decided to call the Meat Science Department at my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin.

I explained what I was looking for, and there was a long silent pause. Then the guy laughed. “People don’t make bacon,” he chuckled. “Oscar Mayer makes bacon!” (I later encountered the same attitude with organic gardening, goats, and other topics, which to this day colors my attitude toward county agents, even though now some of them act like they invented all this stuff.)

When I mentioned this experience to an 85-year-old neighbor who lived just across the road, he offered to help, or at least show me what to do. And then he went into his attic and brought down his hog scraper and lard press for me to use!

The hog butchering was a success, but the wheels had started turning. Certainly there were other people who wanted to know and do the same kinds of things I wanted to know and do. There obviously were other elderly people who had the knowledge we were looking for, and who wouldn’t be around much longer to share their experience. I was a professional writer, I owned a printing press…

In the summer of 1969 I placed a $25 classified ad in Organic Farming & Gardening, a magazine I had been avidly reading for several years, and one I had written “homesteading” articles for. I offered a one-page (12” x 18”, the biggest sheet my press could handle) newsletter on “homesteading.” It was only one sheet, folded to 6” x 9”, because I had little idea of what would be in it, but also because I had been involved in magazines, and didn’t want the production hassles of anything bigger. This was going to be for my own education, not a business enterprise. Therefore the subscription price was $1 a year — plus a letter with a question, or an answer to a previous question, about self-sufficient living.

The first ad brought a few replies, the second a few more, enough to pay the postage. The only thing that kept it going was the fact that I was willing to do the editing, printing, addressing, mailing etc. for free. However, the response, even from those few readers, was so great that I soon had to add another sheet, and then so many more it became necessary to staple them into a 6” x 9” booklet, and when that got too fat for our hand stapler, we had to increase the page size to 8-1/2” x 11”.  The rest, as they say, is history.

There’s more to this, which I’ll share next time. And of course, I’ll be delighted to tell you many other stories from beyond the sidewalks.

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