Comments on: Unlocking the Food

By: Dana

Dana — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 02:22:00 +0000

Coming in late on this…

Or mulberry. I read in my local paper a couple years back, in the gardening section, that a reader considered mulberries “trash trees” and complained bitterly about the mess they left in his yard. Mulberries. Food. *headdesk* I bet he’d have thought nothing of going to the local Middle Eastern market and picking up mulberry syrup, though, if he’d taken up ME cooking.

We also have loads of black walnut trees around my neighborhood whose crops go to waste every single year (I would take advantage but I need to figure out where to put them so their hulls can rot off), plus violets, wild strawberries, dandelions, and wild chicory. The only reason we have the latter few plants is this is a “bad neighborhood” where nobody can afford to call in landscapers to kill off all those damn weeds. It’s just as well.

By: Urban Scout

Urban Scout — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 18:10:05 +0000

[…] It starts with where I’m at; I have just enough money to pay for food and a cell phone bill for one year. At some point I will run out of money. I would say the goal of this project is “Unlocking the Food.” That means not longer paying for food but having the know-how to acquire the food I need with my own two hands, through horticulture, hunting and gathering. Why stop with food? With my sights set on abandoning Civilization, it also means that I unlock shelter and no longer pay rent. Which would also imply unlocking water and heating too. That Civilization uses money as a tool to hold it’s members captive is quite obvious to everyone. But the obvious conclusion, that to “unlock” these necessities we must abandon the money which we must work to get, is not so obvious. […]

By: ChandraShakti

ChandraShakti — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 02:45:22 +0000

Re: planetwarming’s comment.
Ah, but there ARE lots of fruit trees growing everywhere in most communities. All of those “ornamental” flowering trees are fruit trees. But the fruit is not gathered to eat. It is raked up and bagged into the garbage as a nuisance that goes with the pretty spring flowers. I’ve been eating crabapples, pears and apricots around my neighborhood that others don’t see as food.

By: Gary Ewell

Gary Ewell — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:22:29 +0000

Jason

Your example #2

2. The Greenland Vikings ate their dogs, the calves of their cow herds down to the hooves, and finally each other. But never once did they touch the fish teeming outside their doors. Not even with the “skraelings” (Inuit) living well off of the fish in plain view. It simply didn’t register as food.

seems contradicted by article, “C-14 dating and the disappearance of Norsemen from Greenland” in Europhysics News (2002) Vol. 33 No. 3 that you site elsewhere.

Gary

By: planetwarming

planetwarming — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 05:06:24 +0000

I think it would be cool if fruit trees were grown everywhere around communities. But maybe the reason they aren’t is to keep the food locked up.

By: Unlocking the Safety » The Anthropik Network

Unlocking the Safety » The Anthropik Network — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 05:50:13 +0000

[…] There is often quite an amount of talk about unlocking the food. However, food is not the only thing that civilization has unfairly kept from humanity. By locking away the food civilizations have made people work anywhere from forty to over one hundred hours every week on starvation rations. And by locking up the safety civilization has kept people who know better in line. […]

By: The Lilies of the Field » The Anthropik Network

The Lilies of the Field » The Anthropik Network — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 03:02:57 +0000

[…] Of course, the reason we work is clear. The food is all locked up. Civilization passes out tokens that can be redeemed for prizes at the counter, if you play the game. But now none of us know how to survive outside this surreal, horrific Chuck E. Cheese’s, leaving us slaves to those games. Unlocking the food means redefining what we mean by “food.” It means ending our dependence on others. Benjamin Shender wrote on this site less than a month ago: In the specific case of civilization, in particular American-brand civilization, food is only that which humans specifically raised to be food. The only exceptions to this rule being fish and occasionally hunted meat. But even in those exceptions many only fish or hunt for “sport” and have no intention of ever eating their victims. But this meme is what holds so many of us in our shackles. Even once we’ve reached the point in which we can look at a forest and know that it is full of food, this knowledge is worthless if we’ve never learned what is edible in that forest, and therefore “food,�? and what is not edible, and therefore “not food.�? Ultimately this knowledge is the lever by which we can pry open the bars of our cage. Once we reach the point that we only have to walk down the street to earn our dinner, civilization only offers stress and pain, both of which we can do with out. […]

By: Jason Godesky

Jason Godesky — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 14:35:44 +0000

First, everyone welcome our newest author, Benjamin Shender, IshCon’s prolific “Hypnopompia.” Ben and I have been working on a lot of concepts behind the scenes, so it’s really great to be able to host some of his public work.

Just some concrete examples to back up Ben’s excellent article:

The Donner Party, the most famous American example of cannibalism, starved to death in a pine forest. They made shelters out of pine branches, and had even been fed a meal of pine nuts earlier that year, on 12 January, when the residents of a Paiute village took pity on them. It simply didn’t register as food.
The Greenland Vikings ate their dogs, the calves of their cow herds down to the hooves, and finally each other. But never once did they touch the fish teeming outside their doors. Not even with the “skraelings” (Inuit) living well off of the fish in plain view. It simply didn’t register as food.

So why is cannibalism such an option of first resort? Because cannibalism is floating around in our cultural consciousness. We know that when all else fails, we can eat each other. We know that we are food. To the Greenland Vikings, fish was not food–but Greenland Vikings were food. To the Donners, pine nuts were not food–but Donners were food. For all our disgust, we leap to cannibalism very readily, because we have severely restricted the things we call “food,” but we’ve left ourselves on that short list.