Just as you can't truly love another human without knowing them intimately, you can't love your landbase without knowing it intimately.  In other words, you can't be a real environmentalist, or not much of one anyway, if you don't know how the land you live on functions and how to interact with it properly.  You need to know how to live in place to be able to make any real decisions about that place.

Or maybe the term "environmentalist" is more fitting; it's purely caring about your environs, your surroundings. Not the complex interlocking systems and networks of other living beings. Not the play of life and death that maintains the balance, diversity, and abundance of a healthy ecosystem.

My partner has been suggesting that I do some posts about more physical things, such as step-by-step tutorials and updates about my own projects and activities. After all, telling people why they need to live sustainably and in free feral groups just doesn't cut it if you can't at least give hints on how to do so. Granted, there are a lot of other places to get that information, and I'm glad to link to them as well.

So I'm finally taking her advice, since I decided to take it upon myself to see if I'm up to the challenge of eating nothing but wild and locally grown/raised foods. I had been talking about transitioning to such a diet for awhile now (actually since forever, but moreso recently, given all the stories about GMO crops causing organ damage and food contamination, not to mention rising food costs), but what pushed me to do start it was the fortuitous boon of two deer split between myself and a friend/co-worker. Given that one of the deer was huge, we each have a huge stock of wild meat as a buffer, in case our hunting, fishing, gardening, and gathering come up short. I'd also been inspired a bit by an acquaintance of mine out west who had seen if she could go a week on wild foods (see her blog here), and who gave me some great advice on my Facebook.

As a practical skill set, this is probably one of the biggest things on peoples' minds. Food keeps us alive, and growing up going to the grocery store leaves a lot of us doubting that adequate food can be procured through hunting, fishing, trapping, foraging, and gardening. It seems silly given the multitude of methods I just said, even being as broad as that. Simply knowing that another person is doing this is probably inspiring for some people, so I hope I can last awhile!


These are the rules I set out on my Facebook:

All food and drink is wild or locally grown/raised. The exception is coffee with cream (but no sugar; gross!), since I'm far too addicted to drop that cold turkey.

All of it needs to be found, given, grown, or traded. No buying. This aspect is partially a test of how functional our gift economies are.

Spices and flavorings are allowed, but only if they are non-caloric additions to the diet, since part of the goal is to see if I can meet my nutritional needs. So for example, things like sea salt, fish sauce, vinegar, and cayenne pepper are okay, but things like onions need to be found wild or from the garden.

I'll need to make some changes to my general lifestyle and the way I plan my days. I don't yet hunt, but I intend to by the end of the month. Otherwise, I once again wasted money on a permit and tags. I also need to set aside more/better time for fishing, and get around to finally processing the five gallons of acorns I have sitting around (though I'm partially scared to find out just how many of them went moldy). I should likely also get my trapping permit and do some of that, as well.

Today is the second day of this challenge, and so far I'm going strong. I started off yesterday with venison liver, thinly sliced and cooked in a bit of lard. Lunch was peppered venison steak with a wild green salad (mostly me munching on dandelion leaves, plantain leaves, and a bit of sourgrass), and a dinner of more wild greens. I passed out early so I wasn't all that hungry. As I write this I'm sitting down to my lunch of a wild green curry with thin slices of venison. The greens are cattail shoots, wild mustard leaves and flowers, and the shoots and leaves of young milkweed. It's pretty awesome, and the leftover will probably be my lunch tomorrow as well.

Now I think I'll go find myself a nice patch of wintergreen, because I've been craving fruit. Maybe it's seeing all those wild blueberry bushes in bloom, knowing that those many white and pink flowers mean many many blueberries this summer.