Urban Scout: Rewilding Cascadia

Let’s face it. Most of us rewilding people do not yet have the skills or the land to hunt and gather or practice horticulture full-time. And yet, undomesticating the food we eat seems at the very heart rewilding since the very heart of domestication involves growing our food since the domestication of food spawned the domestication of everything. Converting to a domestic free diet may prove extremely difficult for many, especially over night. Lucky for us, ways exist to limit the amount of domestication and the terms of the domestication of the food that we eat without us having to hunt and gather or grow it all ourselves right away. Hunter-gatherer-gardeners eat very different diets than those who practice agriculture. Though diet varies drastically from bioregion to bioregion, basic principles exist to put the diets into different categories.

Eating a Wild Diet Reduces Population Growth Factors & Deforestation

Our modern diets comes from practicing agriculture as a means for subsistence. Agriculture refers to a method of growing food that requires simulated catastrophe to inspire first phase succession plants, specifically grasses like wheat and corn but also includes other grains and legumes and some starchy tubers. You cannot grow grasses and grains inside of a forest, so people must create a catastrophe to clear the forest to plant grass; fires, floods, clear-cuts, etc. Without human hands the area would naturally recover over time. This requires constant catastrophe to keep the field from turning back into a forest. When you change the land to grow a mono-crop of grains for human consumption, you increase the food capacity of that land for human growth, this in turn causes the population of humans to artificially inflate to what the natural condition of a forest would not feed.

Mono-cropping creates all kinds of problems. Aside from the extraneous amount of work it takes to keep the land from turning into a forest (constant tilling), mono-cropping depletes nutrients in soils and provides the perfect environment for “pests” and disease. Because mono-cropping has such fragility, people who use this method of cultivation as a means for their entire living must come up with a solution to live through poor yields. Enter the food surplus.

In order to combat the ills of agriculture people invent pro-longed food storage which leads to rampant population growth which leads to more cutting down forests to grow more grains for the food storage which leads to more population growth which leads to civili-fucking-zation. A positive feedback loop of grain-fetishization and baby-booming.

Not all food planted in the ground can provide people with the protein that causes population growth. You cannot feed a large population with say, leafy greens. By choosing not to eat grains, you make the choice to stop supporting the plants that make population explosion and deforestation happen. Notably, a lot of deforestation these days involves cutting forests down to graze cattle. Though, cattle themselves take up land that could otherwise feed more people if they had grains growing on the land instead, not to mention the grains they must feed the cattle themselves. Animal domestication does not inspire population growth. Even the vegans say that (www.vegan.org):

In a time when population pressures have become an increasing stress on the environment, there are additional arguments for a vegan diet. The United Nations has reported that a vegan diet can feed many more people than an animal-based diet. For instance, projections have estimated that the 1992 food supply could have fed about 6.3 billion people on a purely vegetarian diet, 4.2 billion people on a 85% vegetarian diet, or 3.2 billion people on a 75% vegetarian diet.

Whoever wrote this does not understand the connection between population growth and grain production. Veganism, while addressing many of the terrible problems with animal-cruelty and pollutive factory farms, does not address the larger force that drives population growth, in fact, the diet simply adds more fuel to the population growth diet. By taking grains out of your diet you support another way of food subsistence and limit population growth. Of course, a grain-free diet will still not cease the collapse of civilization, but may actually help to induce collapse, as a collapse-free future no longer exists. I don’t want anyone to think that eating differently will “save the world” or “bring down civilization.” Changing your diet alone will not help that. It may simply lessen the destruction you contribute to as an individual person in civilization and also make you feel better and healthier when the collapse does occur and most people suffer grain-withdrawal.

Eating a Wild Diet Decreases Waste Products

By eating wild you reduce packaging and plastics. Produce and meat don’t generally have a lot of wrappers and wild foods have none at all. “Yeah I’ve got a land-fill in my backyard; my compost pile, bitch.”

Eating a Wild Diet Probably Reduces Carbon Emissions? (Buzzword of the Year!)

By buying locally you reduce the distance that the food needs to travel. Buy buying produce and meat you reduce the plastics and energy used to package and preserve foods. Also, wild plant foods rarely need cooking so you save some energy there too. I don’t do no good at the math. But I can make an educated guess here, no?

Eating a Wild Diet Increases Your Health?

Let’s put our anti-civ ethics aside and just talk about our selfishness for feeling great. Don’t get me wrong. I love pizza, cake and ice cream as much as the next kid. But I also have a wheat allergy (who doesn’t really?) and a lactose intolerance (again, who doesn’t?). I love the taste of pizza and the satisfaction of eating these foods very much, so much that I don’t mind the sloppy diarrhea that keeps me up half of the night when I eat it. I love it so much I don’t mind the constant sinus infections and immune-disorder. I don’t mind the sore knee joints and itchy skin and swollen lymph-nodes and stinky armpits and stomach cramps… “Hmm. Can you put extra whip cream on my bacon-milkshake? Thaaanks.” Actually, I do mind.

Archaeological evidence shows us that agriculture and grain-eating has had a terrible impact on health conditions. Of course, I feel too lazy to quote it all right now, so why don’t you check out Jason’s essay at Anthropik called; Civilization Makes Us Sick.

Eating a Wild Diet Makes You… Wild!

Eating a wild diet frees you from the civilized economy and reconnects you to your landbase.

…And Other Dietary Babble

Some theorize that agriculture came about as humans became addicts to the doping effects of grains. Civilization, a culture of drug addicts? Others theorize that the pathogenic, grain-loving micro-flora that live in our bodies have made us crave the grains, which made us practice agriculture. So maybe the micro-flora controls us! Aaaaaah!

Raw foodists argue that meat also contains poisons that our bodies do not digest well. I don’t necessarily disagree with them, so much that… who fucking cares? The bottom line here does not look like toxins, but ecological implications. Humans have evolved to digest meat more smoothly long ago. They also evolved to live in “equilibrium” with their particular bioregions that require meat as a protein source… without destroying their ecosystem. So eating meat, toxin or no, has no ill effects on ecosystems. Some people have also developed less-sensitivity to grains. Though, grain-based cultures must use agriculture to grow those grains, and agriculture causes desertification of the planet. Soooooo what does that tell us?

We should not confuse foods themselves with the production methods that make them possible. Like our bodies developing resistance to the toxins found in meats they have also developed resistance to some of the toxins found in starchier foods. Though we can see the ill health effects found among people who eat starches as major staples, we don’t see these ill effects in people who don’t rely on them for major staples. This needs recognition as to say that certain kinds of subsistence strategies; agriculture has different health results from other kinds of subsistence strategies; hunting and gathering and horticulture (or permaculture). Meaning, you can grow grains in your horticulture garden and eat them occasionally. But when you cut down your forest to grow your mono-crop of corn, you will begin to experience problems.