I'm eating eggs every day to drive up the price because I can outbid a bunch of Trump voters and I bet they are the people who insist on high protein food like eggs.
You could probably buy pills for Vitamin C.
Realistically, I don't think there's any scenario in which it's in any way more practical or efficient for most people to grow enough food to seriously feed themselves.
My wife's parents have a "garden" in which they grow quite a lot of the produce they eat, but their garden is bigger than most people can access or productively use, it's about 40-50% the size of a football field and has a couple of dozen mature fruit trees, outbuildings for drying produce including dirt cellars, an irrigation system comprising water gather containers and a petrol-driven compressor/pump that her dad made, etc. They then can a lot of the produce they get so that they have fruit and fruit compote through the winter, and lots of preserved or pickled vegetables. Even then, that's just not enough to fully provide them with produce.
re: 3
That land has also been cultivated by their family for a couple of generations, so they aren't starting from scratch, and there are several family members who pop round and help with harvesting, weeding, watering, canning, etc.
Ile: when you say "has anyone done that only in containers" do you mean, like, flowerpots and planters, or do you mean shipping containers? The answer is yes for either, but these are different questions.
It is actually quite hard to get scurvy - you have to spend about 4-6 weeks on an essentially zero-vitamin-C diet. Fresh fruit, fresh veg, supplement pills, some sorts of preserved veg, even fresh meat will give you enough to stave it off.
Scurvy cases I know about fall into two categories:
a) people who have prepared badly for spending long periods in sailing ships, in the arctic, or in sailing ships in the arctic
b) my mate Pete's PA who was on some weird diet / eating disorder
I would definitely not worry about that at this point. If logistics break down to the point where you cannot walk into your local supermarket and buy some orange juice, you should not be thinking in terms of "growing some salad greens in a little backyard garden this summer", you should be thinking in terms of "picking up any children or aged relatives in your arms and fleeing to the nearest border".
More on scurvy and refugees here:
https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/66962/?sequence=1
4-6 weeks is extremely short; if you're otherwise healthy and not stressed, you have months.
In 1939, John Crandon, a surgeon at Harvard Medical School, placed himself on a diet of bread,
crackers, cheese, eggs, beer, pure chocolate, and sugar with supplements of yeast and all the known
vitamins except vitamin C. From 6 weeks onwards no ascorbic acid could be detected in his blood
plasma. After 12 weeks he began to feel fatigued. No clinical signs of deficiency developed until
the 19th week when his skin became dry and rough and signs of hyperkeratosis began to appear...
I wonder if the business owners who tend to lean Trumpy aren't in the most affected category. I don't think food shortages will get to famine levels or even close. But I could easily see it damaging the profits of restaurants and the like.
I would be interested to know which way US restaurant owners tend to lean, politically. Based on reading Anthony Bourdain books they tend to be either very hard-nosed ex-chefs, or retired gay dentists who have always liked the idea of owning a restaurant and proceed to lose their life savings in six months. Neither strikes me as particularly Trumpy. Also the restaurant business is incredibly reliant on illegal immigrant labour (again, going by Bourdain) so it won't be just the food prices that are strafing them.
I don't think Bourdain went to the typical restaurant. And many sectors depending on immigrant labor voted for Trump (for example farmers).
There's this whole no-taxes-on-tips thing which restaurants like.
You can buy vitamin C pills sufficient to provide years of the daily requirement for less than $100. It's probably enough for decades of avoiding scurvy if you take a fraction of the daily recommendation.
I stupidly planted apple trees near my garden 10 years ago and now they block so much light that the vegetables don't grow well. I could trim them but would need some kind of mechanical lift. Also last year the squirrels ate all the apples so I didn't get anything except non-scurvied squirrels. And they are trying to move in under my roof.
12: true, but shelf life though.
And many sectors depending on immigrant labor voted for Trump (for example farmers).
Oh, sure. I didn't mean that was a reason they wouldn't be Trumpy; just that that was another reason they'd get hurt by Trump, besides food prices.
9: anecdotally, the ones I've worked for have been owned by:
an ex corporate hospitality person funded by her uncle, who had made a bunch of money in computers in the 90s
a sommelier in band t-shirts bankrolled by wealthy collector friends from his fine dining days
a French hospitality group full of very Bad Boys (tm) who also had bars in Ibiza and London
a Belgian con artist / visionary bankrolled by the Weight Watchers billionaire
a tech bro who had just sold his company and works on AI
If you count investors I think there's a good chunk of Trumpiness in there.
I've never been defrauded by a Belgian.
I would guess that a big chunk of US restaurant owners either can't vote or are Asian or Latin men who voted for Trump because he's a businessman who loves America.
15 to the tune of "I'm the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo".
I think most restaurant owners aren't restaurant owners two years later.
That sentence was slightly in the wrong order, I meant to say "Asian or Latin men who either can't vote (because they're not yet citizens) or who voted for Trump because he's a businessman who loves America, just like them."
And actually most "restaurant owners" in the US are not people like those described in 14, but are small businessmen who have a handful of McDonalds franchises, and that sounds very Trumpy indeed.
Investing in restaurants is a popular way for wealthy doctors to lose money.
Looks like 19% Asian owned, 14% Hispanic-owned. Which is a bit lower than I was thinking, though still a big chunk. Also 47% women, which is a very big surprise to me!
My CEO is suggesting we hoard food. That's a bit worrying.
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So, apparently there was an earthquake in Maine. (3.9). Did any New England commenters feel it? I didn't but coworkers in other areas around Boston said their houses shook.
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Are restaurant owners vastly different from their communities? I talked to a Mexican Trump-leaning restaurant guy in PA. I think my local farm-to -table place is probably solidly Dem.
Agree with 3.1. Victory Gardens were never feeding people anywhere near comprehensively, just helping out around the edges.
25: Can you flesh that out? I've been looking at America's Test kitchen braise recipes. They and a chicken one with orange juice and olives.* Well, that's out.
* olives were going up for reasons unrelated to the election, but citrus pickers aren't showing up to work post Trump.
A not insignificant number of people like policies that hurt people they don't like even if it reduces their profits. They might not even see the connection.
This is from the perspective of a lifelong gardener, so take it as you will.
Yes, you should garden and you would enjoy growing some of your own food. You can fit some beneficial gardening in any size space. I can recommend some pleasant gardening channels for Zone 9, if you want to watch some of those. Gardening social media is pleasant in general.
The food is only part of it (and honestly, maybe the smallest part for me). Touching soil is supposed to improve your microbiome and brings on immediate endorphins. You can involve your kid. If you have space to compost, you can sequester the tiniest bit of carbon. You can watch flying creatures come visit. You can be outside ruminating on something you have control over.
If there is something you particularly fancy (tomatoes in summer, broccoli in winter, garlic, herbs), you can specialize and provide a good deal of your own supply, available steps away. Contra what everyone says, I don't actually find my own produce to be better than what I get at market but that's because what I get at market is very good.
Gardening is a big part of what I think about, especially now while I am also landscaping (which I presume will end one day when I finally have everything built and installed). Thought given to my garden can yield something; thought given to the political situation doesn't seem to.
My CEO is suggesting we hoard food. That's a bit worrying.
It is worrying in very different ways, depending on whether this is a normative statement ("what? You think we're heading for a famine?") or a descriptive one ("no, Shirley just has a naturally round face, she does not have cheek pouches").
By this point I probably enjoy the composting part of the cycle as much or more than the growing part of the cycle.
I can't grow anything because it gets eaten by groundhogs or deer. But maybe since I put a contract out on the groundhogs and this winter has been so cold, I can grow tomatoes this spring.
I guess I could have asked for the groundhog to eat. Probably tastes like chicken.
I can't grow anything because the idea of taking on any more commitments makes me want to hibernate. Actually my existing commitments make me want to hibernate. Plus this headcold.
You're not going to get scurvy -- even tiny amounts of fresh plant matter every once in a while will stave it off. (IIRC, seal meat will also do in a pinch/polar expedition.)
I'm worried about what a tariff war will do to the price of my luxury toast breakfast, but it's too late to start growing an avocado tree.
Also 47% women, which is a very big surprise to me!
That includes 13% which are exactly 50% owned by women, which makes sense - mostly jointly owned by husband and wife, and that I would think is a fairly common sort of ownership for restaurants in particular.
Exclude those and it's 34% which are majority female-owned, which is not actually very impressive - about 39% of all private businesses in the US are female-owned, according to this from Wells Fargo https://www.wippeducationinstitute.org/_files/ugd/5cba3e_32a20d6c51ab442ca86791888884dc1a.pdf
Frustratingly, I can't find whether Wells Fargo includes 50:50 businesses as "women-owned". But it does also break down businesses into "employer" and "nonemployer", the latter being what I would call "sole trader", and only 24% of employers are women-owned. I would imagine almost all restaurants are "employers" - unless they are the tiniest of holes in the wall.
My parents have a much larger yard than I do, and my mom is very proud of her homegrown perilla leaves. (Tbh though they're a little tough, I think because the sunlight is much stronger here than would be ideal.). She also fights an annual war with the squirrels over her guava tree. One year she tied little netting bags over all the guavas on her tree, and then next day, my dad found a dead squirrel floating in the pool. Now she hates it when we reminisce about the time she drove a squirrel to suicide from despair.
Staving off scurvy is why our forefolk used to tie an onion to their belt, which was the style at the time.
I do the netting bags for my nectarines. It has worked so far and I would only gloat if I drove a rat or squirrel to suicide.
I have chickens so I have rats and have been trying to find some form of ratter for years. We've never gotten an owl in the owl box. We got two barn cats. One promptly vanished; the other only comes back for evening food and to cuddle with our dog. The dog doesn't rat. However, another barn kitten showed up and while I haven't seen a kill, she stays close and prowls for rats. Now instead of seeing eight or nine rats all the time, we might see one every couple of weeks. She has also moved into the owl box, so I suppose it served its purpose.
Barn cats are a program by the county that adopts out feral cats that they trap and fix. You can tell them because they clip the left ear. They aren't meant to be friendly, but the kitten has become so. She hates the indoors, though.
My mother-in-law unknowingly gassed a squirrel in her dryer. That was fun.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that no American ever has a normal anecdote about a squirrel. 95% don't have any squirrel anecdotes at all and the rest are all stuff like 47 and Mike Huckabee deep frying squirrels in his bedroom at university.
So, apparently there was an earthquake in Maine. (3.9). Did any New England commenters feel it?
My windows rattled.
I mean, what's the point in telling a normal anecdote about squirrels? Everyone has a dozen of those every day.
I was just thinking that. "Saw a squirrel today. It did squirrel things and I kept walking. The end."
So what you're saying is squirrels are only noteworthy when they're acting squirrelly? Now wait a minute here
I have a kinda normal squirrel anecdote. The Scottish Wildlife Trust decided that Scotland should have a "Big 5" animals. But instead of Lions, Leopards, Cape Buffalo, Rhinos, and Elephants, they're Red Squirrels, Red Deer, Golden Eagle, Otter, and Harbour Seal. Cute animals all of them, though none as cute as the Tammie Norrie. Anyway, Arran advertises itself as the only place you can see all five. We failed to see an Otter, but did manage to see two Red Squirrels, which were extremely adorable and had their tails tucked up against their back. I thought we saw a third one, but it turns out it was a rat eating the spilled squirrel foods, since squirrels are just cute rats. The End.
Relatedly, Chicago has relatively few rats for a city of its size, because the Fox Squirrels have successfully cornered the eating trash market.
Someone's made a joke about Candide apples, right?
I've never had a garden or houseplant, but I did rent a basement apartment from someone where part of the agreement was watering the plants outside while they were away on trips, and it was surprisingly enjoyable. I found it especially gratifying to revive one of the plants the owner thought might not make it - it just needed some extra watering for a while.
Any appetite for discussing this?
For me to have a logical reason to worry about scurvy, all the following worries would have to come true first: telework ending and my work site being a less convenient one than I remembered, me and Cassandane losing our jobs, ICE coming for the kid's school, and a general police state being achieved, for starters.
Last week, some mentioned Candide. I guess I need to read it. I will say that I was gardening long before my spirit was crushed.
57 the phishing stuff mentioned in that thread is very weird
57.1: That does explain why so much weird stuff is happening government-wide so suddenly.
It doesn't fully explain it, of course, but it seems like a big piece of the explanation.
Yeah, my gut reaction is that the comments are a little too paranoid, since any plan involving this government-wide email system seems comically inefficient; someone by definition already has lists of .gov email addresses and there's going to be a lot of randomness in how people handle them. But I did get those OPM emails at my not-OPM address, so there's something weird going on.
And further on Reddit, no surprise that Project 2025 folks are authors based on some of the stuff based on metadata.
My friend was saying that he was really curious about how the federal worker unions are going to react.
Declaring federal employee unions unconstitutional seems like exactly the kind of thing that this Supreme Court would be excited to do...
But sophisticated observers of American politics assured me that when Trump disavowed Project 2025, his vindictiveness towards someone else getting the spotlight outweighed the simpleton explanation that he was straightforwardly lying, meaning that if he won the election the Project 2025ers would find themselves struggling to regain purchase. Those silly Project 2025ers shot themselves in the foot!
Reference for 64. Wow. (To be clear, this falls into the category of "distraction" for a lot of people including me, but it's probably good to take a small amount of time for awareness. For a lot of people, obviously, it's worth a lot more attention.)
I'm down to 15 eggs. Time go to buy more.
The price of eggs might be the justification I need to but extra chicks this year. I want MOAR egg colors.
Costco had eggs this weekend but just in case I bought the bigger pack (60 vs the usual 24). They were about $1 more per dozen than last month.
Costco eggs don't taste as good to me.
I guess I haven't tried the regular ones, but the organic eggs at Costco didn't taste as good as the organic, cage-free (something like that) from the regular grocery store.
Costco here stocks eggs from a local(ish) farm that are free range etc. I'm sure that varies by region though.
The first time I got a different brand/class of eggs because there were almost none on the shelves, they were jumbo, and 10 of the 12 ended up being double yolk. One explanation I got from a random person on Bluesky is that the double yolks get screened out, but sometimes make their way into the regular supply. Not sure what I'm supposed to take away from that. (Also not sure what the typical use they're being screened out for is.)
48: Squirrels have been plaguing us this winter, getting in the roof and scratching and scrabbling through the walls and ceilings. Yesterday, one of them kept screaming and screaming for an hour or so. I wanted to send the cat after the damned thing with a flashlight and a pistol, Vietnam tunnel rat style, but she's been feeling poorly and wasn't up for it.
All Costcos switched to exclusively free range about 8 years ago. The cartons used to be 3 dozen and dropped to 2 dozen about the same time. There's probably still some variation in availability of organic or not. We have brown or white and also duck eggs. Not sure what is different about duck besides being a little bigger, I've never tried them.
No need to hoard unless you're a student expecting aid disbursement....
I don't eat enough eggs to buy from Costco. Usually, I go to Trader Joe's for eggs. Their pasture raised are pricey but the best price for that kind of egg. Actual pasture-raised do taste better than cage-free.
They've had stocking issues. I can't get cocoa. They are out of sunflower seed oil. I bought some Pantene Italian version at Market Basket. Wegmans was twice the price. It's still less expensive than olive oil (which is the oil it most closely resembles in terms of performance at various temperatures - at least the high oleic version does). I guess Ukraine was a major producer and that has cut the supply.
77: I had a duck egg at a cooking demo at a fancy farmer's market in DC. The yolks are darker and richer than most chicken eggs. A sunny-side up fried egg on top of a green salad with vinaigrette was very nice. But it would be too heavy for breakfast with sausage, bacon, and toast etc.
This is now the egg blog where every thread is about eggs.
82 now it is http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_18825.html#2206177
Hi everyone. I'm sorry I disappeared just when I sent my badly worded question in.
Basically it's been a perfect storm of personal and political stress land I when Nsent that. and I finally decided to call my shrink and change my prescripions. In the cold light of day worrying about vitamin C does seem foolish. Inl spend a shocking amount of time worrying about having an exactly big enough exactly ripe sunsets of the 10 fruits and vegetables my toddler not only is willing to eat but somewhat often demands, and the thought of facing grocery stores depleted of any one of these was inordinately upsetting. Also I think Megan is right and I need to touch soil / touch grass ( and not just sand....I:m in a sand pit right now ..there is just so much sand ). My local nursery has a line anout it being a good time to plant a "sanity garden" and that's probably right. But also,.the notion of California farmworkes hiding scared when they work so hard to provide pretty much the best food in the world is just nauseating.
84: Ile, all of that sounds entirely understandable and a sanity garden (vegetable or flower or both) would probably be a great thing to do. I can recommend a bird feeder as well; it's very comforting to sit outside in the sun and watch them swooping in to feed. If you like finches and sparrows, you can fill it with seeds and nuts. If you're lucky enough to live somewhere with hummingbirds you can get one that fills up with sugar water. I would not, however fond you are of the larger accipitridae, recommend filling one up with rotting mutton.
Yeah, I agree w Ajay. Lots of love your way and this is an ungodly amount of stress we're putting on anyone with immigrant loved ones.
When I was a kid I wanted a vulture. Still kind of miffed about that.
pretty much the best food in the world
As a son of other soils I am patriotically obliged to scoff.
The rest of the comment is totally non-scoffworthy and I wish you the best.
"There's nothing shameful about being a vulture."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dadO5AQTohE
You could definitely have hummingbird visitors if you want them. There are lots around. Super noisy and scoldy.
Those seem like magic to me. I have neighbors who do a country-house party every year, and they have a lot of hummingbirds, and I could watch them for hours. The best is when you have hummingbirds and bumblebees going after the same flowers, and you have to think to be sure what you're looking at.
I saw these amazing moths in Croatia and honestly couldn't tell if they were hummingbirds or not!
Hummingbirds fight other hummingbirds. Yeah, they're pretty. And fairly tameable, I gather. They'll come sit on your hand if you feed them enough. But they're fighty loud bossy birds.
I want to see bees and hummingbirds fight.
We won't have the hummingbirds back for several months yet, but they are definitely a plus. Now it's mostly chickadees and juncos, with the occasional woodpecker.
Hummingbirds!
Today I saw a splendid pair of buzzards soaring over Highgate before one of them did a proper eagle-style diving attack on a gang of magpies. It was pretty epic.
Hummingbirds also do diving attacks. It's pretty hilarious. They just levitate up, up, up until they're this barely visible mote in the upper atmosphere, then zip down at full speed to unleash 0.15 ounces of wrath upon whatever is their target (usually another hummingbird), emitting the tiniest peeps of rage like laptop alerts coming through cheap headphones.
They do kill each other from time to time.
tiniest peeps of rage
That is not my experience of hummingbirds. Constant fairly loud buzzy squawks is more like it.
I read Candide because someone mentioned it. That shit was weird.
Did you come out of it wanting to garden?