Food Provisioning

Discussion

Sam Rose:

"This is closely related to something I've been exploring with people locally as way of procuring supplies of food. Some are calling these "foraging networks" in Europe (we may call them "foraging tribes" here).

The idea is that we can work together to time the harvest of wild plant products that are legal to harvest from public lands (or private lands with permission), and that we can split the cost of supplies for labor, and split the labor of processing, and plan the actions so that they are efficient, and participants walk away with healthy alternatives to commercial agriculture.

An example is the Acorn, which is a direct replacement for staples like grain, soy, and some beans.

Many ancient societies subsisted off of the Acorn, although they were usually subsumed by agricultural societies. In this region, there are quite literally millions of pounds of Acorns that are there for the taking on public and private lands, and well planned foraging expeditions could yield participants with staple food product that could last all year, that is processed, store-able and usable in a variety of ways. This method of procuring staple foods can bring new value to public land stands of Oak trees of various types.

These activities are an example of self/mutual provisioning, using a commons-based resource. The impact on the environment in choosing this alternative is exponentially less than normal food production approaches. The time that it could take to produce a supply of staple foods that can be stored for most of the year, just based on effective Acorn gathering, could be less than 2 weeks out of the year. It's possible that a group of peers, collaborating together could co-produce all of their food within 2-3 months (and still supplement with traditional gardening/agriculture, local aquaculture, etc). P2P Foraging is not always an option, but when it is (such as on the major continents) it could really pay off for participants." (p2p research mailing list, November 2010)