 Consumerism isolates and disconnects. The media hypes the desire for this lifestyle, while we struggle to obtain the cash to buy it. And in this process, its hyper-individualism turns our focus inwards, isolating us from other people and the natural world. From climate change to resource depletion, the system which underpinned that lifestyle are failing, though if you're in the precariat, arguably that happened 20 years ago. Finding the solution to the trap of affluence, or of state-dependent poverty, requires the same practical response, opening up to new habitual methods of living. It's a connection thing. This post started out as a simple idea, to document how I tend, pick, store and use the raspberries that grow in the garden. It's a thing I do as part of daily life, it's not a chore that needs doing. It's a release from the dead energy of consumerism, to engage instead with the positive, natural, life-giving energies of own made food. Okay then, it's not that simple. Thing is, preserving food is not cooking. It requires that you think about your future. This is about raspberries, but it could equally be about sprouting seeds, growing lettuce in a box, or foraging. One of the most powerful methods to learn something is by repetition. Times tables are once drummed into children at school, musicians endlessly practice scales to train their fingers where to go. Craftspeople repeat the same actions over years to perfect their skill at making things. Making people repeat actions is a way to condition their distinctive response thereafter. Now apply that to the consumer lifestyle. One, go to work to earn money, or submit to the deliberate humiliation of the welfare system, to get an insufficient amount to live the life you are sold in the media. Two, use some money to pay for daily needs. Three, as required by that lifestyle, consume the food you see advertised, or that it's the only food you can afford to buy. Four, go back to step one. What if you substitute that of a different kind of activity, like making marsupias? Breaking the repetitive conditioning that the modern lifestyle enforces doesn't require legislation. You don't need permission from your leaders and betters. It only requires that you take the time to learn and express that skill, repeatedly, in your daily life. All you need to do is learn a practical skill that reinforces your economic independence and ecological well-being, and that can be easily repeated. Start small with a single action, then improvise to create new opportunities, and so create the life you want. The full moon nearest to the auto-mechanox is called the harvest moon. I've always found the new moon before that to be more significant. It's when I start to spend a lot of time outdoors foraging, mostly black risonnuts are store for use over winter. Likewise, it's when the forage of my small wild garden demands the greatest effort too. I'm so lucky for me this is not a self-taught activity. I was brought up in a family where foraging growing food and cooking own growing food was an habitual practice and had been so for generations. The experience of doing this in the same location as generations of my family before adds yet another level of energy to this activity. It represents not just a practical middle digit to the power of consumerism, it's also a practical expression of the inherited life skills of my ancestors living in this place. Those skills and the space to express them have shrunk over the last century. Access to land has been curtailed by changing agricultural methods. The lotments around the town have been sold and built over. All I have is a small, badly located garden, and access to what countryside remains are in the arable prairie that erased local fields and hedgerows in the 1970s. Nevertheless, I perpetuate my indigenous culture because I can. Others could collectively create a new, free culture in the space available to them, whether they have permission or not. Again, just like the individual can learn a skill, when that is practiced as a community, we create a common culture and a physical space to practice that culture in. All it requires is the will to undertake these actions habitually as part of our daily lives. If those who believe they are in control don't like it, then the issue becomes our freedom to live in this land versus their presumed control of the resources the land provides. Traditional human culture is not free of constraint. It is formed by the land they live within. It defines how that culture could naturally grow, harvest and preserve foods. All traditional societies by necessity grew and harvested food to live. The further north you go, the more that preserving food is an integral part of culture in order to survive the more extreme depths of the winter. Did Italy foods were air-dried? In Britain, foods were smoked or pickled, and in Scandinavia foods were buried and fermented. The attraction of consumers is that all that effort is made redundant. You just go and buy the same food whatever the time of year. Just ignore the small detail that this lifestyle is devouring the planet to keep itself running. At the simplest level, all food preserving does is time shifting, taking food which you can't possibly eat today and doing something to it to keep as much of its nutrition as possible available in the future. Practically, this is just a set of choices. It may be that you have an ambition to try these choices in the future, but when the food is in your hands, you have to focus on doing something to preserve it right away before the food spoils. In which case, just choose the one that's most doable. Break the false convenience of consumerism by applying a large dollar per DIY, and it creates a measure of economic independence. More importantly, it reconnects us to those natural cycles of the earth, and the constraints it enforces upon our lives as living beings within this landscape. It also allows us to sense those inconvenient things that consumerism is doing to the land in the name of progress, and so work to change them. Food preservation is cooking with a plan. When humans stopped roaming and settled down, they had to store and preserve food. When they were in the maddock, they probably did this using methods like smoking or air drying, but with settled agriculture based on annual crops, they had to plan ahead to manage their supply of food across the year. They had to have a plan. The point about cooking is that it concentrates on preparing food to eat right away. The point about preserving food is that it's not just a matter of learning a technique. You need a plan for using those skills. What you want to store, how long you want to store it, and how much to store to meet your needs. Every food has a set of preserving options. I won't go into those in detail. There's already so many books and websites out there already. What few of those books and sites talk about though is the plan. The set of options you have to preserve food, and how you want to use them to store it. Our rasi plants absolutely brilliant. They fruit from May to July, and after a short break we get a second crop from September to early October. At least once a week we can pick up to a kilo, only half of which we can eat immediately. So we need a plan. That gives us a set of options every time we pick raspberries. You could just eat them raw, simple, easy. The thing is there's only so much you can eat of the same crop before it gets boring, and to eat a balanced diet you need to have variety. You could stew them. Stewing means boiling the fruit in its own juice. This kills any yeasts or organisms that will make it spoil, and the ripening enzymes which will otherwise make it rot. This extends the shelf life in the fridge. Baking has many opportunities from pies to cupcakes. Like stewing, it makes the fruit last longer by halting the ripening process. Bottling involves boiling the fruit with a preservative, the most common being sugar, so the fruit can be sealed in jars. There are three options here. Jam making involves stewing the fruit with a large amount of sugar. Raspberries need gelling sugar, we've added pectin to make it set. This would easily keep in a cool cupboard for a year, though the downside is you're using as much sugar as fruit, which adds a lot of empty calories. Another option is bottling in syrup, using less sugar compared to jam. The trade-off is that this may only preserve the fruit for a few weeks, rather than months. The final option is to pickle the fruit with vinegar to make chutney, which will obviously ruin the flavour of the raspberries. You can put the raspberries in the freezer. Freezing food also interrupts the natural ripening process, as well as killing or making bacteria go dormant. And like boiling, though, it doesn't destroy as much of the nutrition that the fruit contains. Provided the fruit goes straight into the freezer after picking, with a quick salt or rinse to remove the dirt, it will last for up to a year. The main risk with freezing is, what if the freezer breaks down? Or what if you lose your power supply? That's a risk you have to judge, and in the worst case, quickly bake all your frozen food in a share of neighbours. Fermentation involves putting the fruit in a jar of yeast to turn it into wine, though theoretically you could then turn the alcohol into vinegar, as many inadvertently do. Seriously though, it's a lot of effort for a product that has no nutritional value. Chilling food is a method that has been used for thousands of years, long before the electronic fridge was invented. While it slows the ripening process, it can't stop it, so at best you'll keep the fruit for a week or so. Finally, drying is another option that's been used since prehistoric times. Drying removes the water from the food, stopping the ripening process and killing bacteria. The problem, in England, is that this requires an expensive electric dehumidifier, or the space to build a solar dryer, neither of which I have. Over the years, with the exception of drying, I've used all these preserving options. When presented with a big bowl of fruit, what matters most is estimating what you can do in that moment. The point is not that having these skills allows you to save money, or eat your own food. It is that in any situation, you carry in your head the skill that is most appropriate to use there and then. What will I do with the almost 800 grams of organic raspberries that I have today, which would currently retail at about 13 to 14 pounds? Half in a pie, half in the freezer. The bottom drawer of the freezer is devoted to fruit. It's almost half full. By the end of the month, it will be rammed full with the surplus shoved into the drawer above. The pie today will last for half a week or so, and what I put in the freezer will be a future pie that will also last about the same amount of time. In an older video, I prepared blackberry and apple pie filling, then made pies, then froze the entire pie. That's because apples are one of those fruits that doesn't respond well to cooking and chilling. Far better to make a ready-to-cook pie, freeze it, and then cook the whole pie from frozen. If I were given a carrier bag of more apples in one go, that is probably what will happen to them. The raspberries need a rinse to get rid of any dust and insects, and perhaps pick out anything that escapes that. I put half in the plastic container and put it in the freezer. A day later, I run warm water over the bottom of the container, allowing the block of frozen raspberries to drop out into my hand. That gets put in the bag in the bottom of the freezer, and I can reuse the plastic container. I could put the raspberries that remain in the pastry case and bake them. The problem is that these raspberries are incredibly juicy. What I'm going to do is cook them quickly with some semolina or ground rice to soak up all that juice. While that's happening, I blind bake a pastry case in the oven. Then I fill the pastry case, put the lid on, and bake it. A problem people have when making pastry is judging it exactly how much flour to use to make just enough pastry. Often this means that there's not quite enough, or you have a little bit left over. I say do the opposite. Make lots of pastry, and then make biscuits with the leftovers. When I bake sweet or savoury pastry, I always make too much for what I need. When I've finished making the pastry case, anything left over gets rolled flat once more and cut biscuits from the dough. With savoury pastry, you might spread a thin layer of miso or marmite over the surface, and then perhaps sprinkle pepper. Then roll it up, roll the tube out flat again, and then cut biscuits from it. It makes far more of a savoury snack than just a pastry alone. Put the biscuits on a tray in the top of the oven, above the pie, and perhaps leave them there after the pie is baked, until they start to go brown. After my couple of hours of puttering around the kitchen and garden, I have a large recipe pie that will keep the family going for a few days, and a dozen biscuits, which will keep them snacking for a couple of days without shop-bought products. What I hope I've shown here is not so much a recipe, but the outline of a plan. Preserving food is not cooking. It might look the same, but when you preserve food, you have to think about the future. To plan for how much food you need, and how much you might be able to provide. It's that foresight that allows you to have greater certainty, and so have greater independence about other aspects of life generally. To bring this full circle, the power of consumerism is to make the alternatives less convenient. But what if you habituated the planned alternatives that created a more certain future? What if you found ways to keep extending that process to cover more of your needs? What hold with consumerism and industrial society generally have over your lifestyle then?