Rebel with a Cause: After a Hard Winter

This paralyzing winter should have taught us to take advantage of our local bounty and lay up for the day our food systems grind to a halt.

By Joel Salatin

The winter of 2009–2010 will go down in our mid-Atlantic record books as one to remember. Fender benders, shoveling, and bone-chilling cold. Here in the Shenandoah Valley, we had eight weeks of snow cover. What a treat to not have to go to Aspen this winter.

The people who study sunspot activity say this is the harbinger of the next five winters. Look out.

Stranded trucks on interstates, empty supermarket shelves—these events illustrated the stark modern reality that at any one time, only three days’ supply of food exists in a locality. That seems fragile to me.

Looking back from our spring vantage point, I think it behooves us to appreciate preparing, preserving, and stockpiling food as a wise activity. On our farm, as the inches of snow began to build, we had a deep sense of security and satisfaction. Here’s why.

The freezers were full of venison, beef, pork, chicken, turkey, and rabbit, all laid up from a bountiful 2009 production season. Even if the electricity had gone off, the cold would have kept things from defrosting fast—a week at least. Probably two. The woodpile, mounded up, offered plenty of thermal energy during the blizzard.

In the basement, hundreds of canning jars glistened, ready for use: sauerkraut, applesauce, pickles, green beans, yellow squash, beets, peaches, tomatoes, tomato juice, grape juice—a veritable cornucopia of abundance. In the root cellar, boxes of sweet potatoes, winter squash, and white potatoes lay ready for hearty winter feasts.

Honey harvested late in the season offered sweetness. Maple syrup boiled the previous spring ran low and eventually ran out just before a two-week warm snap in January, when the sap from our trees flowed freely again into buckets. Frozen strawberries gleaned from our neighbor’s abundant patch and blackberries picked painstakingly along the road added fruity zest to shortcake.

Our hands butchered, juiced, diced, sliced, pitted, and did all the other necessary steps to fill the larder for just such a time as this blizzard. And now, in the shock of a hard winter—payday. Emotional payday. Nutritional payday. Economic payday.

Every living thing prepares for winter. The spider spins a porous cocoon around a zillion carefully laid eggs. The bear and groundhog gorge and then sleep. (Sounds like a good plan to me.) Deer put on back fat, like a savings account, to be withdrawn as extra energy if the going gets tough. Squirrels scamper around, burying walnuts and hickory nuts all during October and September and moving from airy summer nests to cozy tree hollows.

Following nature’s example, farmers spend most of the season putting up provisions for winter—grain, hay, sawdust for bedding. This is natural and normal.

Who would not go through this ritual? Who would not stockpile for environmental or economic shocks? Only people completely disconnected from their ecological umbilical. It really is a narrow cord. For all our sophisticated computers, cars, and cell phones, we humans haven’t figured out how to survive without food and water. Biologically we’re no different from those Native Americans who romped these forests and fields, hanging venison and buffalo in their smoky habitations to dry and stockpile for a hard winter.

Only proud, arrogant, unthinking people assume that the supermarket will always be there, that the car will always get through. Perhaps if many more people realize our vulnerabilities to shocks and stockpile local food against the next hard winter, this season will have taught them a valuable lesson. The food our family enjoyed this hard winter did not come with extensive ingredient lists. If left on a table, it would rot—which also means it will digest properly. It was just like the food people ate before 1900. It was the stuff our great-grandparents ate in hard winters.

Indeed, appreciating that we’re all still completely dependent on this little orb floating through space is both humbling and challenging. The memory of this past winter should drive us all to the kitchen this coming harvest season. It should drive us all to the food treasures in our communities, where we patronize seasonal abundance and enjoy its security during a hard winter. The ultimate food security is growing in the fields and pastures in our neighborhood and the stockpile lying, precious, in our pantries, root cellars, and freezers.

If we all devoted ourselves to this natural, heritage-based mind-set, a hard winter would drive us to gratitude, neighborliness, and deep satisfaction. That is the blessing of community.

Internationally acclaimed conference speaker and author Joel Salatin and his family operate Polyface Farms in Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia, producing and direct marketing “salad bar” beef, “pigaerator” pork, and pastured poultry. He is now also co-owner, with Joe Cloud, of T&E Meats in Harrisonburg.

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