Food Prices In North Alabama ::

Accepting that, in many respects, our food prices are tied to the cost of petroleum , I am dismayed about the price of food when I visit the local grocery stores, but I am beginning to worry more and more about the future availability. I was listening to NPR on the trip home this afternoon and one topic was how world exports of food are not only drying up, but also increasing exponentially in price with the example of rice, in certain areas of the world, more than doubling in price/ton in the past few months.

Most people fixate on the rise in transportation cost as well as the cost of fuel for farm equipment, but they overlook the fact that fertilizer products are also derived from petroleum, so the increase in the price of oil continues to increase in hidden ways throughout our economy.

Decades ago much of our produce was grown on family garden plots or, at least, locally. Now almost all of our food in grown on large corporate farms and very few of us would know how to grow our own food.

Madison County has a wonderful farmer's market and I visit it often, but I doubt that the growers represented there would be able to supply the food needs of the population of the local area. When I was a little guy staying with my grandparents in rural South Carolina we planted a garden of approximately 1 acre each year and this garden produced enough food for us for an entire year. There was a school nearby which also operated a community cannery during the summer and all excess produce was canned for use during the winter. When my grandfather died in 1975 and the house and land were sold we moved everything from the house. We had a wood closet (at some time I will post about remembering the outhouse and baths in the kitchen in a washtub on Saturday night) where the cans of food were stored. I was probably 27 years old when we cleaned out the closet and we found dated home canned tins which were produced in 1947, the year I was born.

My point is that, for the most part, we, as individuals, are incapable of producing our own food in any sort of quantity to meet our needs, and this worries me!