Low-Tech Food Storage
Preservation techniques before chemicals and refrigerators
by Anne Pyburn Craig
Harvest season is upon us in all its bounty. If you’ve been gardening or
enjoying the offerings of local farmers, you’re no doubt happily habituated to
enjoying healthy and delicious fruits and veggies that are a whole ‘nother
world from the produce in the supermarket bins.
Winter brings with it a multi-horned dilemma for fruit and vegetable
lovers. Who wants to buy genetically engineered, improperly ripened stuff with
a carbon footprint an acre wide that’s been trucked in from thousands of miles
away?
Alternatively, who wants to resort to pre-packaged alternatives pumped
full of fun things like sorbic acid, benzoic acid, and sulfur dioxide in order
to retard the growth of microorganisms? These substances do occur in nature,
but Big Food producers rely on synthetic varieties. The FDA says they’re
perfectly all right, of course.
And we all know the FDA knows everything. (Snort.)
Right now, while fresh local products are still available—and with
hunting season coming on, if you’re so inclined—it’s a great time to get
educated about simpler, older ways of keeping food free of dangerous bacteria.
In the many centuries before refrigeration and before synthetics, people still
managed to eat without getting poisoned—whether you’re a dedicated disaster
prepper or an avid gardener who’d like to enjoy some of your harvest in
February, it’s worth knowing how, and it may be simpler than you think.
There are a few basic methods of food preservation that have been in use
for a long, long time. Some of them were taught to European settlers by
indigenous residents. Others, obviously, were known around the globe;
otherwise, there wouldn’t have been a whole lot of settlers in the first place.
Learning how to preserve food in the old-fashioned ways will come in darn handy
should our current supply chains fail—and can add choices to your flavor and
nutrition palette right away.
Drying
The simplest, and probably the oldest, method of preserving food is to
let it dry all the way out, since microorganisms need moisture to thrive. Of
course, we moderns have access to dehydrators, but long before they came into
existence sun-drying was used by Native Americans and other folks to ensure
usable stashes of fruit, vegetables, legumes and meat.
To simplify even farther, some crops such as beans can be allowed to dry
almost completely while still on the vine, although you’ll want to give them a
bit more drying time after harvest—it’s crucial to eliminate all moisture.
Herbs can be dried simply by hanging upside down (the herbs, that is, not you.)
To effectively and safely dry fruits, veggies and meat, you can build a
solar dehydrator—basically a box with a set of porous racks and screening to
keep the bugs off. Efficiency can be greatly improved by the addition of a heat
collector box. Websites such as Mother Earth News and Off the Grid News have a
variety of solar dehydrator plans available. Of course you could do the
labor-intensive and traditional thing and construct something using sticks and
flat stones, but it seems likely that even most modern indigenous folks would
find that a bit silly.
Yet another drying option is your oven, set very low. You want to be
careful not to actually cook the food, as cooking doesn’t preserve it.
Whatever method you choose, food to be dried should be cut into small
pieces or strips before you place it on your drying racks. The fully dried
product can be saved in either glass or plastic; glass is the popular
eco-friendly container of choice, and looks pretty on the shelf besides.
Smoking
Smoked meat and fish are not only well preserved but so tasty that
foodies go wild for them. Here again, your arrangements can vary from fancy
commercially made items costing hundreds of dollars to DIY projects. Most of
the recipes out there for smoking meat are actually cooking methods that add a
smoked flavor, which is yummy, but you’ll still need to refrigerate the
results. To actually preserve meat by smoking, low temperature is required.
Hypothetically, one could smoke meat by sitting very patiently downwind
from a campfire whilst holding the meat on a stick. But since we are talking
about meat here (and since you, Dear Reader, may have other obligations) it’s a
good idea to go a bit more elaborate.
One important step in smoking meat for preservation is to remove as much
of the fat as you possibly can first and slice the meat thin, in order to
remove as much of the moisture as humanly possible. There are a wide variety of
recipes and preparations out there for flavor—and preservation-enhancing rubs.
Many spices, as well as ordinary salt, have anti-microbial curing properties.
Smokers can be stand-alone or built to work in concert with your
barbecue or even your woodstove.
Burial
Back in the day, one dug a hole and lined it with grasses, then plugged
the top as airtight as possible. Presumably, one still could in a pinch.
Underground food storage, like smoking and drying, is a semi-forgotten
and relatively simple way to keep your diet diverse and tasty in the winter
months. Root cellars, once commonplace, can be created in a great many different
ways. Cold, dark environments can keep root veggies and other hardy items like
cabbage, as well as your dried items, good to eat for many months.
Root cellaring handbooks exist that will walk you through
the entire process of not only designing and building a cool storage space, but
of choosing the precise cultivars of carrots and potatoes that hold their
flavor and nutrition the best. One in particular—Root
Cellaring: The Simple No-Processing Way to Store Fruits and Vegetables, by Mike Bubel—gets
high marks for being comprehensive, readable and full of creative cool storage
ideas that will help even people living in apartments.
Nixtamalization
Nixtamalization is a long word for a simple, easy process
that was in use by indigenous folks long before Christ. It not only preserves
corn, it also renders it ready to use for everything from cereal to breads and
frees up the nutrients. Ever wonder why, if corn has no useable nutrition,
people grew and ate it for all those centuries? They made it into hominy, masa,
and posole, that’s why, in which form the human body can get protein and niacin
from it. Natives nixtamalized (although it seems unlikely they called it that)
using wood ash, which can still be done, but pickling lime is a respectable
substitute; the only other ingredient you need is water.
Mastery of any of these techniques requires a bit more doing
than can be easily explained in an article of this scope. You’ll find lots more
information at sites like thenewsurvivalist.com. Some methods, like
fermentation, are probably best learned directly from experts at workshops, or
at least from full-length books.
That said, low-tech microbe management is one more piece of
the food system puzzle that the mass-producers would rather you didn’t figure
out. They’d have us all believe they’ve got better ideas, like nitrates and
low-dose radiation. Yum? No? Maybe it’s time we took this one back.
Posted by Chris Hewitt
on 2:43 PM.
Filed under
Environment,
Feature,
Food & Restaurant,
Hot Peppers
.
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I think what we don't give enough thought to is the effects genetically modified foods may have on our health. We just seem to trust and eat these foods because they are being sold to us. There are no warnings or safety labels. I think after reading this I will start questioning what I am eating. Thanks.
Hi Marion! Yeah, it amazes me too how much we've been conned into relying on Big Agriculture, GMOs and Monsanto and such. I learned a lot researching this.
I have come to believe that taking the food system back into our own hands by growing gardens, patronizing local growers at farm stands and farmers' markets, and doing our own preserving is one of the most important ways to restore some sanity to the world and health to our families.