Free Food!

It's the time of year when you can pick free food from your front yard. Dandelion greens! The early leaves of the dandelion plant in the Springtime are the best and most tender for eating. If you wait for later in the season, the leaves tend to turn really tough.

To eat dandelion greens: pick them, heat two tablespoons of oil in a skillet, saute the greens.

The big challenge will be to find dandelion greens that a dog hasn't peed on.

Cheap Vegetables

Try growing bean sprouts in your kitchen. It is so easy and they are very nutritious. Not to mention cheap.

Get a jar, a rubber band and a little cheesecloth. Buy dry lentils in the supermarket. You aren't going to need a lot of lentils to get a whole lot of sprouts. I haven't done it with dry beans yet, but they are next on the list.

Then, put half an inch of lentils in the jar and fill it with water. Put the square of cheesecloth over the top of the jar and put the rubber band around it so the cloth is held to the top of the jar like a sieve.

Let it sit overnight. In the morning, drain the water out and then rinse the lentils and drain that water out. Repeat in the evening. Repeat each morning and evening until the sprouts have grown to edible length, about a few inches.

Isn't the idea that you can do this yourself for really, really cheap a fun one? If society collapses, you have a source of greens and fiber.

Fat, Carbohydrates and Booze

Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, a paleo-Conservative magazine (essentially Klansmen with Bachelors degrees), has an article this week about the obese. After the usual statistics about obesity in America, the article goes on to attack health insurance as we know it.

Their big complaint is that health insurance subscribers are not given higher premiums based on lifestyle decisions. You know - fat, carbohydrates and booze.

Now that we are breathing on the possibility of universal health insurance, would it be so awful to charge more to the people who will cost the system more by virtue of their choices? No.

This article attacks the political correctness of not penalizing people for being fat, lazy alcoholics. I guess the readership of Chronicles is all fit and non-smoking in their moral superiority.

But - they have a point. The health-conscious among us should not pay higher premiums than others who eat like there's no tomorrow. It is actually basic common sense. The worst drivers pay higher insurance premiums than good drivers. Bad eaters should pay higher health insurance premiums than good eaters. It just makes sense.

Eating Cheap - The Essentials

Stocking up on the essentials is important right now.

Get:

Oil
Dried beans
Several gallons of safe drinking water
Dry soup
Pasta
Rice
High fiber cereal
Dry milk
Canned foods - fruit and vegetable

Eating Cheap - Dandelion Greens

Just a note, don't pick your dandelion greens in the dog park. Seriously, I saw some woman doing just that.

But dandelion greens are fine to eat, as long as the greens are young. Older greens are too tough.

So pick the young dandelion greens, heat oil in a frying pan, and throw in the washed greens.

It is worth noting that a human can survive on weeds and oil. Not weeds alone, the oil is essential.

Food Crisis: One Billion Hungry Asians

The prospect is frightening. The political instability that a food crisis on a continent-wide scale could cause is really beyond our comprehension. As a species, we've never faced it before.

Expensive food is one thing when there are cheaper alternatives. When the cheap food is your only nutrient staple and you can't even afford to eat that, the situation becomes dangerous. Widespread violence is going to be the result.

Remember, that's one billion people. If even a fraction decide that they're going to gate-crash another part of the globe, we'll be severely overwhelmed and looking back with fondness when it was only the Mexicans we had to worry about.