Homesteading, PBS-Style...

...Or, Being Nothing If Not Topical, I Review a TV Show That Ended Seven Years Ago.

For my last birthday, my mother gave me the DVD of the PBS series Frontier House. In case, like me, you are not a follower of "reality shows" or PBS, this is the one where three families go to rural Montana and pretend that it's 1893 and they're homesteaders.

Well, I finally got around to watching it. Despite (because of?) my stupid useless history degree, I am not a fan of historical re-enactments, so the whole premise of this struck me as kind of silly. Real 19th century homesteaders did not try to live like 18th century colonists; instead, they used best of the technology available to them at that time to help themselves survive. Why shouldn't 21st century homesteaders do the same? The longer I watched the show, the more I came to see the historical aspect as a pointless handicap.

The show that I would really like to see made would go something like this: the families would be given a plot of land on which to build their individual homesteads. The challenge would be to see if they could, while working within reasonable real-world limitations, become self-sufficient. Each would have a limited budget but would be free to utilize it however they thought best. Ideally the families would be chosen from the start for their different outlooks; maybe one would invest in lots of machinery, one in lots of livestock, one would go for modern, high-tech agriculture, one would be all low-tech and organic, and so forth. The payoff of the show would be the comparison of the different approaches, as well as lots of how-to information for the audience.

But I realize that the reason that show didn't get made, and Frontier House did, was that the historical stuff was the hook. People enjoy romanticizing the past, and they also enjoy laughing at it. And when all is said and done, it's good that the show got made at all. I think viewers can learn a lot from this show. Some of the participants certainly did. After returning to the modern world one of the children commented that he was happier having a few possessions in "1893" than he was now having lots of stuff in 2001. (Smart kid: I sure didn't understand that at his age.) Two teenaged girls complained that the now found their lives boring and lonely, and that hanging out at the mall just wasn't satisfying anymore. One man mused about how much more time he had to spend with his kids on the "frontier." Overall, the "homesteaders" seemed to feel that there was something lacking in the easy modern world.

Less happily, Frontier House also demonstrates the ugly truth that the biggest challenge in any human endevour is... humans. One participant claimed to believe that the three families could have made a great community if they'd been able to stay for five years instead of five months. He seems to have forgotten how  much snark, bickering and gossiping there was in  those five months! People like to promote the idea of "community" (Eric Brende, I'm looking in your direction) but don't realize that community is hard! So is family, for that matter. In fact, one of the Frontier House marriages falls apart on camera. It's hard to watch, but is a reminder that relationships are difficult at best, and really difficult under stress.

Anyway, if you're interested in homesteady stuff (and if you're not, what are you doing here?), and your local PBS affiliate is re-running Frontier House, it's worth watching. At least until I can persuade someone to fund my show idea. :)

Home Cheesemaking in 25 Easy... Well, 25 Steps

A comment about cheesemaking in Better Off reminded me that I have always wanted to, well, make cheese. But for some reason I'd gotten the idea that it was absolutely impossible to do that with grocery-store milk. Well, that's not quite true; it depends on how your milk was pasteurized. So I decided to give it a try. I'm not going to type up the exact recipe because I assume it's copyrighted (copywrtitten?); I highly recommend the book I got it from. Anyway, here's a generalized overview of the process:

1. Purchase crucial ingredients from friendly cheese-making supply company. Feel slightly guilty for not being able to be really self-sufficient and raise your own milk and rennet. Decide that this exercise is just practice for the future.

2. Gather equipment. Be sure that you have everything. Realize that thermometer is in celsius instead of fahrenheit. Be glad you noticed this at the beginning instead of halfway through. Write celsius temperatures in recipe margin. 

3. Carefully examine grocery store milk to determine whether it is merely pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized. Hope that labeling is accurate. Shrug, cross fingers and buy whatever is available.

4. Put milk in double boiler (actually two stock pots, stacked) and heat milk to 90° 32.22°.

5. Realize that you need "unchlorinated" water for a later step. Send husband on emergency trip to store to buy distilled water.

6. Add packet of mesophilic starter to milk.

7. Wait for milk to ripen. And wait, and wait.

8. Try to photograph big pot of milk. Realize camera battery has died, condemning readers to drab, picture-less post.

9. Remove milk pot from double boiler to keep from overheating during ripening. Realize that inner pot has a hole somewhere and is leaking milk all over the place.

10. Quickly clean another pot. When it won't fit in the "double boiler," draft canning pot for the job.

11. Husband arrives with new, American thermometer. Discover that thermometer is for candy-making and does not reach low enough temperatures for cheese. Wonder why God hates your cheese-making attempt so.

12. Dilute calcium chloride and rennet and  in unchlorinated water. Add both to ripened milk.

13. Wait. Check every 30 seconds (Is it cheese yet? Is it cheese yet?). Resist urge to poke it.

14. OH MY GOD! IT SOLIDIFIED! I MADE CHEESE!

15. Attempt to cut curdled milk into neat 1/2" cubes. Make a mess of it. No worries, though--it's all going to be pressed together later, right?

16. Over half an hour, slowly heat pot of curds to 100° about 38°, causing whey to precipitate out.

17. Let sit five minutes.

18. Pour curds and whey into cheesecloth-lined colander set over large pot to catch whey. Fold up ends of cheesecloth and tie to make a bag. Hang bag of curds over a dish for an hour to drain remaining whey.

19. Meanwhile, use pot of whey to make ricotta. Heat to 200° F (the candy thermometer works for this!). Turn off heat and add 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar while stirring. Watch curds forming right away. Ladle curds into cheesecloth-lined colander, being mildly disappointed by low yield. Mix in 1/2 t salt. 

20. After an hour, remove lump of curds from cheesecloth sack. Gently break up curds in large bowl and add 1 T cheese salt. Having forgotten to buy "cheese salt," assume that kosher salt will be good enough. Wonder exactly what are the differences between salt, cheese salt, kosher salt, sea salt, and pickling salt. Suspect clever marketing campaign.

21. Place curds in cheese press. Discover that the cheap economical cheese press doesn't work very well. Do the best you can and hope it all turns out OK somehow.

22. Realize that you've spent all day in the kitchen doing this. Sit down and have a glass of wine.

23. Next morning: remove cheese from press and admire. Try to ignore lopsided shape caused by cheap press. Allow cheese to air-dry for 2-4 days, preferably somewhere where it will not be molested by the cats, until a nice rind has formed.

24. Melt cheese wax in small double boiler. Cover cheese with at least two coats. Realize that all utensils that the wax touches will be impossible to ever completely clean and thus will be the desginated cheese-waxing tools in the future.

25. Put cheese in the cellar to age. Realize that it will be a month before you can taste it and find out if this worked or not.

Better Off, Part 2: It Takes a Village...

If Eric Brende happened to read the first part of my review (which he probably won't since, as he says, he refuses to own a computer) then he would probably say that I ended rather unfairly in claiming that his "Minimite" lifestyle wouldn't work in the real world. He would point out that, after leaving the Minimites, the Brende family did, in fact, find a way to implement a low-tech, low-work, communal lifestyle in downtown St. Louis, smack dab in the Real World. In fact, that lifestyle is the subject of the whole postscript to Better Off. So...what exactly does this urbanite-Minimite lifestyle involve? And how does it stack up?

It's worth mentioning that the Brendes, as Catholics, never embraced the Anabaptist beliefs by which the "Minimites," like many similar groups, actually define themselves. So Brende's definition of the Minimite lifestyle is more pragmatic and  functional. In essence, it's low-tech (duh), frugal, economically localized, family-focused, and very, very neighborly. Sort of a mix of modern left-wing-feel-good ideas and nostalgic small town Americana.

And it seems to work out quite well for them. Even with three kids, they are able to avoid "regular" employment, thus freeing up time for homeschooling, gardening, hand-washing the laundry, and other Minimitish activities. At one point Brende comments, "it is a good guess that Mary and I spend only about two or three hours a day on work necessary to our livelihood" (227). After reading that, and having finished swearing and kicking the walls in envy, one naturally asks, And what do they DO in those three hours? Well, they grow vegetables to sell at a farmer's market. They sell handmade soap. Eric drives people around in a rickshaw. (Really!)

At this point I become very frustrated with this book. I want it to suddenly become a detailed how-to book instead of a brief autobiography. I want to know more. I want to know exactly how a family could survive this way. I want to see the monthly budget. I want to know how they paid off the mortgage. I want to know their gardening techniques. I want the recipe for that (apparently very valuable!) soap. I digress. The point is, you can live the low-tech, low-work lifestyle in the Real World, but you have to be very, very frugal.

And one of the tricks to Extreme Frugality is being part of a supportive community, which the Brendes have certainly achieved in St. Louis.* It's also something they got used to living with the Minimites, for whom labor was almost always cheerfully gregarious:

There was this phrase they kept repeating: "Many hands make work light." The statement was true, though hard to explain. Gradually, as you applied yourself to your task, the threads of friendship and conversation would grow and connect you to laborers around you. Then everything suddenly became inverted. You'd forget you were working and get caught up in the cameraderie, the sense of lightened effort. This surely must rank among the greatest of labor-saving secrets.Work folded into fun and disappeared. (31)

 More than that, the neighbors were tirelessly helpful: "Their assistance took us off-guard. Often it came before we even knew we needed it: a reminder to plant or pick, the loan of a wheel-hoe or an axe. We tried to thank our advisors, but they were quick to deflect praise" (28). This gregariousness and generosity seemed odd to the Brendes but perfectly natural to the Minimites, for whom such communal selflessness was simply a part of everyday life. To describe their attitude Brende uses the term Gelassenheit, which he defines as "self-surrender"(80). Or, as someone at Wikipedia  describes it,

Modern culture's aggressive individualism sharply contrasts with the Amish gelassenheit. Through gelassenheit, an Amish person yields to the Ordnung, the will of God, church, elders, parents, community, and traditions. The individual suppresses the will of 'self' in lieu of the Amish community.

Um, yeah. Anybody want to sign up for that? Of course, the Brendes, as outsiders and temporary residents, didn't have to practice this kind of self-suppression... but they did get to benefit from it. And while I don't think Brende (or anyone else!) would try to get modern Americans to exchange their "agressive individualism" for a little old-fashioned Gelassenheit, but it is true that being part a functional community requires a certain loss of autonomy. 

It took me a while to grasp why this short, cheerful book struck such a nerve with me, but I finally realized that the Brendes' lifstyle combines elements of my two greatest fears: poverty and collectivism. In fact, that's why I got into the whole self-sufficiency kick: I hoped to become more able to take care of myself, and thus less likely to end up poor and dependent on others. But the themes of "simplicity" (which I always read as a euphemism for poverty) and "community" keep recurring in the homesteading literature, and I can't help feeling like I've mamaged to get on a road that loops around and takes me right where I don't want to go. But it's undeniable that the Brendes' system... works.



*Admittedly not everyone in the neighborhood is on board with this happy communalism. Brende notes that many of the older, tradiitonal folks despise him: "I think they [the disapproving neighbors] are in a 1950s group-think time warp. The woman across the street told Mary that her mother, of local descent, had a quilting frame she could borrow. The day came when Mary needed it. The woman told her mother, and her mother refused to lend it out. 'That man doesn't have a job,' she said angrily, or words to that effect." (224) 

It's ALIVE!

On a whim I decided to buy a book of sourdough recipes. Sourdough is an interesting and very self-sufficientish concept; supposedly you just mix flour and water, and given time (and warmth) it produces its own leaven from yeast spores in the air or in the flour. Supposedly! Or, maybe you just get a crock full of pasty goop.

I didn't think it was really going to work, since the goop wants to be warm and our house often... isn't. This temperature requirement sounds odd  at first, since sourdough is famous as the food of Alaskan prospectors. I'm going to assume that those guys kept their woodstoves going or at least smoldering 24/7; we don't do that. Anyway,  I moved the crock around to different spots with no result, and finally just stuck it in the oven for a day. The oven must hold heat pretty well even when off, because when I got home my goop was all a-bubblin':

 (I am probably jinxing it by posting this; tomorrow morning it will be dead...)

Update: It did not die. Not only did it not die, it doubled in size.  I hope it doesn't do that every night, or the kitchen will be taken over by cheesy-smelling goop...

Wordless Wednesday: "--The sofa? Um, it was like that when we got here!"

Better Off, Part 1: The Luxury of Labor

Yesterday I read Eric Brende's Better Off: Flipping the Swith on Technology. It's the account of how Brende and his wife Mary spent 18 months homesteading in a low-tech, Amish-like (Amishish?) farming community. (To protect the group's privacy, he refers to them only by the pseudonym "Minimite.") I have a lot to say about this book, so I'll probably break this up into several posts. (Note: I actually really liked this book and strongly recommend it; if I spend the next three posts tearing it apart, that's just how I learn.)

Brende's ultimate question was about quality of a low-tech life: "How hard and time consuming was this life without 'labor-saving machines'? And was it one Mary and I would consider leading ourseves?" (15)

And his answer is, without the devices--and with more physical work--he and his wife found, paradoxically, that not only were they happier, but they had more time. And the work that they did was more leisurely, even downright inefficient, as Brende found by analyzing a typical day's labor:

While seven hours and fifty minutes were available for the afternooon's work (mainly threshing), only four hours and forty minutes were spent in actual physical work.... All this [other] time was sheer cushioning--the benefits of cameraderie, conversation, fresh air, and natural scenery, without the labor. (161)

That's nice, I guess. But you know why Brende and his wife were able to live this way? Because neither of them had to have jobs.

How did they pull that off? First, Brende received some "fellowship money" from his university. He is quick to point out that it is not a large amount, and that by itself would not pay the rent for the entire 18 month experiment (23). But (and second) this rent of which he speaks--$150 a month for a furnished house with a garden--is phenomenal. A kid with a part-time job could pay that. Brende's meagre fellowship would pay for ten months of that! Even better, their landlord was often willing to let them work off the rent instead of paying cash. For the Brendes, life's single largest financial struggle--affording a home--had been mostly removed.

Third, the "Minimite" lifestyle neatly eliminates most bills. No electricity, no phone, no running water, no insurance... their mailbox must have been blessedly empty. And fourth, their neighbors, both "Minimite" and "English," are amazingly generous, surprising them with frequent gifts of vegetables, meat, and even a free dairy cow. Overall, the Brende's living expenses were reduced--largely through others' generosity--to an enviable minimum. This allowed them to devote themselves full-time to the task they had set for themselves. And they certainly needed the time:

Mary and I were discovering now that it wasn't the sheer physical burden of unmechanized labor that was daunting. It was the skill. To make matters  harder, skill was not concentrated in a single specialty but scattered in dozens of little knacks and hundreds of bits of knowledge, all foreign to the button-pusher. On top of all this, the foremost skill was balancing and integrating all the little bits into a single livlihood. (50)

The work of a lifetime! What I'm getting from this--and this is my conclusion, not Brende's--is that real labor is actually a luxury. Only someone who doesn't have to work for someone else can work for himself. Is it satisfying to grow your own vegetables? Sew your own clothes? Homeschool your kids? Sure! Okay, now do it all after spending nine hours behind a cash register at Walmart. Still feel so good? There's a reason most of us don't wash our clothes by hand,* Eric, and it's not because we're seduced by shiny gadgets.

Admittedly, the money question is not what Brende set out to address; he just wanted to find out if the low-tech life was worth living. And, OK, it is. But like any desirable lifestyle, it's more than most of us could afford. Brende may be quick to point out that he was not wealthy, but he was certainly rich in time.



*Interesting fact: the hand-powered clothes washer Brende recommends actually costs more than our new high-efficiency electric washer did.

Foiled Again

My riding lesson plans have been dashed again, this time by a flu which may or may not (pending test results!) be the dreaded Pig Flu. It's not my flu, it's my instructor's (and her family's), and they are politely isolating themselves until it's over. Which is all very responsible, but this means I haven't been on a horse in a month. We're talking serious withdrawal, folks. I may start stalking a rancher.

I had hoped that being way out here in the boondocks might protect us from the infamous H1N1, but apparently it's in all the towns around us, so it's only a matter of time before it hits. The up side of its, um, popularity is that now that everybody's got it, we can see that it's just, well, the flu, and not an apocalyptic superflu like the one in that Stephen King book. So we don't need to lock ourselves in the basement after all. And, with the germ-induced end of civilization postponed, I can afford to sulk about missed riding opportunties.

So to cheer myself up, here's a picture of two of my favorite things, combined: Hugh Jackman...on a horse.

But I'm only posting this so I can admire the horse. No, really. ;)