Third World, USA

I watched a video titled Third World, USA and then wrote a post elsewhere about Appalachia. I am still thinking about it and there are people without running water in parts of the US and there is stuff on Eclogiselle tagged very basic water infrastructure.

There's also some information on Eclogiselle about helping small towns serve the homeless community better. Brown bag lunches can potentially be given out and made up of shelf stable foods and not be a nutrition disaster.

I started Eclogiselle while living in Aberdeen, Washington (population 16,000) and the general area that I defined as Coastal Washington is mostly small towns and unincorporated communities and rural areas with transportation challenges.

I did see the streets of downtown Aberdeen improve within two or three days of me writing some pieces about homelessness, but that's anecdotal. I don't have real confirmation that my work was used to improve things.

And I wasn't really writing for places where the biggest town in the county is around 500 people. I don't know how well my writing will work for very rural America.

I tend to be imagining someplace in rural Africa with NO electricity where people are reading it Eclogiselle on their phone and someone hikes once a week to the nearest cafe to charge all the phones in the village.

But that means I'm imagining places that presumably simply lack development and the reality is that, in the US, we have regulations that make it illegal to do certain things. And sometimes those regulations make sense in the big city, but apply everywhere and this is likely a root cause of what gets described in the video called Third World, USA as being like a fire and people are jumping out of windows and we think them jumping is the problem rather than thinking the fire is the problem.

So I've just watched a video inaccurately titled 25 Depression-Era food tricks the USDA quietly made illegal after 1970. Some of these are not food tricks and I decided to write about it because the videographer acts like this is entirely a conspiracy to make assholes in certain industries rich. This is probably not the entire story. So please be mindful some things he says may not be entirely accurate and may not work as easily or as well as he suggests they will.

I seriously doubt everyone was the picture of perfect health during the Great Depression. The cavalier and repeated assertion that the way your "grandmother" did it was flat out better in every way has a heavy dose of rose-colored glasses and please be aware that unhomogenized raw milk or eggs laid by your own hens in the backyard will not behave the same as store bought homogenized milk and store bought eggs. So you may be unable to successfully replicate some of these tricks if you don't own a cow and a few chickens personally.

In the good news column, I began making notes partway through because it talks about making homemade soap. My older sister's first serious job after college was with a County Extension office and I actually helped her set up a display for making homemade soap once.

I haven't personally done it, but I'm fairly confident this is doable and involves grease and a source of our, such as wood ash. It was probably discovered completely accidentally thousands of years ago and then refined. I have a piece about soap making under a maker space tag elsewhere. It's just a collection of videos.

I have clarified butter on the stove top at home. Clarified butter -- cooking off the milk solids -- keeps for up to two months. Odds are good that straining bacon grease to remove any meat solids and leave just cooked grease is similarly shelf stable for at least a few weeks.

Contrary to the oft repeated advice that bacon grease is the work of the devil, I am a bacon fiend because it's a fat I tolerate well. I have a genetic disorder and I misprocess fats.

I was Internet acquainted with someone who testified in probably a state level Congress or something like that about "Please, please, don't outlaw raw milk. My sickly child will die without it." or something along those lines.

I mean you probably need to watch your weight more than I do. You probably don't want to go crazy adding tons of fats to your diet. But if you are in a food desert and your diet is already crap and your budget is being hammered, straining bacon grease, storing it in a glass container and cooking with it may be a completely reasonable hack to extend your budget and help you cook more. And it's probably not worse for you than a lot of commercial products intended to help you reduce your consumption of animal fats like bacon and butter.

There's a couple of recent posts on Project SRO about living without electricity and eating without any cooking facilities:



There's also a small site by me called Nutrient Dense that talks some about things like shelf stable foods and coping without a full service kitchen.

There's a piece on Eclogiselle about survival foods. Historically, shelf-stable food staples were the default and we cooked from scratch and supplemented with some fresh items, like delivered milk or garden vegetables. 

I liked the stuff in the video about a cold stone shelf on the north wall for keeping things like cheese and butter. If you are off grid, it may be worth it to try to replicate a cold shelf. Be mindful it probably doesn't keep things as cold as a refrigerator and try to not give yourself food poisoning.

Butter doesn't actually need to be refrigerated and lots of people have things like an old butter bell or butter crock for storing butter on the table. I used to buy butter sometimes while homeless and try to keep it in a Ziploc bag and keep my backpack out of the sun and it was fine for a few days.

I haven't had access to a full service kitchen in a lot of years, something like fourteen or fifteen at this point. I've sometimes had access to a fridge and sometimes not. I've sometimes had limited access to the ability to cook but often not. 

If I have access to a fridge, I drink a lot more different stuff, like fruit juice and milk tea. Sometimes my diet is significantly restricted to a problematic degree but I try to get dried fruit and nuts in my diet and I try to get a variety of veggies on pizza or at places like Chipotle or Panda Express.

For pizza, you can do something like pepperoni, onion, pineapple and green pepper. Each additional topping past two is more money if you are ordering pizza from a pizza place, but if you are doing homemade, onion and peppers can be pretty cheap per serving. 

You can peel and prechop your veggies, put them in separate baggies in the fridge. It can keep for about a week.

Instant pizza sauce, homemade flat bread and whatever toppings you like. Microwave or a regular oven or toaster oven.

You could potentially toast just the bread in a toaster and add cold toppings if you have no other means to cook. Call it "Pizza al fresco" and pretend you are being fancy.

They're "normal, American" pizza toppings. The weirdest one is pineapple and that's from Hawaii, an American state.

Because YouTube and the entire Internet probably needs a restraining order for stalking, I also tripped across these two videos which I have not actually watched.




If you are living in the Third World country of rural MERIKA, please be aware that eating primarily shelf stable foods doesn't have to mean having an atrocious diet. If you are in rural America and your tap water is brown or you are off grid entirely, you may be able to implement some of my ideas like tree urinals.

But some provisos:

1. Not all of those laws are one hundred percent corporate conspiracy to intentionally ruin your life. 

2. If you are in rural America instead of rural Africa, you probably have more people around than they do in rural Africa and some of those regulations matter because of population density and chemicals from vehicle traffic etc.

3. So please check the law and do a common sense check.

I'm aware some people in desperate straits may feel that breaking the rules is in their best interest. But if that's you, please make sure you aren't breaking rules that actually are there for a good reason.


My understanding is that after the Great Fire of London, they outlawed a bunch of building practices that helped spread the fire rapidly. Some of those may have been outlawed entirely, like using tar to make things waterproof.

I have read that thatched roofs were outlawed within city limits but can still be used in the English countryside. If it's a farmhouse with no other structures around, it's not a fire hazard in the same way as it is in a densely built big city.

So it's possible there are exceptions where it's legal if you are doing it for personal consumption and not selling it or if you are in an unincorporated community but not in an incorporated town, etc. Even the video about "25 things the federal government outlawed" stealth admits that some of these are still legal if it's done for personal use and not for commercial sale.

I will add that I grew up with a backyard garden and a not uncommon part of harvesting and processing cucumbers and squash was soaking them in salted water to get worms or caterpillars or the like to come out before peeling and chopping. It wasn't like every single time, but "convenience" of store bought goods isn't entirely just corporate hype. 

And one reason to NOT grow food in the front yard is that when we had leaded gasoline, you could get lead poisoning from produce grown in high traffic areas and even without leaded gasoline, it's probably not good to eat food exposed to a lot of gas fumes. 

So do your research and don't believe that you can readily and easily do everything exactly like Grandma did and promptly get incredible results without having grown up with whatever skills and knowledge she was raised with. Formal education -- "book learning" -- isn't everything.