I was reading this article in Scientific American about the possibility of food shortages bringing down civilization. The overall story is a bit overwhelming and probably not applicable on a global scale, but one thing that I came away with is that one reason this could happen is the world's dependance on grain. Grain is pretty much the major crop that is in jeopardy, and also the crop the most people depend on.

But why are we so involved with grain? Many, many people have an allergy to it, and I feel a bit suspicious of any food that people have only eaten for a short while and which takes so much processing in order to eat it. Technically, anything that you have to grind up and/or cook before it becomes palatable is processed, and probably harsh on your system.

For one week, before I had this current blog, I had my family on the Paleolithic diet, the principle of which is that you don't eat anything you couldn't eat raw. This is also very similar to whatever Mercola says, and also similar to the Weston Price Foundation's dietary recommendations.

What is interesting in our family is that although we don't really follow any of these things, we have naturally fallen into much of these dietary practices because we have felt the adverse side effects of following the USDA food pyramid (which is a bunch of propaganda baloney as I touched briefly on in this post). We don't eat dairy, and very little processed sugars. We do eat lots of grain, however - sliced bread, tortillas, oats, barley, corn products...

For the urban homesteader being totally self-sufficient can be a problem when so dependent on grains. In most primitive cultures, they do eat grains but in much smaller quantities and they sprout and ferment them first. In our culture we would know it as sourdough. So I think my goal will be cut back our grain consumption and ferment or sprout what we do use. Which reminds me that I have a sourdough crock ready to go on my counter that I haven't used yet!