CharonNo Gravatar (19:40:43) :

Red Feet: You are proposing that someone in rural Alaska make their own spaghetti sauce using fresh tomatoes in January? Are you completely insane? It’s not cost effective or environmentally friendly for me to do that in January, and I live in Seattle. Plus, did you miss the bit about not getting tomatoes because they’d freeze on the way back home?

Did I say she had to do this in January?
I guess you missed the entire part about canning.

Obviously this would best done during the thawing months and when tomatoes are cheapest. The shelf-life is at least one year. Not insane by any measure.

But I guess if for some reason you had an emergency stock-out of tomato sauce, and couldn’t hold out for a few months, there are ways to keep things warm on the way home in the winter – an insulated container/box with a battery-powered warmer or chemical hand-warmer could do the trick.

just asking, salient facts have obviously been omitted for the sake of a good story.

That said, I do think it’s pretty silly to live in the bush. Echoing a point above, _I_ don’t get to live where I grew up (SF Bay Area) because it’s too expensive for me. So why should you get to live where you grew up, if you can’t afford it?

And yes, there are just too many people in the world to really be sustainable, but we can choose to live in relatively sustainable places. Seattle has a mild climate, so we don’t need much for heating and we don’t need AC at all. Plentiful water supplies, good farmland nearby, an ocean port. So I chose to live here. (And for those who like solitude, there are many places near Seattle, in the Cascades, where you are quite isolated. If you really need to be more isolated than that, well, you have issues.)

1. Stop using disposable diapers, or use them only at night.

2. Make your own sausages – its easy, especially the “fresh” (uncured) type, like Italian fennel sausage or kielbasa. Certain basic cured meats such as ham and bacon are also very easy to make at home and you can save a bundle. You can make many months supply and freeze it for later use – cheap cheap cheap.

Please check out this website for recipe: http://lpoli.50webs.com/Sausage%20recipes.htm#AFRICAN-STYLE%20SAUSAGES-FRESH

3. Avoid store-bought “mixes” like the muffin mix you bought. Make you own bakery products whenever possible.

4. Not sure if its economic or not in your area (it appears to be just about everywhere else), and it totally depends on your price for milk, but you can EASILY make your own cottage cheese using milk, a bit of vinegar, and little heat. Many simple recipes on the internet, which you apparently have access to.

5. Make (and dry if you like) your own noodles out of flour and water – add eggs for egg-noodles. Make pasta out of semolina flour if you can find it. Many easy recipes on the internet. You don’t really need a pasta machine, but having a hand-cranked one can make the process more convenient and more uniform.

6. If you can get tomatoes, onions, garlic, and dried herbs (and the prices are advantageous in your area compared to canned sauce), make your own pasta sauce – easy!! And it almost always tastes better if you do it right. If you’ve never made pasta sauce before, after a few times, you’ll have it down – and you can even can it yourself as it is naturally low in pH.

7. Coffee creamer? Yech!! Please consider buying quality coffee and learn to drink it black. Good coffee doesn’t need to be “smoothed” with cream. However… and I imagine real cream might be quite prohibitively expensive there… If you must, just add a splash of whole milk. If you can find cheaper bulk milk, know that milk can be frozen and stored – you can drink it, use it for coffee, and make cottage cheese.

NOTE: When canning, its handy to own a pH meter (always test a sample at room temp 72F) – otherwise many recipes say to add vinegar or lemon juice to lower the pH “just to be safe”. But I find most of the time it is not necessary to sour the sauce with vinegar or lemon. Basically, you are looking for a pH of 4.2 – 4.5 for spaghetti sauce. Higher pH than that is not safe for a 10-min pressure cooker cycle at 5-psi. Lower pH is no problem, but will only taste a bit more tart. Actually, you really don;t even need a pressure cooker if you got the pH right – you can just bathe the filled and sealed jars in a boiling water bath for 10-minutes.

Heck, I do all the above living in Thailand, where food is cheap (as are disposable diapers) – but it is a matter of availability for the food items I have learned to make at home. The disposable diapers – we use cloth diapers except at night, in an effort to reduce our environmental impact.

Well, I hope this is helpful.

How are they going to move if they have to fly everything there or shipped it out they can’t get out unless they leave everything. Oh they could sell it but nope wait no one has the money to buy it. They can’t drive out (of some town from what I understand) because there are no roads….hmmm whos job is it to build roads?

just because you don’t l like someones life style doesn’t me that it’s you job to tell them to move…when they can’t or don’t want to move. i presonally don’t get how people can live in a city with all the noise the smells and violence. I think you should all move to the country and there should be space between everyone. doesn’t make me right. it’s just what I think. and if I am not mistake the natives are tied to there land not just by family and history but is there faith to like the native’s in the lower 48?

Well that’s my two cents.

The traditional way of life of not only native Alaskans but of the native peoples of most of north and south America has been destroyed out of the European’s belief that only cities and monuments constitute “civilization” and that a nomadic way of life is somehow primitive and inferior. ENOUGH!

Cities, and western civilization, may well be some form of monument to what mankind can accomplish. But wisdom lies not in doing all that one can; rather wisdom lies in doing what is right and just. There is no righteousness in locking a nomadic people down to fixed, impoverished lands and expecting them to either survive or decide to join “civilized people” in their cities. There is no justice in making their right to live dependent upon hunting and fishing regulations designed to make it impossible for them to survive.

The cities may well soon die as fewer and fewer are able to survive in an essentially non-human environment. Who will be there to teach them how to live off of the land? Who will show them the way back to balance? Who will be left?