Squishy red beetles lead to foraging flashback

It’s one of the unexpected consequences of the pandemic.

It is tempting, very tempting, in our New England bubble, to assume the storm is passing. We’ve had access to vaccines that appear to be working, and a population willing to use them. It is a relief to be able to walk into a grocery store without feeling a vague sense of dread, isn’t it?

Yet, we will be living with the pandemic, and its consequences, perhaps forever.

To help us understand what happened during the pandemic, where we are, and perhaps where we are headed, research is being published, including the University of Vermont’s study of that most basic of life’s necessity: food.

Nearly 40 percent of Vermont households experienced job disruptions, in 2020. Thirty percent of Vermonters experienced food insecurity, almost triple the 2018 levels, and roughly 1 in 4 people purchased and ate fewer servings of fruit and vegetables, red meat and seafood.

We are, however, nothing if not an independent bunch. The university found that 41 percent of Vermont homes reported participating in home food procurement efforts, which include hunting, gardening, foraging, raising livestock and preserving, since COVID-19, including many — 21 percent of gardeners — for the first time.

My grandmother taught me which ferns produce fiddleheads in the spring, and to cook them twice to get the tannins out. From the first ramps of spring through blackberry season and into October where an unseemly tussle took place between my usually dignified grandmother and the squirrels over what beach nuts our old tree produced, my grandmother supplemented her garden’s casual production with foraged foods.

This year, I did something I haven’t done for a decade: I foraged. Count me among the 27.5 percent of Vermonters who did more foraging this year than years prior.

It was Jeff Danziger who created the Teeds, that most Vermont of the Vermont native families: “Pa (has) worked out a system of not spending much money, a system made possible by not having much to spend. The Teeds grow their own potatoes, raise their own chickens, make their own cheese and preserves, produce their own vegetables, and even keep a few turkeys around for the Thanksgiving trade. Ma bakes her own bread and cookies, and Pa has been known to brew a little silly stuff to ward off the winter tremors. The rest of the world has grown desperately interdependent, but not the Teeds. They can’t afford to.”

The Teeds have several books out, and were featured in comics back in the 1970s; for example, the one with two teachers chatting over the heads of a group of children when one remarks to the other, “Do you remember when only the poor kids smelled of woodsmoke?”

In 1973, when that comic appeared, OPEC nations shut off the supply of oil to the United States. If you’re old enough you may remember Jimmy Carter addressing the country wrapped in a hand-knit cardigan, urging everyone to turn their thermostats down to 68.

For Vermonters, accustomed to setting their thermostats at 60, with 65 being seen as flagrant decadence, 68 was, and remains in my mind, simply profligate.

Waking up to a paper-thin sheet of ice on the wall of your bedroom, however, is not the most desirable state of affairs, even if it is character building. Vermonters, like everyone else who could afford to, adopted forced air heat powered by oil and gas burners well prior to the oil crisis. We too reveled in being able to walk over to the wall to adjust a dial, then scoot over to stand on the grate to experience toasty air venting upward. We liked bedrooms that didn’t require hot water bottles to defrost frozen sheets.

Then, we had the Oil Crisis.

Back in 1974, almost overnight the price of conventional fuels soared. As they soared, not only did they hit prices many couldn’t pay, but there was a question of fuel even being available, at any price.

There is a bit of truth to the Vermont legend that speaks of Vermonters shrugging and heading out to the barn to dig granddaddy’s old cylindrical or box stove out of the pile of Things Which Might Come in Handy Someday and manhandling it back into its former place in the center of the kitchen or sitting room.

A bit of stove black, a new pipe, fire up the chainsaw, and Vermont homes were back in business, circa 1900, ice cold bedrooms and all.

Those old stoves were not, however, efficient. They ate wood and didn’t hold a burn through the night. And after experiencing 11-degree mornings in his workshop, Duncan Syme created the first Defiant woodstove prototype.

I think we bought ours in 1977. The last Defiant rolled off the assembly line in 1988, 10 years later, having made its founders millionaires and re-established wood as a home energy source. That last stove was such an event it was covered by the Washington Post.

In a sidebar the Post notes that renewable wood delivered — in 1988 — as much energy as nuclear power.

Back in 1974, even Danziger dragged a woodstove into his home. And he’s benefited from it with more than heat, publishing several essays on his relationship with wood, including a 1996 piece in the Christian Science Monitor titled “Whose Woods These Are I Couldn’t Care Less.”

I remind you of the winter of 1974 because it was, at the time, a huge shock to the system that required innovation and frank grit to overcome and resulted in a lasting impact on how we regarded, and interacted with, essentials like shelter and energy.

We live with the consequences of the oil embargo today. Everything from how homes are built and insulated to clothing have been influenced by that experience. This season, assuming supply chains hold, you will be able to buy winter boots with a -10F rating that are, thanks to adapting reflective material and insulators, light and stylish, to say nothing of comfortable.

You can trace the advances that make those boots possible back to fighting winter cold with woodstoves, wool hats and clumsy pack boots.

While the Carter White House bought six Defiant woodstoves to signal its support for renewable and alternative energy sources during the crisis, the rise of the efficient woodstove was a home grown, backyard, affair with a lasting impact not only on how we heat — or partially heat — our homes, but in how we think about energy and resources.

The Congressional Research Service, a federal legislative branch agency located within the Library of Congress, serves exclusively congressional committees and members of Congress. Their reports, however, are a matter of public record. Their report on the Global Economic Effects of COVID-19 was updated as recently as June 17, 2021.

It looks at the impact of the pandemic on poverty, opening with “the human costs in terms of lives lost will permanently affect global economic growth in addition to the cost of elevated levels of poverty, lives upended, careers derailed and increased social unrest. Some estimates indicate that 95 million people may have entered into extreme poverty in 2020 with 80 million more undernourished compared to pre-pandemic levels.”

On it goes to cover the impact on workers, trade, financial markets, major economic developments and policy responses. It is an interesting report as a bird’s eye view of how the policy makers and market makers are reacting to stabilize the systems to bring them back to “normal.”

All of which makes me wonder if a similar report, issued in 1975, would have considered the wholesale shift from gas and oil to wood that leaves us today with at least three stove manufacturers in Vermont, a thriving market for wood fuel, and an abiding distrust of relying solely on liquid fuels for a home’s heat?

If the garden centers expected a respite from the raised bed frenzy of last season, they didn’t get it. The garden is the woodstove of the 1970s. Each radish is a red, white and green bite of independence. Each bean — fresh, frozen or dilly — is a victory against food insecurity.

As one person participating in the University of Vermont survey wrote, “We, and many residents of our town, put in victory gardens this year in order to donate to the community food shelves because of COVID-19.”

I just hope you didn’t mulch them with bark chips. But if you did, sweep the baby beetles off into soapy water, fluff the soil around the potatoes to disturb the larvae, and mulch with hay or straw.

The potatoes will be fine, you just don’t want those beetles spreading to your tomatoes.

Tamara Burke and her family were longtime residents of Stowe, leaving the Garnache-Morrison Memorial Forest as a gift to the community. She and her husband, the sheep, and a riot of golden retrievers now call Craftsbury home. She works in Stowe.