Investment Advice

In September I went to Salina, Kansas to attend the Land Institute's Prairie Festival. Barbara Kingsolver and Steven Hopp, authors of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, were guest speakers. When they gave their talk (in the heat of midday, with the crowd of us all piled into a perfect red cliche of a barn), Kingsolver told us that a friend of hers had asked if, given the economic crisis, we all should be investing in gold or something. Kingsolver's response was to point out that you cannot eat gold, and suggested that our efforts should focus on that most essential element - our basic sustenance - our food. "Food," she told us, "is the one consumer choice we have to keep making."

So, the consumer choice we made last week was to buy the largest batch of greens you have ever seen in your life. So big in fact that when I tried to stow them all in the refrigerator, the door actually wouldn't close. I managed to make them fit eventually, despite having bought an additional two giant bunches of turnip greens a few days later. And finally on Sunday we spent two and a half hours blanching and freezing all our greens - a two and a half hour investment in our future market-less winter when the greens out in the field will freeze over inedibly, but the greens in our freezer will be delicious all season long. I have no doubt about the positive returns we'll see on that investment.