A lunch for my first Transition

There is a group of people in town who are learning skills for what they call the Transition.  Basically their idea is that the way of life we have is heavily dependent on limited resources like oil.  Eventually these resources will start to run out and the way of life as we know it will drastically change.  Everything from pre-fab food shipped from long distances to fancy cell phones, to fuel for our cars, to readily available clothing... all these things will be gone!  Poof!  Or, more likely, fizzle.

To make this change easier, this Transition group hopes to acquire skills we need for our community to be (more or less) self sufficient.  They want to help people learn to grow their own food, save their own seeds, find methods of transportation that rely on as little petro as possible, and even make their own clothes.

Transitions group exist all over, and are a 'global grassroots movement supporting citizen action toward reducing oil dependence and building local community resilience and ecological sustainability' (Transistion Victoria).  Pretty cool eh?

And right up my ally.

So I've been helping to pull flax.  This is part of The Linen Project  where members of the community make linen from scratch.  Using mostly hand tools at this point, they do tend to complain about how much work it is - obviously they aren't homesteaders at heart - but in my opinion, learning that a way of life not dependent on a big industrial complex is hard work, the sooner they stop dreaming and idealizing the future, the better. (end of rant)

If pulling flax is hard work, I'm going to need a lunch!

First thing I did was run out to the garden and pick some grapes.  Delicious.  It is a Transition event after all, I should at least have one food in my lunch that I grew myself.

Two ume onigiri, one wakami furikake onigiri (they are the rice balls), home grown grapes (the best kind in my opinion), and a soy-free chocolate pumpkin made by Denman Island chocolate (a local company and my guilty little pleasure)

I warped my drink container in the cloth so it wouldn't sweat too much in my bag.

The wrapping makes it so that there is a handle on the other side.  It's very cute and convenient 

I also made a mini-bento for when I got home in case I was too tried to make a snack.

Wakami furikake onigiri and nukazuke carrots.



As a side note: I like the idea of Transition and will be looking into this further.  What Whole Wheat Pastafarian wouldn't?

But I worry that the people I met who are engaging in Transition activities are too firmly set in their middle class capitalistic mind set.  Living a life without oil is going to take more than a few mornings volunteering in a picturesque setting talking with your friends, complaining about how much hard work it is.

If things are really going to hell in a hand basket, maybe they should look to the past instead of spending all their free time reading books about the impending doom.  The idea of free time being another luxury that they would be wise to transition away from.

There are still people alive (I live with two of them) who remember harvesting in the fields by hand, know how to properly tie grain sheaths, &c.  There are also enough manuals and writings from the last two hundred years to provide the basic understanding.  There are also people like me who are already more than half way transitioned - I sew on a treadle sewing machine for goodness sake.  Relying on info from a couple of core books over those who have lived it and are living it now... that seems like a steady road to folly to me.

But simply my opinion.

Maybe transition needs to start like this?

I hope to participate more in this project, if only because I love textiles so much.  But as a first expierence, I'm a bit underwhelmed.

Yummy Bento Lunch shared on: