For much of the year, 100% of the meat in my diet is accounted for by my hunting. I go back to eating beef and pork only when the game runs out. I’m bored silly by fishing, so I don’t do any. I gather blackberries and huckleberries in season. Used to do wild strawberries but they are more trouble than they’re worth. Grandpa and uncles used to pick wild mushrooms and I ate a lot of them. The old guys are all dead now and I don’t trust myself to pick mushrooms myself, so that has dropped back to O%.
Snip
Shayna, not to run off topic, but would you mind too terribly emailing me - my husband and I are going to attempt some gardening this summer, and I have a bunch of questions I would just love to ask you! You don’t have an email listed, so if you could get a hold of me…
Many thanks!
M2U
Back on topic guys - sorry…
Probably about half of the meat we consume is from wild game.
Once the weather warms we will be supplying nearly all of our own produce and also putting it up for next winter. Peas, beans, parsnips, 2 types of corn, 5 types of tomatoes, peppers, hot peppers, squash, melons, lettuce, radishes, kohlrabi, turnips, zucchini and who knows what else. Maybe soybeans this year because I just discovered I like them in stir-fry.
The only vegetable I can think of that we eat regularly and aren’t growing is potatoes, just because potatoes are cheap.
I pick morels in May and try to pick enough to dry some for later in the year, but we usually end up cooking them for friends while they are fresh.
I grow raspberries, mulberries and grapes, but gooseberries, currants and blackberries grow wild on our hill so i guess I can only count the last three by your rules.
I will be raising 2 pigs this summer and slaughtering them this fall but since they are “grown” they do not meet your requirements either.
Oh yes, I forgot that we also have 7 apple trees and 2 pear trees.
Would it help if I went dumpster diving for a not-quite-empty can of Cheez Whiz and a stale roll or two?
Hmm… I think you could get into the gray area, yeah. Call it “gleaning,” as above.
Sal Ammoniac, as DrDeth said, acorns are toxic because of the tannins they contain, but can be made edible with some processing. We had so many acorns fall from the trees in the back yard that I had to rake them up several times to protect the lawnmower. There were piles of acorns 18" deep around the edges of the yard. It seemed like a waste to just let the deer have them, so I did some Intarwebs research to figure out how to make them edible.
My technique was to let the nuts dry for a few weeks, so they became loose in the shells. I then shelled them and bashed them between some flat rocks to make lentil-sized chunks. I soaked the chunks in water for about 48 hours, changing the water several times. When the acorns were no longer bitter, and the water no longer tea-colored, I spread them out on the porch to dry a bit before running them through a grinder to make meal. It was fairly labor intensive, but now I’ve acquired a taste for the stuff so I’ll increase production this fall. I’ve read that you can soak the acorns whole for several weeks in moving water - the meat swells and cracks the shell for you- but the stream behind our house is a little grungy for me to trust this method.
We’ve also got big puffball mushrooms in the woods - like volleyball sized - and they can be good eats if you get them while they’re still immature.
The only hunting and gathering I do is picking blackberries in vacant lots when they come into season around here. I have several relatives and friends who hunt and fish, though, and I frequently consume fresh fish, wild boar, and venison.
I’ve eaten wild-gathered acorns, but found the taste didn’t justify the hassle of preparing them. And I fully intend to go mushroom-hunting one of these days, as soon as I’m reasonably confident I won’t kill myself.
Now that I consider it, H&G (and cultivation) accounts for a fairly large part of my diet. I live in a farming community with a large extended family. We all farm to some degree and share the produce. Most is frozen for later use. I fish and purchase beef and pork from farmers. I don’t hunt, but some do and I am frequently offered venision. With the exception of staples like salt, coffee, tea, etc, I could approach 100% support by H&G and cultivation…except I have to work and that cuts into my farming time!
In the park where I walk my dogs, spring onions grow. I’ve picked them before, sniffed them (they smelled good) and discarded them.
Well, somewhat inspired by this thread, yesterday I went out and picked a big handful of these onions. They were delicious.
Berries grow there too.
Outside of berries, and now these onions, there’s really nothing I hunt or gather.
Oh, lots of mint grows around here that I gather for things. So, mint too.
If we’re going to accept sustinence farming as being a form of gathering, then what’s the point of this question? Why not just ask how much of what makes up our diet isn’t bought from a store?
My apologies. Perhaps I should have read a bit closer.
brossa,
can you describe the flavor of acorn-meal as close to something, or is it totally unique?
I’m practically begging you to create an Acorn Cooking thread in Cafe Society… I’m super curious about this.
That should read “subsistence farming”.
Thank you very much. Although I confess to having missed the OP’s later post that home-growing doesn’t count at all. Oh well, I guess that makes the answer 0% for me, then.
I sent one last night – I’m more than happy to answer any questions you have, but this is only our second season, so I’m still learning by trial and error myself. I’m trying to keep my garden organic, and at the moment the slugs are winning their little war against my less-established lettuce and beans. Feh!
The house I grew up in backed up to 35 acres of “common ground,” and the puffball mushrooms were so plentiful that my father finally decided to figure out a way to eat them, and came up with a recipe for puffball soup that was deeeeelicious! Yum, now I’m hungry.
If supermarkets and groceries don’t count as “hunting ground”, close to zero %.
The only gathered food I eat is mushrooms, chesnuts, blackberries and walnuts. I never hunted, and never fished since childhood.
Shayna- regarding puffballs: Yeah, there’s nothing like a huge 1" thick slab of sauteed mushroom that covers your whole plate. I took one of the mature puffballs and kicked it up and down in the woods closer to our house; with luck a few billion of the spores took root and I’ll have an inexhaustible source in a few years.
Tristan, ask and ye shall receive.
When I was a kid I came across an unopened Tootsie Roll on the sidewalk. I’m not sure how to translate that into a percentage.
Most our meat is venison or fish and what isn’t we raise ourselves (beef, pork, chicken). Occasionally a wild goose, turkey, pheasant or bunny or six.
I gather herbs, berries (raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, wild currants, wild plums, apples etc.) along with mushrooms, asparagus and fiddleheads from the wild.
The rest I grow as I have a large organic garden.
I’m one of those nuts who make my own bread yet though I have yet to grow my own wheat.
If going by wild I’d say perhaps 25-30% since the garden is not wild (most the time).
Shasta
I’m going to planting my garden again here in the next week or two (which I’m doubling from last year), and I have about 50 lbs of wild boar in the freezer. I have some venision in my dad’s freezer and I think I have about a dozen perch from last summer in the freezer here too. At the height of the growing season, after a fishing or hunting trip I probably reach as high as 50%. Throughout the year though I probably average about 5-10% though.