"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
Farm1 wrote:
"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
The 'bush' is everything outside cities and major regional centres
and includes areas where your neighbours are a few hundred metres
away and the outback where they might be a hundred kilometres away. It
is where people tend to have land to grow large plants like
pumpkins and the tradition of doing so. I wasn't making any comment
on level of sophistication, it's that city folk wouldn't eat gramma
pie due to the lack of grammas and knowing how to make it.

:-)) Indeed. City people seem to have lost many skills when it
comes to food and it's preparation.

I'm always stunned when I visit my sister in Sydney and look in her
fridge and pantry. Both are almost bare and I always think of the
old saying about 'society being 7 meals away from anarchy'. I could
eat out of my fridge/freezer and pantry for at least a month but at
my sisters I wonder what they will eat for dinner (she seldom does
any cooking at all and they seem to eat out every night).

I was reading that in some western cities (eg New York) kitchens are being
converted to other uses (spare bedrooms, walk-in wardrobes etc) because
the occupants always eat out and that some new appartments are built
without one. No I can't recall when or who said so.

I've read similar things for a few years. Being a keen and active cook, I
shudder at the thought, let alone the practice.

If you look at the way cities decay into anarchy in a few days due to
external events (eg weather extremes such as Katrina at New Orleans) we
must be very concerned about the fragility of such a way of life. As soon
as the power or fuel stop people will be hungry very soon.

Yep. Typhoon Haiyan being a current example.

We are going to pass
through a transition away from a fossil fuel economy some time in the next
generation.

What astounds me is that such a fact is not glaringly obvious to so many
people. We're living in post peak oil world by every account I've ever
managed to read on the subject and despite Himself's hobby of collecting and
driving old cars, we still try to be careful about our use of fuel and in
our purchasing of oil derived products. And as you'd know, oil derived
products are just about everything in and around a modern day house.

I don't see myself as a doomsayer but I worry that the transition will not
be smooth.

I know what you mean. I've read the Transitions Handbook and a lot of the
other literature but it seems that many people have not or if they do think
aobut the issues, they start to soudn like some of the radical 'preppers'
cites aroudn the web.

More sane, middle class people need to start thinking aobut the issues and
voting according to what they learn IMO. Additionally it wouldn't hurt if
they started gardens and learned some of the old skills such as learngint or
elaly cook not just assemble ingredients. I might someday come in handy.

Many people would not be aware that in this
country we have had many thousands of city men tramping about the bush
looking for work/food. Sydney is now much bigger and more dependent on
remote supplies of food and energy than it was in the Great Depression.

When I was interested in the Depression, I was fascinated when I found out
in my research that apparently Australia and Germany had the highest
unemployment rates during the Depression years. I'd always thought the US
was more impacted than anywhere else on earth but I guess the majority of
all images we have ever seen about the Depression come from the US. The
photographers they had in the US at that time were icons of B&W photgraphic
'art' and, even today, looking at their images still manages to say a lot
about the human condition IMO.