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Discovering Local Food at Merriewood
Submitted By: Kevin Feinstein (permacultureme@yahoo.com) - Garden Manager at Merriewood Children's Center.

Challenge
1) How to provide opportunities for children to engage and feel connected to the natural world.

2) How to discover and utilize local foods. There is an amazing amount of food growing right in our own yards and in open spaces that rarely gets used and ends up rotting. There is a golden opportunity to harvest more of the free and delicious food that is all around us! This year's huge acorn crop is a perfect example.


Solution Detail
As garden manager at the Merriewood Children's Center, the best way that I've found to help children connect to the natural world is through food. Although fresh garden veggies are a big hit, no food excites the children more than the wonders of the wild. I often see kids and their parents picking blackberries, and we've gone on several field trips and gathered all sorts of wild and feral foods such as figs, pomegranates, wild plums, feral pears and many others. Lafayette is FULL of food to discover with children!

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A local food that I have had fun discovering with the kids this year is acorns. So far, the Merriewood kids and I have harvested about 100 pounds of acorns, and I've also collected another 100 pounds for my own use. The children naturally take to gathering the acorns, and we’ve spent several afternoons telling stories and having great conversation while shelling them. We’ve made the best pancakes I’ve ever had (and probably the most nutritious, too) as well as cookies and bread-like treats made from the ground and leached acorn meal. This has been one of the most enriching experiences I’ve had with the kids, connecting them to the natural world in a way that nothing else really can. This is the most local and sustainable food you can get. It required no fossil fuels at all to deliver them to us. And acorns are very filling, too, so maybe we might actually do the planet a favor and buy a little less imported and ecological unsound food.

All About Acorns
Acorns were a staple of the people that lived in this area not so long ago. They subsisted on acorns for thousands of years, many times they provided 60% or more of their total diet. The Natives in this area were strong and healthy, and lived a very rich, leisurely life. As with most human cultures that have existed on this planet, life wasn’t full of toil. They spent on average only 3 or 4 hours a day of satisfying work to make an abundant life. Acorns were a big part of this lifestyle.

Acorns, having more carbohydrate than protein or fat (although they do contain healthy portions of those as well), are more similar to grain than nuts. It makes more sense to talk about acorns as corn or wheat, rather than walnuts or almonds. Acorns, however, are far more nutritious than wheat or corn, containing more essential amino acids, protein, fat, calcium, phosphorus, potassium and myriad other vitamins and minerals that humans need to grow healthy. They also contain no gluten, and can be eaten without cooking.

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Time and time again, I hear people commenting on how desperate the Natives must have been for food that they would resort to eating acorns. It is a complete misconception that it takes a lot of work to eat acorns. Wheat and corn agriculture demands tremendous amounts of work and ultimately depletes the soil (as well as displacing wildlife and mystery and intrigue.) Oaks build the soil, provide for wildlife (and mystery and intrigue.) The oaks were managed by the Native Californians, but their methods required little effort compared to grain agriculture. So that’s the growing them part, people say, but what about processing them? Acorns are easy! Going from picking the acorns off the ground to eating a dish made with them is ridiculously easy compared to harvesting wheat from the field and trying to make bread. You can make the acorns yourself, but wheat pretty much requires a slave labor force to get you your daily bread. All you have to do with acorns is shell them, grind them, and run water through them until the tannin is gone (leaching). You can put the ground acorns in a cheesecloth and tie it to your faucet (or hose outside) and let it drip slowly overnight. In the morning you have this local, sustainable, wonderful, nutritious food.

This year it is especially easy, because the valley oaks (Quercus lobata) are masting -- that is they are producing a bumper crop of acorns that are thousands of times more than all the wildlife could eat in their wildest dreams. This year is particularly abundant. I first noticed these trees in 2004 when there was a similar bumper crop of acorns. I was astonished as I saw all this amazing food being run over, stepped on, swept up and thrown in the trash. The thing that disturbed me the most was how for the most part the crop was being ignored (other than the nuisance they caused to be people’s decks, roofs, and driveways.) I gathered several bags worth and ate them on special occasions for the following year. To my surprise, in 2005 and 2006, there were virtually no acorns on the valley oaks whatsoever. This was true not only for Lafayette valley oaks, but every valley oak I observed from Contra Costa to Sonoma, Napa, Santa Clara counties. So when I saw all the green acorns on the valley oaks this summer, I was ecstatic. Valley oak acorns are some of the largest in the world, easy to shell and even easier to leach.

Informational Links

Merriewood Children's Center


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