We bought a food dehydrator a
few months ago, and while it took me a while to get the hang of dehydrating
food, I use it all the time now. With all the health problems Shauna has been
experiencing, I’ve learned that there is a clear connection between autoimmune
illnesses and problems with the gut. Because Shauna has Crohn’s Disease, and a
myriad of other potentially related autoimmune disorders, I have been
experimenting with dietary changes which might allow her besieged bowel to heal.
We’re now eating more plant-based foods, and we have substantially reduced the amount
of dairy, grains, and animal fat we consume. I bought the food dehydrator
because I was looking for nutritional alternatives to corn chips and other
snacks we used to eat. I have tried dehydrating a variety of fruits and
vegetables and have found several we really like. The best part about a food
dehydrator is that we no longer have spoilage; I simply dehydrate
leftover fruit and vegetables before they can spoil. Dehydrated foods maintain
much of their raw nutritional values, keep for a long time, and can be
re-hydrated to be added to soups and stews.
Here’s the issue. Neurotic individual that I am, it occurred
to me the other day, as I was cutting up the fifteenth apple for the food
dehydrator, that I may be subconsciously hunkering down. I think I may be going
into survivor mode. I’m watching all these stories on the news about climate
change and weather disasters, crazy despots and nuclear Armageddon, the
seemingly exponential rise in mass shootings in public places, and of course Baby
Rump’s daily chaos-inducing foot-in-mouth tweet, and I think all this negativity
is eroding my anemic sense of security. Stress is widely considered to be a
fertilizer for ill health, and I don’t think the world has ever seemed more stressed
than it does right now. Just the other day, our quiet little rural community made
the national news because there was a triple murder/suicide, very close to our
home. Americans can’t seem to persuade their NRA-paid-for leaders that it is a
wise decision to make automatic weapons a little harder to purchase, so I’m
thinking the horse is out of the barn, barking up the wrong tree with both oars
out of the water, and it didn’t look before it leaped. The talking heads keep drumming
it into my head that the world is stockpiling ridiculously overpowered weapons
( if you can’t hit that rabbit you’re hunting with the first shot, the next fifty or sixty are bound to do the trick), wiping out endangered species (white rhino,
you’re next), warming up the planet, and hating just about anybody who doesn’t
look, act, or worship like us; and here I am, frantically cutting up food for
dehydration, so that when civilization finally does reach that fast-approaching
tipping point, Shauna, Jasper and I will have a three month supply of dried apples
and beef jerky on which to survive. I’ve become a closet hunker-downer.
When I was seven or eight years old, many of my
friends lived in houses with bomb shelters. Cuba and the evil Russians had
missiles pointed at the U.S., and we were told it was just a matter of time
before someone blinked. We practiced drills in our school wherein we hid under
our flimsy desks when an alarm was sounded. Even at that early age, I was
skeptical that hiding under the desk was going to save me from a nuclear blast.
I guess history is once again repeating itself, except now I won’t be hiding
under a desk, I’ll be in my basement with a garbage bag full of dried fruit.
- Written
by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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