Cooksville 2100: Food Production I -- Low Tech Podcast, No. 80

Almost 250 years ago, the French had a revolution. Some historians say it was because the wealth was too concentrated at the top and the rich flouted themselves over the poor. Others say the Enlightenment raised the consciousness of the masses and they recognized the lack of reforms in the government. I say, and I'm speaking over broadly here, it's because people got hangry at a time when most calories came from bread. That is most French people were eating about 2 pounds a day. Two years of a failed harvest made bread prices skyrocket. People starved. Studies show hungry people make poor impulsive decisions. Bread riots led to revolution. Food is more important than energy production. And so far uh we've seen no government topple because of the power being out. Maybe we should have started here with food, but doesn't matter. We're here now. Let's see how we're eating in the year 2100. This is the Low Tech podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 80 on January 30th, 2026. Coming to you out of the Low Tech Institute recording room in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're going back to the future to see how people are getting their food in the year 2100. We will also have institute updates. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Nope, just kidding. We're not on Twitter anymore, but you can find us. Our handle is at lowtech Institute on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the usuals. You can also check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org. You can find both of our podcasts there, as well as information on joining and supporting the institute and its research. Also, you should know some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts. So, unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on that advertising. And while all of our podcasts, videos, and other information are given freely, they do take time and energy and, yeah, resources to make them. If you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as three bucks a month through our Patreon page. You can find that at patreon.com/lotchinstitute. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website, which again is low techchinstitute.org. And here, you know, it's the beginning of the year. And at the top, I want to give a special shout out and thank you to all of our patronons and members. Um, I just sent out the year-end tax letter, so I have them uh here. But uh, extra thank you to Ben, Alexis, Donna, Matt, That Thatcher, Sterling, Be, Math, Kate, Phillip, Ma, Aaron, Paula, Jason, Robin, uh, Leanne, Marilyn, Ingred, Chis, Rob, Elizabeth, and Tony. Really appreciate you guys. Thank you so much. And hey, monetary support is great, but you know, sharing our podcast or engaging with us on social media also really helps us out. So, thanks to those of you that do that. All right. Although we started our tour looking at energy, food is more important for the stability and survival of humankind. This is kind of a bold statement, but consider in the history of anatomically modern humans, the only periods of constant overabundant food production came after 1950. And in the industrialized world for those with at least moderate means. So it's a pretty small subset of humanity. Society is linked to having food. Uh food insecurity even on the individual level. And that means being hungry for a long time makes us bad decision makers. Hunger is what's known as a visceral state. And other visceral states are things like fear, sexual arousal, being tired. when you you as an individual uh are in one of these states, you're less predictable and you're prone to rash decisions. And this is according to a number of studies. So on a larger scale, for example, just before the French Revolution, bread prices doubled, troubled, and then sex tppled at a time when 2/3 of a person's calories came from a loaf of bread. And while not all civil unrest is due to hunger, I'm speaking too broadly there. Masses of underfed people are not as patient when other social systems are malfunctioning. So we can see that a lack of food can light the fuse on a personal or on a societywide powder cake. So I started talking out about the French Revolution and the immediate uh quote that springs to mind is let them eat cake, right? And this is commonly thought to come from Marian Twinette when she was told that the peasants were starving because they had no bread. But really this quote comes from Jeanjac Rouso in his book Confessions where he says that once a princess told him that if he couldn't find bread he should just eat bio. And bio is kind of a a rich bread with um eggs and flour in it. So it's not quite cake but it's definitely fancy bread. So this anecdote was written when Marianette was 9 years old and had not even come to France yet. So the point is that although if people are starving and the governing people are out of touch, it's not a good look whether or not they actually said let them eat cake. That sort of Okay. And now while energy is certainly important and we're going to keep talking about energy as we continue our tour here of Cooksville, uh we don't need energy itself. We need its products like food, heat, cooling, clothing, shelter, and you know, stuff. So energy is important, but the stuff it makes is what we actually need, right? You can't eat electrons. Since the time of well, the French Revolution, uh, food production has gotten a lot more predictable and regular. At the beginning of the 2000s, people have been living for generations with abundant food for the first time in human history. And it doesn't mean there weren't hungry people. It just means that there was enough food being produced to feed everybody, even if it wasn't being distributed to everybody. So, now let's jump in our time machine. You know the drill. We're going to hop forward in time to the year 2100. And now, as we move into the food section, I'm going to strike a bit of a different tone here, right? I'm going to sound probably a little more like a tour guide. So, imagine we are now entering Cooksville. You're a visitor from 75 years ago, and I now am a local in the year 2100. Why don't we say that I'm my own grandson? Cuz that's kind of funny. All right. Uh, I'm glad you're here and I'm excited to show you around our little village in the year 2100. Today I'm going to take you around Cooksville and show you how we produce our food. We're going to walk through town. We're going to look at different infrastructure and talk about the annual cycle of food production. We're going to talk about how we harvest and process and store food in a future episode. Um, and then finally, uh, later on we're going to talk about everyone's favorite part of food, that is consumption, eating it, right? cooking and eating in the year 2100, but that's a couple weeks away yet. Before we start, we should really talk for a second about how we got where we are today. Not just Cooksville, but you know, the world. We already talked about how we use much less energy today. And that's also true in food production. The other biggest change is the climate. Today, in the year 2100, southern Wisconsin is more like what you would experience in Tulsa, Oklahoma or St. Louis, Missouri. And although we have more trees than you might expect in uh what you used to call present day Oklahoma, we're about 12° Fahrenheit or about 7° Celsius warmer year round and about 6% drier during the growing season. On the flip side, our winter is a lot more mild, but also wetter. So, think of it this way. We've lost our coldest winter month, so no longer do we have January and we've gained a new hotter month. We can sandwich it between August and September, right? This has extended our growing season by about a month and it's also made growing in the winter a little easier. But on the other side, it has put strains on our existing environment and it has also significantly changed over the last century. So, we've had to bring in new varieties to grow and either breed adaptations of our favorite existing varieties or let them die out because they weren't producing anymore. And while we don't burn any fossil carbon anymore, the momentum of two centuries of spewing ancient carbon into the atmosphere has created a long arc towards our new normal climate. Today, scientists predict that another uh 50 to 100 years of warming should be expected. And so, we keep our food system flexible and ready to adapt to even more warming. So, now uh we've been standing here by the creek. Why don't we take a walk around? It's now springtime, which is a great time to be walking around Cooksville. Why don't you follow me? And we're going to see where our food is coming from. And we're already at our first stop, which is on the north end of town, just off the Bad Fish Creek. We're going to then go down Main Street and head out the southern side of town before we circle back around uh in the next episode. But before we head out, I should talk about how the village is organized, or at least how we organize our labor. And I'll contrast that with other communities. So, south of us is a town of Evansville. They use what they call a cash economy. In that town, each person works as an individual with set rates for different jobs. Then they spend that cash locally to buy things. And while the US dollar is still used for buying and selling things across the country or when using the national transit system, stuff like that, we'll talk about these econ large scale things in in a future podcast, these cashbased communities often keep their own ledgers of local credit. It's kind of like a version of local libertarian inspired economics. Stoden on the other hand, which is just north of Cooksville, I've talked about them before, they use what they call a time bank system. So for each hour someone works, they get an hour of credit. Then when they want to buy something, they exchange their hour against the cost of the product. So for example, when growing and harvesting and processing wheat into flour, all the hours are tracked. And then when a loaf of bread is baked, the value of that flour can be divided out from the total. Then you add to that the bakery's time and the overall cost of the production of the loaf of bread. So somebody can then exchange their hour of work for the hours it costs to make that individual loaf of bread on a 1:1 basis. And that way some folks never have to do agricultural work if they have enough hours doing other things to cover their needs. So a few jobs also have different rates in order to kind of nudge people to do jobs that are less attractive. So, for example, somebody working in the human uh station and humanure is human manure. So, we'll talk about that also in another podcast. People working there because that's not quite seen as the most enjoyable job or for each hour they work they get an hour and a half paid to them. So, that way they can ensure that the tougher jobs get done, right? They value them more highly. On the flip side, easier jobs might be paid at a slightly discounted rate. Cooksville though we run on committees and this kind of controversial and messy system is loved and hated. So people sign up to work with different groups and those groups are called committees. Each committee is headed by a few folks who have experience in that area. They get voted on each year by the committee who's going to head it. The fish hatchery, for example, is headed by my friend Bill Robert, who has been on that committee since he was a kid. It's just a part-time committee, so it only has one head. The other three people that work on the fish hatchery rotate daily duties and then they all pitch in when a big task is needed to be done. So they strip the eggs, they hatch out the fry, which are baby fish, move the fish between the tanks and so on. We'll see all that in a minute here. And then uh from harvest days on, everybody from town can come and spend some time helping out under the direction of committee members like when they have a really big task to do. And so every every hour that's worked is tracked. So everybody in town is asked to pitch in about 10 hours a week helping out either their committee or a committee with a large project. Some years ago we had to bump up that number to 12 hours a week because we weren't getting enough done. But then other years when it's been really easy, we've been able to drop it to as low as eight. Every year we decide what the annual hours per week rate should be and we do that at an annual meeting and uh that's when most villagers gather and all the committees report back hey we had a really great year harvesting wheat or the potatoes did really well or oh this year the goat flock isn't doing as well right and then the committees say we need another person or we have too many people in our committee and not enough work. So um we can also as villagers get together and say hey I really want more meat next year or I really want more citrus or I have too many potatoes right and so we can kind of evaluate on a yearby-year basis what we need more of and what we need less of but really this we tried this on a larger scale but really it works well in a community size where everybody knows each other but once you get bigger than that it's this system tends to break down and even with us it's a really messy and contentious and sometimes argumentative process all 100 village Villagers though do share um get a share of these local products as long as they contribute their weekly hours over the year. You don't have to help clean the fish, but you get the fish because you've done other things, right? So, in the committee system, some people never help with the fish hatchery, but they still get fish. My neighbor Phil Binaric, for example, he likes to harvest wood. That's his favorite thing to do. He and his buddy Keith Axford, they are the entirety of the firewood committee. Phil puts in about 30 hours for 18 weeks through most of the fall and winter. So, you don't have to do 10 hours each week. You can bunch all that work together. And so, he spends his fallen winter clearing out firewood from the fields that have fallen. And throughout the year, he adds up to the 520 hours he needs to contribute to the village. And that's his only committee, but he still gets a share of everything else just as the rest of the village gets firewood even if they don't contribute to that committee. So it kind of uh helps us equalize our work all around. People get to work on things they like and they still get products um from other committees. So um others, for example, you know, those of us with small kids, we often chip in on the big work parties like going on a weekend to help harvest the fish or the wheat or the potatoes or other episodic tasks to make sure that we hit our 520 hours in the year, but we don't, you know, formally join a committee because we have kids and we're busy with other things. that's that's totally possible. It's a pain in the neck to work all this out, but it's also very flexible um and very, you know, communal as long as you have people that get along. A lot of religious communities um where a little village is, you know, all made up of one religious sect, they often function like this. Or there's some other thing that coheres them and brings them together. These are these are very popular among those type of people. Whereas if people are more individualistic and want to do their own thing, then you might see cash or you a cash economy or maybe a time bank system. There's others too. So, I mentioned the fish hatchery, which you can see here on your left. Uh, it's headed by Bill Robert. So, let's take a look how this functions right here on the Bad Fish Creek. So, people have been rearing fish since ancient China and Rome, but it didn't really take off until the late 1800s in Europe and a little later in the US. A fish farm or hatchery is basically an artificial river where the water is moved through a long thin tank at pace to keep it clean and oxygenated. And although more high-end hatcheries have been used in the past with large pumps and recirculating water and all kinds of bells and whistles, we use a less productive system, but is more energyefficient. In the mid 1800s, a small dam on the Badfish Creek was created to make a little mill pond to feed the flower mill that stood on the north end of town, right where we are today. But here now, four 10-ft wide trenches have been dug about 100 ft long and 4 ft deep. One of the trenches is divided into four quarters for rearing smaller fish. Each trench or pond is fed with water from the creek and that moves swiftly through on its own power and then back into the main flow out the back end. Obviously, there's grates to keep the fish in. Insects and other food flows in from the river to ensure that there's enough oxygen. Small windmills turn a paddle drum to turn the water. You know, it's just a paddle and it's constantly turning and splashing the water to help oxygenate it. The ponds are interconnected with underground tunnels and these are closed by slle gates. They have to be open to let the fish pass. So generally they're closed, but a couple times a year uh when the fish the fish are transferred from one pond to the other, usually because they've grown bigger, these gates are opened and people walk through the ponds and flush the fish into the next tank. So earlier this spring, the rainbow trout were stripped of eggs, which is where you hold the fish and the female fish and you push along their belly and all the fish pop out. You know, it looks like salmon row. And then the milk from the male fish are is is basically milked out of them and mixed together with the eggs. And those eggs are now developing in the little enclosure you see back there behind the ponds. That is the where they rear the fry. Fry are just baby fish. And once they're about an inch long, half of them are put into the divided quarter tanks and then the other half are put right into the Badfish Creek. So, we've been stocking the Badfish Creek uh for decades now. And those fry begin to grow. Oh, and I should say the brown trout, we do the same thing with the brown trout, but we do that in the fall. So, there's always kind of a staggering. So, as the the fry grow and get bigger, they're transferred from the divided side into the second pond and then as they get bigger, the third pond and then the fourth pond when they're the biggest. And that's done through the slle gates. And the gates are have various widths. They're bars, right, with various widths. And the bigger the fish, they can not pass through the bars and so it helps segregate them by size. We feed the fish from a variety of protein sources. So, primarily as many insects as we can get. So at night there are low lights right over the pond and those attract all kinds of insects which land on the water and of course get eaten by the trout. Other sources of protein come from well insects that are in the naturally occurring in the creek that flow into the intake and are flushed into the tank. Those get eaten. But we also bring protein from animal fat and plant oils that gets made into a fish meal to be fed to them. Kind of like you feed a flakes in an aquarium. We kind of do the same thing to feed them a fat and other nutrients. We feed them up through the summer and then we harvest them in the fall. The largest fish are let into the final tank and we feed that tank and airate it through the winter and that's the only tank that's active through the winter so that we have our breeding stock for next spring. The fall fish harvest is kind of a big deal. It's a big community event and many hands make light work of cleaning the fillets which are then dried or canned for later eating. In a good year, over 20,000 pounds of fish come from the farm. People also fish in the Bad Fish Creek year round, though for fresh fish, and they've become plentiful since we began stocking, like I said, decades ago. We follow a few simple rules so that we don't over fish our creek. If you go fishing here, don't harvest more than you can eat in a family meal. And you can only keep fish between 11 and 14 in long. These two rules have kept the population fairly stable as we stock it as the smaller fish can grow larger and the bigger fish can breed. So now let's leave the fish hatchery and walk down Main Street. We can see on our left hand side here a Cape Cod from the 1950s. And it looks a little out of place. The rest of the houses being carpenter gothic. Uh but it's been here since the 1950s. And the Coleman's have lived in this house for generations. They have a kitchen garden just like practically every other house here. But a kitchen garden is just a small but really important part of our food system because it provides most of the foods that are frequently used in cooking or foods that are hard to grow or foods that are highly valuable or plants. They don't all have to be foods. So each household runs its own kitchen garden. And these do not count towards the committee system except uh for a few older folks who can't do their own kitchen garden fully anymore. And so there is an elder care committee and part of their job is to have people use their time to go help the elders or people who are injured or you know otherwise can't work their kitchen garden because kitchen gardens are so important. They have to be done. Um but if you don't have the wherewithal to do that there is there is help available. So the the Coleman garden is a beautiful example of a kitchen garden. Most people have a lot of herbs in their kitchen gardens because herbs are best eaten right after they're picked. So for most of us, the first step in meal preparation, especially during the anytime other than the winter, but then even in the winter sometimes, the first step in meal preparation is taking a few literal steps into the kitchen garden to get herbs and other things. So the most popular herbs today are the same ones you'd probably enjoyed like basil, dill, rosemary, sage, cilantro, parsley, chives, and and a lot of others. Another reason the garden is close to the home is that well, not only is it convenient, but being near the garden scares away critters. Critters love to eat delicious food and we grow a lot of our delicious food in our kitchen gardens because things like big juicy tomatoes, tender lettuce, sweet bell peppers, radishes, peas, zucchinis, spinach, celery, carrots, sweet corn, all of these and others would be eaten by everything from rabbits and chipmunks and squirrels and deer and raccoons if they weren't deterred. Uh so we do grow some of these things to scale at our next stop, which we'll talk about next uh episode. Uh we do grow some of these to scale. The variety here is usually less robust or what that just means is it needs more TLC and also it's more susceptible to critter gam damage just because they're so darn delicious. So people use all kinds of ways to keep squirrels, chipmunks, birds, deer, rabbits, raccoons out of their gardens. Uh, one of the most popular is chili powder sprinkled around the ground because these animals with sensitive noses, they walk around, they smell the chili powder, and they learn, "Oh, this area sucks." Uh, we also use shiny decorations, bits of metal, other mirrors, stuff like that that flash in the wind and can disorient birds. Many people, including the Coleman's, allow their cats into their backyards where most kitchen gardens are found. So, a couple of folks let their cats out and that certainly does a number on the rodents and small birds and things like that, which is a mis blessing and a little bit debated. Other people keep guinea foul, and guinea fowl uh in the kitchen gardens don't eat the plants. They eat insects, seeds, and even rodents. And they largely leave the mature garden plants alone. They also have this really loud obnoxious shrieking. So, if a raccoon shows up, they'll start shrieking. And depending on the time of year, people also use nets mounted on frames to cover particularly delicate or uh valuable kitchen garden plants. Most people keep their kitchen gardens in the same spot every year. Some people move them around, but for the most part, they're permanent installations, and people feel really comfortable investing in making them look attractive. They build raised beds, trelluses, and they spend a lot of time and care to keep them weed-free, healthy, and and and vibrant looking. Every spring or fall, we bring in compost. And people have hot debates every year about which is better, the compost in the spring or in the fall. Nobody tills their beds. Instead, we use we pull a lot of weeds and we also use uh leaves to smother the ground um and then cover that with compost, which helps create a weed barrier. And this has built up the kitchen garden beds to be thick layers of like chocolate cake type soil. People compete for bragging rights on who has the deepest, richest soil during the annual garden fest. This is when um cooksians have a long weekend in midsummer and it's really just a big villagewide party and it moves from backyard to backyard culminating in uh completing projects for those that need help. So typically these are installing a garden or infrastructure in a garden for a new couple who just moved into a new home or an older resident who needs their um infrastructure re revitalized. Those who had help last year are really generous hosts the following year. uh as a thank you for the work that was provided and they bring out food and refreshments and they often um support the people that are doing the new work in the gardens this year. So next week we're going to head a little further down Main Street to see a subsistence garden which is where we grow produce in bulk quantities. As we continue along you'll see a decline in effort per plant uh and care and an increase in scale. And this just means that people spend a lot of time and effort for really small caloric payback in kitchen gardens. And field crops, by contrast, have low labor investment and high caloric payback. But then eating potatoes, grains, or other field crops can be a little boring without the burst of flavor from the nominally less efficient kitchen gardens. Less efficient calorically, but much more flavorful. The comparison of calories in versus calories out is not the only consideration we have for thinking about what is a worthwhile investment of our time today. But we will get to those next time. And now for a brief recap of the research we have going on around the institute or events really better said. In two short weeks next when the next podcast comes out we'll be at the garden and sustainable living expo put on by Wisconsin public television in Madison. If you're in southern Wisconsin we'd love to see you. I'll be giving five talks over three days of the expo and we'll be uh tableabling at a booth. Uh one of my talks will be on gardening in warming Wisconsin. I'll actually give that twice. Another will be with my friend Todd Fleming and we are going to be sharpening garden tools. I got to call him. We got to get that organized. Another one will be on beekeeping for gardeners. And then a final one will be on homecale composting systems. That one might show up in your podcast feed a little later. So if you want to come to the Garden Expo as our guest, uh send me an email. My address is s cot ttl lowtechinstitute.org. You can sign up to be a volunteer. Just a couple hours hang out with us at the booth. Uh and you get a 3-day pass for free and then you can come to the event all weekend. It has hundreds of lectures, seminars, and a whole room full of garden and sustainability related organizations and products. I hope to see you there. That's it for this week or better said Fortnite I suppose. The Low Tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted and produced by me, Scott Johnson. The episode was recorded in the Low Tech Institute recording room. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com/lotchinstitute and signing up. Thank you to our forester and land steward level members, the hambases, for their support. The Low Tech Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. Uh, you can find out more information about the LOTE Institute membership and underwriting at lowcinstitute.org. Just in case you missed it the 12 other times I mentioned it. All right, find us on social media. Uh, and you can reach me directly. I'm Scottinstitute.org. Our intro music today was back in the8s off the album Power Pop by Hollisna. That song is released in the public domain and this podcast is under the Creative Commons Attribution and Shareike license, meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks so much. Take care.