The results are in!

We have officially made it through two months of our home grown diet, and have decided to end the experiment a month early. Joe is going to be gone for almost two weeks of September, and the experience has already been very successful and enlightening. The point of the experiment was to see how plausible it was, in this modern day and age, to rely on our own two hands to provide the bulk of our food. Some of our conclusions were:

1) As long as there is zucchini seed available in the world, no one need go hungry. They may want to shoot themselves after a month or so, but at least they wouldn't have died of hunger.
2) Green beans are one of the toughest, most prolific and underrated plants in the vegetable kingdom. They take a lickin' and keep on tickin' - and we've yet to get tired of them
3) We relied fairly heavily on wheat products (flour being one of our allowed "foreign imports"), which goes to show that bulk carbohydrate/calorie crops are one of the weak links in our home food production. We could have and should have leaned more on our own potatoes, but we didn't want to eat them all up at once.

As I've mentioned before, we did cheat a few times. Not in any way that negated the legitimacy of the experiment, but mostly with seasonings and ingredients we already had on our shelf - soy sauce, curry powder, nutritional yeast, etc. One big canister of oatmeal was all it took to see us through any breakfast egg shortages. I don't have any huge huge grocery shopping sprees planned for September 1st either. In fact, the only thing currently on my mental list is rice and butter. The garden is still going strong, so we will continue to do our best to keep up with it.

Coincidentally, but as a fitting finale to our experiment, we watched the movie "Food Inc." last night at the theatre. None of the information presented in the movie was new to us, but as Joe said, "it was a nice lifestyle reaffirmation". In a time where there is virtually no connection between people and their food source and there is little that is wholesome and nutritious about either the product or the production, there's nothing quite like beating the system by sitting down to a meal that has your own love and care in every step of its existence. Maybe someday we'll be able to sit around a campfire with our kids and tell them ghost stories about the bygone days when Monsanto and ConAgra ruled the world (insert scary laugh here). Until then, I'm thinking of telling my chickens that Mr. Perdue and his band of mistreated illegal immigrants will be showing up in the middle of the night to stuff them into a truck and take them to chicken hell if they don't stay out of my mums!