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Yes Food, No Kings

Yes Food, No Kings

Hey all! Hope you're staying dry now that we're finally getting some much needed rain. Here's this week's newsletter:

Emergency Food Bucket Project

A half-page flier for the Emergency Food Bucket program. Text reads: "Wish you had an emergency food supply at home, but you're not sure where to start? We've got you covered! We're planning to order a big batch of dry bulk foods like rice and beans and pack them into mylar bags with oxygen absorbers to give them a 25+ year shelf life. If you're willing to chip in towards the cost of supplies, and help us bag things up, you can get your own 25lb emergency food bucket, and have fun with your neighbors along the way.
Feel free to download or print this out to share with friends and family

I made lots of progress on the food bucket project this week, most of it in boring deskwork form. I got a signup form up and running, I got a handout designed and printed, and I did some behind-the-scenes organizing of my notes so that it's easier for new folks to get up to speed on the project.

We've got a couple of volunteers in the field collecting buckets, but we won't know exactly when we're scheduling the community work days until we have at least 40 buckets in hand. The math works out nicely if we aim to fill 50 buckets at a time, and I figure we'll probably want about a month of lead time between announcing the dates and holding the event. So if we schedule once we hit 40, we'll have plenty of time to round up the last 10 buckets.

If you want to help collect buckets, all it takes is asking around at your local restaurants and grocery stores to see if they have any clean empty buckets, and bringing those buckets to the Artisan Market on Saturdays. 5 gallon buckets are ideal, but we'll take anything from 1 gallon on up. We want lids wherever possible, and we'll even take extra unmatched lids in case we can match them up with a lidless bucket.

So, TLDR:

  1. Sign up here to make sure you're on the list for a food bucket
  2. Bring us all the empty buckets you can find
A plastic yogurt cup that has been cut down so that it holds 1 pound of black beans

Nate and I also ran some preliminary tests on the practical side of the project. We've bagged up a lot of beans over the years, but we never paid too much attention to things like how many pounds of beans were going into each bag, or how long the process took. We've figured out that 2lbs of beans fit just about perfectly in a one quart bag, and we made this handy one pound bean scoop out of a yogurt container by weighing out a pound of beans and marking how high they filled the container.

Once we had that figured out, the two of us were able to bag up 20lbs of beans in a little under 20 minutes. If this batch turns out to be a representative sample, than bagging up enough food for 50 buckets would take about 40 person-hours and 20 impulse-sealer-hours. An impulse sealer is a specialized electrical gizmo for sealing mylar bags. Nate and I have one, and I'm hoping I can find a few local prepping geeks who already have one and would be willing to bring it to our community work day. Having at least two would really speed things up, and a team of 8 people with 4 impulse sealers might be able to get the whole thing done in 5 hours.

We still have more tests to run before we know what size bags we'll need for things like rice and powdered milk, but we're at least closer to having a finalized plan.

This Week in Acorns

We're up to nearly a gallon of finished acorn flour! We're going to try to bring some acorn-pumpkin muffins to the Artisan Market next week so that everyone can get a taste of the finished result. We've still got plenty of acorns to go, so we're going to stay open at the Artisan Market for a few extra Saturdays, through the Holiday Walk on November 21st. Come get your holiday shopping out of the way and support your local foraging weirdos 😁

We had a great time with our friends from the White Lake Climate Action Council on Wednesday evening. They held their monthly educational meeting down at the Artisan market, and we set up the acorn processing stations so they could join in. We got six or seven pounds of acorns cracked and sorted, and made two or three pounds of finished flour. We were having so much fun that we only stopped when it started getting too dark to see what we were doing! Next year I'd like to try organizing more weekday evening events down at the Artisan Market. It was nice to get to see folks who can't make our usual Saturday morning timeslot.

Huge Protest Turnout

photo credit: Pam Hassett

Our local No Kings protest went incredibly well on Saturday. I'd printed about a hundred fliers for the Emergency Food Bucket project, because I wasn't sure what sort of turnout we'd have and I didn't want to waste paper. I ran out before noon even hit 😂 At one point, I walked from one end of the protest (nearly to the Dowling St. bridge) to the other (Seen above at the Water St. entrance to Montague Foods, and did my best to count every person in the crowd. It was hard, because the crowd was 3-4 deep for most of the way, but I counted 427 people, so I'd guess the total was somewhere between 410 and 450. For a rainy day in a tiny town, it's pretty darn impressive. Big credit to KP for promoting the event and hooking us up with official protest swag. I could geek out about the history and sociology of protest swag culture for hours, but suffice it to say that my new No Kings bandana is already a treasured part of my collection.

Everything was peaceful, and even most of our usual hecklers stayed home. The vibe was joyful and community-driven. I was keeping a sharp eye out for litter, and all I was able to snag was a single know-your-rights business card. Nate was able to get several dozen signatures for the the Ranked Choice Voting petition, and we even got a couple of new volunteers.

A quick note to my conservative readers: (I know there's at least one or two of you, and I do care about you guys)

You've probably heard people say that the No Kings rallies were driven by hatred. Hatred of America, of conservatives, of people like you. In general, you've probably heard a lot about how people on the left hate you and want you to suffer.

Take a minute and ask yourself if that really makes sense.

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you've probably gotten a sense of who I am and how I spend my time. I deeply believe in a world where every person has access to food, shelter, medicine, and community. And I work my butt off at a full time, unpaid, self-assigned community organizing job because I think I can get us an inch or two closer to that world.

I'm a real-life lefty. Do I really seem like someone who's driven by hate?

I also want to address the idea that the protests were driven by funding from George Soros or other "left-wing billionaires". I'm going to start by sharing this picture of my couch:

The arm of a heavily worn brown leather couch. The leather has worn through in sever places and the stuffing is poking out

I've been doing lefty organizing of one sort or another for most of my adult life. If lefty organizing got you funded by billionaires, I would own a couch with fewer holes in it 🤣

(We got it at the thrift store back in 2021 for $40 with the holes already starting to show, and we're hoping to get a few more years out of it before we have to either learn some basic upholstery skills or find a replacement. If anybody out there knows anything about leather repair, hit me up. We aren't aiming for "undetectable repair" just something to add some structural support and stop the holes from getting bigger.)

Billionaires don't fund lefty organizing, because the main goal of lefty organizers is to eliminate the role of "billionaire" from society. We want a world where everybody gets a plate before anybody gets seconds, and where nobody can afford to buy an election or a judge. There are a few billionaires who like to think of themselves as socially liberal, but they get spooked quickly once you get into economic justice territory, and they often use their power and influence within the nonprofit sector to blackball people and organizations that they see as anti-capitalist.

(If the distinction between liberal and lefty feels confusing/surprising, that's another one of those anthropology-of-political-movements topics I can infodump about for hours 😝. I'm working on an explainer essay for the newsletter about political ideologies beyond the D/R binary, and in the meantime I'm happy to talk about it in person.)

Wrap-Up

I need to wrap this up a little abruptly, because I've been writing this newsletter very slowly for three days now and we've got family coming into town tomorrow 😂 There won't be a newsletter next week, but if you come down to the Artisan Market booth this Saturday, you might get the opportunity to meet Nate's parents! We're trying to convince them to move to Montague, so come tell them about your favorite local hiking trails and bird-watching spots.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! I wanted to go with something a little subtler this week, and I really like how these came out.

Stay dry out there! If I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here in a couple of weeks.