Surprise! (The surprise was more clams.)

They were a new kind that is good raw or cooked.

Did you know that I'm not paying for these dozens of clams I'm eating?

Actually I am getting paid to eat these clams.

That is what I am trying to say about get hooked up.

In a economic downturn such as this, it's hard to beat getting paid to eat.

Offing the grid

Michael Pollan was on the TV last weekend. I am glad he will not be Agriculture Tsar because he can't differentiate between lie and lay and I know Our Leader can't stomach too many grammatical idiots in his administration. Despite the intellectual inadequacies and unfortunate resemblence to Hank Paulsen that render him unfit to serve this great nation, however, the Pollanator is right about one thing, and that's Victory Gardens. We spent about.... mmmmm... $25 putting in a couple of little gardens. We now have more bok choy and so on than we can jam down. The neighbor at the community garden has more you-name-it than he can eat, so we trade around. We spend maybe... an hour a week? max? messing with these little gardens. In exchange we have food to throw away. We're not using any inputs, we're just pulling weeds and eating whatever manages to grow without fertilizer. We're not doing anything to prevent freeze damage, other than maybe throwing a sheet over the plants. Totally inefficient. No concept of economies of scale. And here we have more food than we can eat for next to no money and less labor than it takes to drive to Walmart, park, and schlep-ass around the store dodging the gargantuae on their little rascals. Life is sweet! (That's a good movie. You should watch that movie.)

Get hooked up! Part two.

Sure, it's great to be an American these days what with all the modern conveniences and all. But! What about...

after the lights go out?

Neener neener, neener neener, Bwaaaaaaaaaaaammp! Bwaaaaaaaaaaaammp! ... Plink plink plinka plink plong!

^
(Hello, duh? It's the theme from The Twilight Zone? Like, of course? You poor kids. It's got to feel bad when you find out you postdate your own country's cultural apex.)

What will you do for food after all the grocery stores go dark and the shelves are picked bare of food but for a couple of half-eaten granola bars being guarded by the wall-eyed homeless dude who, in somehow getting his hands on a howlitzer, has proven he has the right skillset for today's jobmarket after all?

How will you get those granola bars from that cranky ol' Tommy Crazy Eyes?

Well, take heart, loyal reader! Because you don't have to. You don't eat granola bars because you've been following the advice of this blog for so long that you've forgotten they--and the grocery store istelf--even exist. You'll be happily unaware that the grocery store has gone dark in the first place. You'll be going about your eating life just as you did before, though with fewer forays into the wild and wonderful side alleys of the WWW for Valomilks and the like, since portals to the WWW will long since have disappeared from the lives of regular people.

But enough dystopian scene setting! To the topic!

Right, okay, so the first way to get hooked up was... oh yeah, oyster tasting. Well guess what! next week we're trying raw clams. Evidently people eat them! Clams are even more mineral rich than oysters, or so I've read. So that's even more nutrition I don't have to pay for. And I have a few more up my sleeve to tell you about in the months ahead. Don't worry! We're all going to be fine.

Get hooked up.

I was going to talk about free food today, but I'd rather talk about the larger issue of which free food is only a part, and that's getting hooked up locally.

This is sortof an amorphous concept, but it's way key. Here's one aspect of it: I get free shrimp and free oysters and occasionally free all sorts of other sea creatures because I signed on to be an oyster taster over to the aquatic foods lab.

Every few months they'll do another experiment where they, for instance, compare oysters from all over the continent to determine whether there are any qualities specific to oysters from a certain area.

Or the industry will come up with some revolutionary (and always revolting) method of processing oysters for shipping or storing and we oyster tasters will be required to eat the proceeds and report the patently obvious: "freezing oysters and then hurling them at a wall to bust them out of their shells and then sweeping up them and a few bits of their pulverized shells and throwing the whole mess in a big ol' plastic bucket, refreezing it, and trucking it halfway across the country may save you $0.03 per oyster in shelling/shipping costs, but it loses you money in the long run because unless they're a stressed out middlemanagement demon tasked with stocking the buffet table for a cocktail party in the ninth circle of hell, there is no one on earth or below who will buy that nasty 'product.'"

By declaring myself willing to eat swill occasionally, I make myself eligible for the occasional supertreat. For instance, sometimes the oysters are good. If you like oysters, good oysters is a reason to eat bad oysters, and that's really saying something, because there is nothing worse than a bad oyster. Nothing. I don't mean "bad" as in "spoiled"--a spoiled oyster isn't the worst thing in the world; eating it would bring on merciful death. I mean bad as in gravely mistreated. But good oysters make it worth it.

Sometimes? They have extras? And they send us home with bagsful. Bags full of live, fresh, salty, happy, icey, bivalved darlings. Two, three, four dozen.

It is worth it.

So that is one of a few ways I'm hooked up. Get hooked up. Find out what's around locally. Nose around. Take all offers.