How to Eat Acorns
It’s really just a tree cycle, and the native Californians used to know these cycles intimately, they knew the cycles within cycles, within cycles and hundred year, you know, even more bigger cycles that, you know, our imaginations can hardly even fathom. And yet despite all the people I’ve talk to in this area and all the research I’ve done in the internet, I had to learn for myself about their cycles, and so far I’ve only seen two cycles. In 2004 they produced, 2005, 2006, there were none, like virtually none and in 2007 they’re all producing again, and producing just a big as crop they did in 2004. So, in my experienced, they seem to be in a three year cycle, but, you know, only time will tell or possible I’ll meet someone who has a more intimate knowledge of this. So let’s go to the open space here and let’s pick some acorns. This here is a pretty old Valley oak, beautiful, beautiful tree, and they call it masting where it makes its bumper crop of these giant acorns, some of the biggest acorns in the world. And you can see some of them are still on the trees, some are still green, but then, lots and lots of them have already dropped. And you look in the ground, I mean, it’s just covered with them, I mean just do a little scan of the ground here and you can just see, there’s just tons and tons and tons of acorns everywhere you look. In the trails, you can hardly walk coz you’re stepping on them, they’re falling in parking lots, on people’s roofs, on their decks, when the wind blows they even fall and hit you in the head and you don’t really want to be hit in the head by one of these poppies. Just covered and covered with them, and again where in an area where there are tons of this valley oak trees. This big valley oak acorns are everywhere. So just look through the landscape and you can really see them, and you can look up on the hills in the distance and that’s more like an oak savanna and there’s just valley oak, old valley oak after old valley oak after old valley oak, which I can only imagine are just covered with this bumper crop of acorns. So in places where there’s, the ground is not, you know, open like this, there’s a lot more undergrowth, what not, and it’s harder to find acorns. You can put like a tarp down underneath them and you can shake the branch, just, you know, just give it a good shake or you can climb the tree and shake it, coz there’s a lot still on the tree and if they’re brown, you know, you can, they come right off, the wind, if the wind would come through really strong, it would just pull that, barely pulling it, it comes right off. So, this, this is about the easiest foraging job I’ve ever done, so I’m picking them up, I’m just trying to make sure they have no holes or mold on them or anything and I just kind of squeeze them to, to make sure they’re nice and firm, but this is like, I mean, look at this, I mean, I can gather like a handful, which is enough for like, you know, an acorn tortilla that’s very nourishing and satisfying, and I can just like pick this up in like a matter of seconds. I mean, look at that already, look at all that food that’s in there. And you put in the basket and we’ve been gathering here for maybe 10 minutes and just telling stories and having great conversation and look at that, all that food. And like I said there’s thousands of trees right now, and this area alone producing. I really would love to know how much, how many people these acorns could feed and for how long. To most people, like I said, aren’t even aware that they have cycles and that they’re producing other than the fact that their driveways are all messed up because of them. And so, you know, this is not really being accounted for as a sustainable food source which it is. And of course, these acorns are way more nutritious than wheat or corn or barley or rice, there’s no real comparison as far as nutrition, acorns are far, far superior and, you know, they’re growing in rich soil, they probably have lots of trace minerals and there are studies that you can find that lay out the nutritional information. Acorns have more in common with corn and wheat, in that, they’re a lot more starchy than they would a nut, let’s say a walnut or an almond, which is more protein and more fat. Although this do contain protein and fat, this is more like a grain, and this is what sustain people in this area for thousands of years. If you go back far enough, all of our people’s, at one point, for the most part ate acorns as a staple diet. It wasn’t until the agriculturalist, you know, conquered them and then chopped down their oak forest and force them to grown grain and adapt that agricultural way of life that we stop eating acorns. And having picked and eaten acorn and also having grown corn and wheat, I can imagine for a second why agriculturalist thought that that was a better method of getting food. You know, you say, oh, it’s so much work, so much work to make acorns into food, and it’s really hardly any work at all compared to taking the wheat plant or the corn plant and then processing that to make your bread. And it’s just, it’s phenomenal that there’s that type of understanding in our culture that acorns are a lot of work. I’m sure that not everybody has time to go and pick acorns and shell them and then grind them and then do the really easy process of leeching and cooking them, just as the same way that most people don’t have the time to eat or even cook dinner at all. They start to buy the fastfood drive thru or they eat a TV dinner, or they eat chips and cheese, you know, we work so hard during the week, we work this forty hour weeks, we don’t have time, like I said, to make this simplest of dishes. You know, much less make, you know, acorn something from scratch. But, you see, the way people have lived in almost all cultures throughout the world and throughout human history, picking these acorns off the ground was all the work they had to do. And most cultures spent two to four hours a day getting what they needed to live, and they live a very comfortable, rich life. Now, we slave forty hours a week just to have the right to like, you know, buy the food. So instead of just, you know, coming to pick it, you know, we have to work all this time to buy food. Of course most of our money doesn’t go to food, anyway goes to rent and other things. So we have to just sort of, you know, just have this slavish work life just to have the right to live, when in fact, it’s our biological heritage to just sit under this beautiful oak trees and things like this and take care of them and then, be able to just eat from them and live off the wonderful amazing abundance that they provide. And it’s so satisfying to do this, just being here is fun and having great conversation and telling stories, like I was saying, and when you shell them, that’s another great communal activity to do and when you eat them you just feel a lot more nourish. I mean we would, as a community, we would come here and we would make sure that we did this harvest justice and we’d store this in granaries so that we all could live off this abundance for as long as we possibly could before they produce again. But that’s not the way it is, at least not yet. So right now I’m finally, because I’m getting picky because I only want the bigger ones, I’m gonna actually kinda scoot over a little bit now so that I can reach this whole other abundance, just like a couple of feet away from me. So this area here has been tilled for fire break and it makes it easier to see the acorns and then pick them up. The native Californians used to burn under them and it created this very park like environment where just, you know, Europeans were stunned by California’s beauty that there was this, this sort of, you know, grasslands underneath these big oaks, so that the native Californians used to burn every year underneath the oaks and they would just sort of scorch the grass and it wouldn’t hurt the oaks at all, it would jus burn the grass underneath them. The ashes would fertilize the soil. The real point is we need to pay attention to them and pay attention to the landscape and the non-human natural world around us. And one of my favorite ways of course is food, picking food and eating it. I can’t think about a better way, a more intimate way to connect with the natural world and become aware of the cycles than that, because, after all, you know, we’re humans, and we need to eat food and our food comes from plants and animals that eat plants. As we have millions of years of evolution, you know, we’re humans, we’re plant, we’re food eaters and these trees produce food and that’s what they’ve been use for a long time. And I think it’s just one of the best way we could possibly connect and one of the most fun to.