Your Value Added Products

SUBHEAD: You made a more lasting value, like turning berries into jam, or a piece of wood into a bowl...

By Juan Wilson on 6 February 2021 for Island Breath  -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2021/02/your-value-added-products.html)


Image above: A gourd shell preserved and decorated for use in carrying water made in Kenya, Africa, for sale online. From  (https://www.secondvoyage.ca/listing/533640266/africa-gourd-calabash-kenyan-carved-jug)

It does not mean you have hack out a canoe with an adze or stretch a birch bark canoe from scratch. In this case "value added product" merely means making some item longer lasting and of more useful function.

It can begin with something you grew from a seed, or something you found on a walk. It often means producing, processing, preserving and packing a food product. It can also mean transforming something into a completely different utility, like a corncob into a tobacco-pipe or a calabash into a drinking-gourd. it transcends beyond being a bit of food.

Certainly, transforming various forms of the plants and animals that we eat into useful and more permanent items has proven both useful and valuable to people for millennium. Sadly, most of us in the 21st century have forgotten transform and trade some bit of what is around us into anything useful. It becomes trash,waste or garbage.

Among other things, my partner Linda has learned to make and package comfrey salve, macadamia-nut butter, and jarred bee honey produced on our 1/2 acre yard. 

Other kinds of efforts include fishing or hunting and having the skills to processing, dry and preserve the results. 

Beyond just food are such activities as transforming plants and prey into woven fabrics, cured wood,  tanned leather and feather ink pens. 

There is much to re-learn and master in order to thrive in the world we are abruptly going to enter. Once the funny-money checks stop coming and the Costco shelves are empty we better have a reasonable grip on the resulting future where we the Producer and not just the Consumer.  

Of course, there are whole other categories of activities other than making a meal and maintaining a home. Expertise in entertainment and medicine come to mind as areas of skill that can keep a roof over your head and a chicken in the pot. 

If you want that kind of life you'll probably will have had to already been practicing long and hard.

In any case, your value added products will be of use to you as well as to those who want them. Trading locally produced products will be the re-newed normal... And that will be a blessing.