Dave Odegard

If you haven’t been buried in a cave at the bottom of the ocean, you’re probably aware that there’s been a bit of “zombie-craze” for the past decade or so.   You can’t turn on a TV, go to bookstore or comic book shop, or even check out the movie theater without seeing some depiction of the end of the world due to the dead rising and eating the living.

And in response to such a dark and horrifying story archetype making the rounds of the cultural consciousness, a light-hearted kind of reasoning to the inevitable impending zombie apocalypse or “zombie-pocalypse” has popped up.  It’s a sort of joke among people my age, particularly my friends, that you’d better be prepared for when the zombies come.

Need a reason to hit the gym and work out? You’re training to out run the monsters.

Like to go camping?  Well, you’re just prepping for when you have to live off the land.

Want to figure out how to fix your car?  Makes sense in a world without mechanics.

And lately, I’ve been learning how to make a lot of things on my own and thinking about what it means for something to be “homemade.”

Recently, I’ve gotten into home brewing beer and baking my own bread. I like to say that I’ll be super popular after the zombie apocalypse. But I’ve found that there’s something about making these things from scratch.   It may not always taste better than the store-bought version, but it feels more fulfilling to eat something that’s homemade.

Yet, I wonder if what I’m making is really “homemade.”  To make the beer I brew, I buy grains, hops, and yeast from a store that specializes in brewing materials –beside that, I have no clue on where to get those things.  And the bread?  I don’t know how to get flour besides picking it up at the grocery store.

So if there really is an end of the world, could I really make these things I’ve taught myself to make?  I’m not sure, but I think I could figure it out.   But it got me thinking – is anything really homemade or made from scratch anymore?  Have we become so far removed from the necessity of having to make things completely by hand that we’ve forgotten how to do any of it?

For example: I have friends who are into knitting clothes, but I’m positive they wouldn’t the slightest clue on how to make their own yard.

And that’s the rub.   No matter what you can make, if you break its ingredients down far enough you get to a point you can’t cross.  It’s one of the benefits (and disadvantages) of living in the 21st century – 99.9% of us never have to make our own flour, but that means we also don’t know how.

But I’ll tell you one thing: it makes me want to learn how to make my own flour.