Survival and Famine Foods

   When I think of the garden, my default image is of a bountiful landscape, well-organized and fruitful, inviting to the eye and nourishing to the body. In my mind's eye, all is as it should be, in balance, and with allowances for changing needs and appetites.
   At its best, my garden can sometimes resemble this, until things get out of hand towards the end of summer. But all gardeners must take heed and due care, to build plans for contingencies into their gardening scenario- and into their life plan as well. What happens in times of drought, insect or rodent depredation? What happens in times of famine?
   I don't like that word, famine. It's something I have never lived, makes me think of people chewing shoe leather and belts, eating roasted rat and glad to get it.
   But Purdue University has paid due diligence to the concept.Their website 'Famine Foods',
 http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/FamineFoods/ff_home.html , is an extremely comprehensive, worldwide database of plants which have been used in time of famine.  The notes on the inventory mention 1200 plant species.
   Wikipedia states;
'...A famine food or poverty food is any inexpensive or readily-available foodstuff used to nourish people in times of extreme poverty or starvation , as during a war or famine. Quite often, the food is thereafter strongly associated with the hardship under which it was eaten, and is therefore socially downplayed or rejected as a food source in times of relative plenty.'
'...Foods associated with famine need not be nutritionally deficient, or unsavoury. Having been driven to consume them in large amounts and for long periods of time, however, people often remain averse to them long after the immediate need to eat them has subsided. That remains the case even if such foodstuffs might otherwise constitute a healthy part of a more comprehensive diet.'

  This is a subject that I take very seriously, but at the same time I have to laugh a bit, because of my personal experience with Jerusalem artichokes.
   Helianthus tuberosus (Jerusalem artichokes, or sunchokes) are, ironically, not on the famine foods list- but they should be. They have a reputation for surviving adverse soil conditions, they are a perennial, and you can eat the tubers in the fall, at around the time of the first frost. Once dug and exposed to cold (in the ground or later), their taste becomes quite sweet, and when simmered and peeled, they taste like artichoke hearts (hence the name).
I first bought Jerusalem artichokes at Perennial Pleasures Nursery in East Hardwick, Vermont. Their catalog makes due mention of the tendency to establish and spread, suggesting that the artichoke bed be set off with boards to confine the spreading tendency.
   Well, OK- I didn't get around to the boards. And spread they have, into the grapes, into the asparagus, into the corn, and they show a tendency when tilled to hitch a ride on the tiller blades, into new territory. My husband is very protective of his asparagus, and not pleased by the incursion. He mutters 'Famine foods' every so often when he is in the garden. But in fact they are there, and if there were the need , anyone with the wit (who happened to be starving at the right time of year) would have plenty to eat.
   They also have lovely small sunflower heads which are fragrant, attractive to bees, bloom at late summer, and dry well. That corner of the garden is a lovely blaze at about the time of ripening tomatoes.

References
http://plants.usda.gov/java/
http://pfaf.org/user/default.aspx
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/
http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/faminefoods/ff_home.html