http://www.verdant.net/food.htm
There is no act more gratifying, more basic, more liberating, than to coax food from the Earth. Time and the rhythms of nature become the ultimate template by which to live. Do it just to know that you can do it, or do it just to live or do it to save money or for whatever reason.
You want to talk about a truly useful skill-set?
Learn how to grow some or most of your own food or teach others how to do the same.
This is not as complicated as you might think. If you have access to a deck, a roof, a patch of ground no larger than a flower bed or far more space, you can, with just a few of the resources listed on this page learn to feed yourself and others. Any reasonably intelligent person can learn as much about soil and gardening as the most experienced farmer knew a hundred years ago--putting it into practice takes time however, today is the day to begin a garden.
Visualize going out and picking dozens of different kinds of vegetables that grow with no maintenance and re-seed themselves year after year just like native plants in an uncultivated meadow. Or visualize a small plot of intensely rich soil that feeds your family with less than an hour of labor per day-far less time and energy than many Americans waste on maintaining cosmetic lawns. Imagine hundreds of pounds of different fruits coming from trees in your backyard. It can be done but you will need to learn some of the basics. That is what this page is about.