Читать книгу City Farmer - Lorraine Johnson - Страница 10
ОглавлениеEMBRACING A FOOD-GROWING ETHIC
ON THE FIRST day of spring, in 2009, a busy mom took time out of her highly scheduled work day to do something unusual. She dug up a patch of lawn and prepared the soil for a vegetable garden in the front yard. Spinach, chard, collard greens, and black kale seedlings would go into the ground where only grass had flourished. A small space of edibility was thus carved out of an ornamental landscape. And not just any ornamental landscape: this was the front yard of a nation, the White House lawn in Washington, D.C., and the mom holding the hoe was Michelle Obama.
Was it something in the water? Or maybe in the air? In the spring and summer of 2009, politicians of all stripes and at every level, in the U.S. and Canada, were planting food gardens at the symbolic seats of power—in front of city halls, governors’ mansions, legislatures, and yes, even on the lawn of the White House.
Michelle Obama had plenty of help. The National Park Service had tested the soil (and found lead levels of 93 parts per million, within the safe range) and prepared the bed. Twenty-six grade 5 schoolchildren from the nearby Bancroft Elementary School assisted with the planting. An army of media recorded every move and dissected every nuance, right down to the First Lady’s choice of footwear: Jimmy Choo boots. While the folksiness of the scene may have been diminished somewhat by the luxury attire adorning her feet, the popular verdict on the event was that this was a class act by a down-to-earth woman in touch with the people. In a few brief hours, Obama achieved what food activists and nutrition advocates could only dream of: she made the planting of a vegetable garden front page news around the world. It was a good news day indeed for urban agriculture.
As is appropriate for a place on which the spotlight of symbolism shines so brightly, the White House front yard has been the focus of many food-related campaigns over the years, some started by individuals or groups with a message to promote, others initiated by the inhabitants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue themselves. Surely the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt was hovering over the White House lawn to cheer Obama on. It was Roosevelt who last channeled her energies in the direction of food production, planting a Victory Garden at the White House during World War II. Interestingly, Roosevelt’s efforts, while embraced by the people, were somewhat less than enthusiastically supported by officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who were concerned about the effects that a populace committed to growing their own food in backyards across the nation would have on the agricultural sector and the food industry. How times have changed. When Obama planted her garden, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack had just recently announced that an organic food garden, “The People’s Garden,” would be planted at USDA headquarters, across from the Smithsonian Mall, in honor of President Lincoln. For the photo op accompanying the announcement, Vilsack chipped away at the pavement—a reversal of fortune for the parking lot, which was brought back to some semblance of paradise. As he put it to the assembled media: “Our goal is for USDA facilities worldwide to install community gardens in their local offices.”
Other presidential precedents can be found for Obama’s agricultural act. The first presidential inhabitant of the White House, John Adams, planted vegetables there. Thomas Jefferson planted fruit trees. President William Taft is said to have kept a cow at the White House from 1910 to 1913—a Holstein-Friesian gifted by a senator from Wisconsin. During Woodrow Wilson’s tenure, sheep grazed the lawn. In the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter tended an herb garden.
The symbolic power carried by food production at this most symbolic of households had been noted and promoted by many people and organizations before Obama picked up her trowel. In a slyly subversive gesture, Euell Gibbons, the father of modern food foraging whose classic 1962 book, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, is still in print, stuck his hand through the White House fence and plucked four edible “weeds” from the lawn. Clearly the standards of care have become more stringent since then, and the small army of groundskeepers who maintain the place wouldn’t let any weeds—edible or not—get past them.
It was precisely this small army that writer Michael Pollan, the author of many bestselling books, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma, suggested in 1991 be enlisted for a different kind of effort. His New York Times opinion piece “Abolish the White House Lawn” proposed that President Bush issue an executive order to rip out the grass—“an act of environmental shock therapy” that, Pollan imagined, “could conceivably set off a revolution in consciousness.” Just where that revolution could lead included four different possible destinations, usefully provided by Pollan. One option was to replace the lawn with a meadow, the mown path of which could form a spur of the Appalachian Trail. Another was to restore a portion of the White House landscape to its original condition—as wetland. (Pollan acknowledged that the swamp symbolism might be troubling to some.) A third proposal was to plant a vegetable garden—an 18-acre Victory Garden. “The White House has enough land to become self-sufficient in food—a model of Jeffersonian independence and thrift!” Pollan noted. The fourth suggestion, preferred by Pollan, was to plant an orchard with that most American of fruits, the apple. (Pollan remained silent on the subject of apple pie.)
President Bush didn’t accept Pollan’s challenge, and it took almost two decades for the White House turfgrass to be turfed—1,100 square feet of it anyway. We can only speculate about what role Roger Doiron played in the Obamas’ decision to install a White House food garden, but there’s no doubt that his persuasive efforts captured the public’s imagination. Doiron is the person behind the Maine-based network Kitchen Gardeners International’s Eat the View campaign. Promoting “high-impact food gardens in high-profile places,” his campaign was launched in February 2008 to encourage the planting of a White House Victory Garden (for the “Eaters in Chief”). More than 110,000 people signed the petition. Without a doubt, the garden has been an inspiration to hundreds of thousands more—an example of a leader pointing people in the direction of positive, personal solutions in tough times. But it’s also a rousing example of the people leading the chief.
Cynics might suggest that the White House garden is all optics without much traction, despite the flurry of interest that accompanied its planting. But the follow-through has been impressive. Michelle Obama, who said at the September 2009 opening of a Washington, D.C., farmers’ market that the White House food garden was “one of the greatest things I’ve done in my life so far,” has put food issues in the spotlight. According to the website Obama Foodorama, which tracks matters food-related, Michelle Obama is “the only First Lady to ever have a food policy agenda, a food policy team, and a Food Initiative Coordinator.” Indeed, she has been a food garden ambassador of sorts well beyond Washington. When the Obamas went to the U.K. in April 2009, the First Lady encouraged Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s wife to plant a food garden at Number 10 Downing Street. And on her second international trip, to Russia, Obama was greeted by a Moscow media obsessed with her gardening activity—a refreshing change, a substantive change, from the focus on her fashion sense. Gardens as an instrument of international diplomacy . . . now that’s an idea with growing power.
Closer to home, all across North America, what might be called politically symbolic food gardens are sprouting up at a great rate in landscapes of power and governance. In the spring of 2009 alone, Maria Shriver, wife of California governor Arnold Schwarzeneg-ger, announced plans to plant a vegetable garden at Capitol Park in Sacramento; Maryland’s First Lady, Judge Katie O’Malley, planted a food garden at the governor’s mansion in Annapolis; Portland mayor Sam Adams inaugurated one at his city hall, replacing two small lawns with vegetables, while the Portland headquarters of Multnomah County installed the Hope Garden; Baltimore mayor Shiela Dixon proclaimed that a food garden would be planted on the plaza outside city hall, and Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson converted a portion of the city hall lawn into a community garden that includes wheelchair-accessible plots. The governors of Maine, Pennsylvania, and New York all have food gardens at their official residences, according to Eat the View’s Roger Doiron.
It’s a brave politician indeed who risks the jokes and humorous digs that such gardening activity might provoke. As one wag on the Society of Environmental Journalists listserv, Mark Neuzil, put it, “Allow me to be the first to say that these [politicians] will have no shortage of manure with which to fertilize their vegetables.” And it’s a brave activist who takes food matters into his or her own hands by planting symbolic food gardens in public, political places. Matthew Behrens was arrested for the garden he and other members of the group Toronto Action for Social Change planted at Queen’s Park, on the grounds of the Ontario Legislature, in the mid-1990s. About forty people showed up with bags of topsoil, seed packets, and small transplants in front of the imposing Romanesque building and proceeded to plant zucchinis, peas, and tomatoes under the premier’s window. They also put in some marigolds, not as a concession to aesthetics but for pest control. As a seventy-five-year-old nun watered seedlings, security guards swooped in, demanding to know how long the gardeners intended to be there. Presumably the guards were not amused when one of the protesters looked at the back of the zucchini seed pack and said, “fifty-two days.” Behrens and a few others were arrested, fingerprinted, and held overnight in jail—all for adding topsoil to the heavily compacted ground and sprinkling some seeds.
The group returned to Queen’s Park the following autumn to plant winter wheat and Jerusalem artichokes. Ten people were arrested, but acquitted at trial. There was no evidence that they’d damaged public property; indeed, common sense and the evidence both suggested that the gardeners had instead improved the health of the soil. Unsuccessful in official attempts to punish this wanton act of gardening, one exasperated police sergeant was quoted in NOW, Toronto’s alternative magazine, as saying: “It’s not like we’re upset that they’re planting seeds, but there’s got to be a line. Otherwise, everyone and their uncle would be there growing things.”
Now that’s a scary thought. And also a thought blind to historical precedence. Everyone and their uncle did in fact grow things—lots of things in lots of places, including on the legislature grounds—during at least three notable periods in North American history: during World War I, the Depression, and World War II. Variously labeled as war gardens, relief gardens, and Victory Gardens, these massive efforts at domestic, home-based food production were hugely successful by any measure. Fruit and vegetable gardens sprang up everywhere there was space: in backyards and front yards, parks, utility corridors, vacant lots, school grounds, church grounds, playing fields, community centers, corporate grounds, railway corridors . . . Name a type of private or public space and it was planted. Likewise, the commitment to food production cut across all social classes, from the poorest to the richest, from the powerful to the disenfranchised. Picture this: millionaire socialite Helena Rubinstein had a penthouse Victory Garden (she called it her “Farm in the Sky”) at her Park Avenue apartment in New York City. Along with growing cauliflower, cabbage, and celery, she kept two chickens and two rabbits. At a 1943 Victory Garden party she hosted in honor of the United States Crop Corps, an organization of auxiliary farm workers recruited by the War Manpower Commission to grow food, surrealist painter Salvador Dali mingled with the assembled crowd.
The North American public enthusiastically embraced domestic food production during both world wars, proving that a staggering amount of food could be grown, particularly in cities, if people set their minds to it. During World War I, an estimated 5 million gardeners in America produced $520 million worth of food in 1918, cultivated in backyards, vacant lots, and previously untilled land; the National War Garden Commission in the U.S. (just the fact that such a commission existed speaks volumes) called them “patriotic gifts . . . to the nation.”
What is perhaps most striking—particularly for today’s audience— is the earnest urgency of the government’s language around the need for domestic food production. During WWI, the Ontario Department of Agriculture steeped its garden promotion in military metaphors intended to galvanize the populace. “Have You Enlisted in The Greater Production Battalion?” asked a full-page advertisement the department published in the April 1918 edition of The Canadian Horticulturist. Likewise, a department circular, titled “A Vegetable Garden for Every Home,” stated that “every backyard is fighting ground for the empire.” Noting that the government planned to ban the sale of canned goods (in order to preserve supplies for the war effort), the department warned that “if we don’t grow them [vegetables], we won’t have them.” Rarely does a government entity summarize a situation with such bracing clarity.
Nor did the end of the hostilities in Europe bring an end to North American food production campaigns. In 1919, the National War Garden Commission stated, “As a result of emergency created by war the home garden of America has become an institution of world-wide importance.” Characterizing home food gardens as that “which helped establish the balance of power between starvation and abundance,” the commission urged Americans to engage in “high pressure food production.”
North Americans responded to the call again during World War II. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 20 million Victory Gardens produced 40 percent of America’s fresh vegetables in 1943. In Canada, according to the federal Department of Agriculture, 115 million pounds of vegetables were grown in 209,200 urban gardens in that same year. There were, of course, thousands more wartime gardens in villages and on farms.
Such commitment to the food-growing effort didn’t just spontaneously spring forth from the collective consciousness of the North American urban populace. It arose in response to policies and promotional campaigns that worked to organize public purpose. At all levels of government, in both the U.S. and Canada, officials drove home the message—often couched in patriotic terms—that gardens were a matter of “duty.”
For example, the federal government appealed to Canadians during WWII with the following bold and baldly stated goal: “Every available bit of land that is suitable should be put into a garden. Those with experience should help their neighbours who wish to start.” The feds advised provincial governments that it was “desirable to sponsor community garden and backyard garden campaigns.” Cities across Canada took up the charge. Victoria, British Columbia, offered concessions to the public at $5 a year to grow gardens on vacant lots. Toronto, Ontario, offered the use of municipally owned lots to individuals and groups for gardening purposes, charging just 25 cents for a permit; interestingly, the fee covered police protection for the gardens. Even Toronto’s mayor got in the act, arranging a photo op with the Globe and Mail, which dutifully reported that Mayor Fred Conboy’s flower border was replaced with tomatoes and that his lawn was being transformed into a potato patch.
Citizens responded with all-out effort. The police and firemen at the Forest Hill Village station in Toronto cut four patches out of their 5,000-square-foot lawn. As the Globe described it in June 1943, they used “any odd time they [could] spare from upholding the law and keeping firefighting equipment in tip-top condition” to grow tomatoes, radishes, Scotch kale, carrots, cabbages, and more.
The Ontario Hydro Horticultural Club’s Victory Garden Committee had 425 members in Toronto alone (750 throughout the province) gardening on land donated by municipal commissions and private owners. In Toronto, they grew $26,000 (or $331,000 in 2009 dollars) worth of food in 1943. The Community Gardens Association of Toronto tended plots on major streets, cultivating $30,940 worth of vegetables. The Pine Crescent Joy Club, an east-end Toronto activity club for youngsters, turned the lawn, where once they enjoyed badminton, horseshoes, and lawn bowling, into a 35-foot-long, V-shaped Victory Garden. Seed companies did a roaring business: in response to a reporter’s inquiries, one seed seller responded, “We’re so busy selling seeds for Victory gardens that we have no time to even discuss them.”
All this food-focused labor bore results across the country. By the end of the 1943 growing season, there were approximately 52,000 Victory Gardens in the greater Vancouver area, which together produced 31,000 tons of fruits and vegetables valued at $4 million. Many Vancouverites also applied to the City Building and Zoning Secretary for permission to keep more than twelve chickens (permits weren’t required for fewer than twelve), though this pales in comparison to the livestock action in Britain, where, according to Michael Hough’s book Cities and Natural Process (first published in 1984 as City Form and Natural Process), keeping chickens, pigs, goats and bees “evolved as a major urban activity” during the war: “By 1943 there were 4,000 pig clubs comprising some 110,000 members keeping 105,000 pigs.”
The British effort no doubt provided inspiration for many North American Victory Garden campaigns. Images of British citizens growing food in craters left by bombs and using the Tower of London moat to grow cabbages were surely potent motivation for North Americans to assist in the war effort by growing food anywhere and everywhere. Even the royal family was tending vegetable gardens at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
Although it might seem inappropriate to make the connection, there are striking parallels between then and now. Global conflict threatened and continues to threaten our ability to take care of our most basic needs. For us in North America, the threat may not be as immediate, but it hovers in the background because our society is now far more global. We are more connected to, and dependent upon, other parts of the world than ever before. Today, as a result of many factors, including the recession, close to 4 million Americans and 3.4 million Canadians live in poverty and struggle to feed themselves adequately, relying on food banks, food stamps, and charitable organizations to supplement their diet. Although the particular circumstances of past world wars, the Depression, and the current climate are vastly different, there remains a common thread: millions of North Americans are in need, and one of the basic things they need is food. In this context, are the times not ripe to nurture the resilience—resilience that sprang, literally, from the soil—that helped North Americans through not-too-distant times of conflict and economic hardship?
Perhaps the “yes we can” that we need to proclaim—beyond symbolic gesture, and from the soil—is the yes we can of feeding ourselves. And it would be useful to remember, while we flex our yes we can muscles, that not too long ago, yes we did.
JUST WHEN AND why did we lose that commitment to domestic food production? And, equally important, how? What were the mechanisms at work to help create a cultural amnesia around our ability to feed ourselves? Was it a collective decision to so emphatically negate the food-producing possibilities of the city? Or was it rather a slow accretion of factors, each building upon the other, until we had forgotten the productive potential of our urban environments?
I suspect that we were willing participants in the erasure of food growing from our cities, at first anyway. World War II was over, and with it went need, replaced with want. There were products to buy and there was work to do in order to be prosperous enough to purchase all those consumer goods. Our homes became places of display, the stage on which the trappings of accumulated wealth could signal success. A profusion of food plants had no place in that display; they spoke of need, not ordered control. Much better to carpet our home landscapes with lawn—the ultimate symbol of triumph over necessity, a declarative public statement that we no longer depended on our yards to have the capacity to supply food, since the stores (and later the supermarkets) did that just fine. We had reached a heightened position of luxury in which space could be “wasted” and sustenance replaced with decoration; ornament was what we wanted. (I’ll be talking about this in more detail in chapter 5.)
There were—and still are—class elements to this attitude. The suggestion of need that accompanies food gardens was, for a long time, something to hide rather than trumpet. To be forced by economic necessity to grow some of your own food was a public announcement of straitened circumstance and reduced status. For a brief period in the 1970s, the back-to-the-land movement— ironically, a movement characterized by privilege—attempted to invert the equation, rebranding need as a moral virtue, food growing as an ethical requirement. It’s easy to imagine that those who didn’t have the financial option of “dropping out” were less than entranced by the message.
As a teenager, I saw a similar thing happen, not only as it relates to class and food gardening, but to issues around ethnicity. At my high school, most of the students’ fathers (and it was
> Converting a Lawn to a Vegetable Bed
A no-dig technique called sheet mulching is the easiest way to convert an area of lawn into a vegetable garden bed. Start preparing the bed in fall and you’ll have wonderful soil ready to plant in the spring.
> Mow the existing grass using the lowest setting on your lawn mower. No need to rake up the clippings; just leave them where they land.
> Cover the area with a layer of cardboard or newspapers (if using newspapers, add a layer approximately ten sheets thick; if using cardboard, a single layer is fine, though be sure to remove any staples and packing tape).
> Spread a 3-inch layer of soil and/or soil mixed with compost and/or well-rotted manure on top of the cardboard or newspapers.
> Top it all off with a 3-inch layer of chopped dead leaves.
> Don’t worry if, in spring, all of the cardboard and/or newspapers haven’t completely decomposed; just dig planting holes through any cardboard or newspaper that remains.
the early to mid ’70s, so it was mainly the dads) worked in blue collar jobs at the local automotive assembly plant, and most were recent immigrants from southern Italy. Food gardens were the norm in the culture of my large town—our neighborhood, anyway. (We had, by this point, moved from the small city where I’d spent my early years, where food gardens were rare.) Grape arbors covered the driveways, tomato plants flourished in backyards, and in autumn the air was redolent with the heady smells of wine and sauce production. My classmates, the children of immigrants, wanted nothing to do with it. For the most part, they looked on their parents’ food-growing and food-preserving labor with embarrassment. They viewed their parents as hopelessly attached to old-country ways and they couldn’t wait to leave such nostalgia— and nostalgia’s food gardens—behind.
Our historical complicity in the triumphant rush to create landscapes of ornament rather than those satisfying need was also accompanied by economic and structural changes that have severely diminished our capacity to feed ourselves. In the past fifty years, we have created a food system that depends on global circulation and that is vulnerable to everything from minor hiccups to major disruptions in the global market. We’re so inured to this long-distance choreography of goods that we fail to see its surreal logic. (Economist Herman Daly, in a 1993 Scientific American article, says it best: “Americans import Danish sugar cookies, and Danes import American sugar cookies. Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”) In my own city of Toronto, for example, as Debbie Field, the executive director of the nonprofit organization FoodShare, pointed out in NOW magazine in 2009, “There is more arable land in downtown Toronto than there is in Newfoundland.” And yet, of the food consumed in Toronto, approximately 50 to 60 percent is imported, mostly from Florida, California, and Mexico.
Moving from the local to the regional level, the province of Ontario imports $4 billion more in food than it exports—this in a province that boasts more than 50 percent of Canada’s Class 1 farmland. The great majority of our country’s agricultural land is not devoted to what can be directly consumed—instead, just 6 percent of Canada’s farms produce fruits and vegetables. Nor would it necessarily take a massive shift to rectify the imbalance and thus be able to meet our own needs rather than depending on global production. A Region of Waterloo Public Health study, for example, found that with a shift in production on just 10 to 12 percent of local agricultural lands in that region—replacing the foods we eat too much of (such as meat and highly processed foods) with the whole grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables we don’t eat enough of from local lands—the regional population could sustain itself from local agricultural lands. (The study assumed that people would continue to eat imports of many foods, such as bananas, that don’t grow in the region.)
Retooling the food system in favor of the local and the regional, regaining control of what we eat and where it comes from, will require structural changes to every link in the long and complex chain that takes our food from seed to mouth. But reimagining our cities as places of committed food production, as one piece in that larger project, will require, above all else, not a shift in structure but a shift in attitude. Quite simply, the biggest barrier is an idea, a pervasive notion that food production does not belong in the city. Whether we came to this idea through a class-based discomfort that equates food growing with reduced economic status, or through other cultural channels (as my high school classmates did, viewing food growing as an ethnic marker of “otherness”), makes little difference, because the idea is now thoroughly entrenched, whatever its origins.
But there is a chink in the armor that surrounds our notion of what’s proper, what’s appropriate, what kinds of activities belong in the city. And that chink, that opening, lies in how we define the idea of urban productivity. What if we expanded our current yardsticks, which measure urban productivity in terms of jobs and economic output and widgets or services exchanged, to include a different question? What if, along with providing us with a place to live and work, our cities also provided us with the essential ingredient we can’t survive without—food?
I suspect that just asking the question will force us to look deeply at the definitional divide we’ve constructed between the urban and the rural. And the philosophical heart of that divide lies, I think, in our attitude toward the land itself—the land being the literal soil on which we build our notions of what properly belongs. We’re entirely comfortable with the idea of the rural landscape as a working landscape, the soil from which our food comes, the place where we negotiate productive effort with, and from, the earth. The city, on the other hand, is a landscape in which the land is little more than backdrop or platform for activities that aren’t intrinsically connected to it and don’t grow from it. Even urban places that don’t seem to fit this argument—parks and green spaces, for example—are either appreciated for the passive recreational opportunities they offer or, at worst, merely tolerated as long as they don’t get in the way of more important efforts of city building. (One can see the latter in the approach that many cities take with regard to community gardens, where people come together to grow food. The gardens are often considered to be temporary land uses until a “better,” “more appropriate” purpose can be found for the space.)
Closely connected to this conceptual divide between urban and rural is our attitude to nature. Nature exists “out there,” untouched by humans. Cultivation is a corruption of the pristine.
Reimagining our cities as places of food production encourages us to be guided by a different ethic, an ethic of productive possibility. It asks us to work the land—growing with it and from it—and to work with natural systems. It asks us to see the city as a living landscape, its soil generative of value precisely for what it is: something alive, something from which much goodness can grow.
