Читать книгу City Farmer - Lorraine Johnson - Страница 9
ОглавлениеSOWING THE CITY, REAPING THE BENEFITS
AS A YOUNG child growing up in the small southwestern Ontario city of Galt, I wanted to hide my family’s vegetable garden, pretend it didn’t exist, erase it from the neighborhood. I felt embarrassed by our rows of beans, peas, tomatoes, and strawberries. They were like a banner announcing our less-than-robust financial circumstances to the community. Everyone else seemed to be straining for the upmarket trappings of consumer culture— buying glamorous cars like convertibles while we made do with a Rambler station wagon; eating exotic fare like avocadoes while we had pigs’ tails for dinner. And growing food was a decidedly down-market thing to do. Our garden signaled need, just one more item in the long list of evidence that my family did not fit in. It didn’t help that, one year, during a period of compost experimentation, my father buried food waste directly in the soil between the rows. After a particularly heavy rain, egg shells started poking up through the dirt. Yet another advertisement for our oddness.
I remember the precise moment when my feelings about the garden began to change from embarrassment to engagement. It was after a summer dinner, when I was six. For dessert we’d had watermelon and I’d hoarded the seeds. After dinner, I sprang up from the table with the stash in my hand and a vision in my head: I was going to plant those pips. I was going to have my own little garden, tucked under the shrubs by the side of the house.
I don’t know how long it took for me to realize that nothing was going to come of my plantation, that shade equals watermelon failure, that late summer is not the time to seed an annual crop in southern Ontario. But I can still summon the yearning stretch of my dreamy plan, the way it fired me up with hope for a future that included a small corner of my own tending.
I AM GLAD that I learned early on about the rhythms of food production and connection with the soil. I see so much of my adult self nascent in my childhood excitement and yearning for seasonal progression. Shelling fresh peas was an event I longed for. Hulling strawberries was a labor that made me happy. Cutting beans for the pot felt good. And eating my father’s homegrown tomatoes was best of all: summer meals involved jostling with my younger sisters to be first in line for the big spoonful of seeds my father separated out from the slices. He salted the slices just right, and we couldn’t wait to eat the seedy slurry that he found hard to digest.
I wonder what it’s like to grow up without growing things, without connecting your food to a particular time and place and to your own labor. Perhaps because my family had that tradition, motivated by frugality, I carried it with me into adulthood through a series of apartments and houses. However unlikely the circumstances, I always managed to make room where I lived for even just a few pots of edible plants. Roommates cast dubious glances at the buckets of basil sunning on the roof and were otherwise engaged when it came time for the dangerous and daily acrobatics of rooftop watering. But they lined up when it came time for pesto suppers. I also lugged deep plastic trays (okay, I confess, they were unused cat litter trays) to balcony corners and planted them with radishes. One year, I “borrowed” the backyard of a friend’s rented house and carried shovels and hoes across town on my bike, all in an effort to turn a neglected lawn into a food garden. Another year, I accepted an offer to babysit a friend’s allotment garden. Squatting her plot, I invented a whole new way to grow tomatoes: letting the weeds grow high so they served as no-fuss tomato stakes. Later still, when I owned my own bit of city land and had filled that up with lettuce and bean plants, I continued to colonize any empty backyard space that friends and family would allow me, even going so far as to plant watermelons and blackberry canes 40 miles away, in another city.
In short, I’ve always been on the lookout for productive space— anywhere, anybody’s—to enlist in the adventure of growing at least some of my food. (Luckily, most of my adventures have turned out better than my watermelon plantation did.)
HOWEVER SMALL MY tentative gestures might have been, they participate in a much larger story—a story that is chipping away at convention and inverting notions we’ve held dear for decades. Food comes from farms, we’re told, farms that exist in the countryside, separated from cities not just by physical distance but by an attitudinal divide that is much harder to breach. The countryside is “clean” and pure, close to nature. Cities are “dirty,” far from nature, essentially nature corrupted. Urban soils and air are contaminated; vandals lurk around every corner . . . And even if we could overcome these dangers, there’s simply not enough room in North American cities to “waste” space doing something that properly belongs in the country. So the old story goes, anyway.
But when we dig in the dirt and cultivate food, what we’re also doing—beyond growing the basil—is staking out territory for an expanded notion of what our cities might be. We’re making room for productivity in a place defined for too long as incapable of meeting, even partially, one of our most basic needs.
Maybe this explains, to some degree at least, the giddy high that comes from unearthing an urban potato. Yes, it’s most definitely just a potato, and that is reason enough for deep satisfaction (for those of us who love the lowly spud). But it’s also a possibility— of a different way of living in cities.
Given the heightened interest in urban food production, one could be forgiven for thinking that to live a virtuous life now requires that we garden 24/7. If we’re not hoeing, seeding, weeding, watering, harvesting, canning, and otherwise preserving the mountains of food necessary to sustain us through a year of eating, are we not shirking duty? No, we’re living our lives and making choices that are dictated by a whole host of complex circumstances. So, let’s dispense with the should’s and imagine, instead, the could’s. Could I plant a few pots of cucumbers, herbs, and tomatoes on my balcony? Could I do with a bit less lawn and a few more veggies? Could I plant an edible fruit tree on the boulevard? Could I grow beans up my apartment building’s wall? In our answers to these questions, some of us might find a small sliver of do-ability. Others might find an obsessional pursuit that keeps us busy for the whole growing season. There’s a lot of room in between.
The benefits accrue, whatever the scale. First and foremost, of course, is flavor. Ask any gardener why they’re growing their own veggies and chances are that superior taste will be at or near the top of their list. Ask an industrial agronomist, on the other hand, why they’ve chosen a particular variety of tomato, for example, to grow by the acre-ful, and flavor rarely rates a mention. Thomas Pawlick tried this experiment. In his book The End of Food, he recounts his conversations with tomato-breeding experts and industry spokespeople, discussions in which he asked them what characteristics were most important in the top fifteen tomato varieties in their markets. The experts mentioned yield, size, firmness, resistance to disease, heat tolerance, uniformity of shape, and uniformity in time of ripening. Pawlick gave them a chance to add the obvious, but no one bit. As he writes, “No one mentioned the two characteristics that any ordinary consumer would likely put at the top of his or her list, namely: flavor and nutritional content. They were simply not there, not important, not even worth mentioning.”
Industrial agriculture cares not one bit for our taste buds. And it would hardly matter if flavor were a top priority of the agricultural giants, because every aspect of the industrial food system works against it. From harvesting machines that demand uniform unripeness to storage methods that do ripening work best left to the sun, to the final indignity of time spent in transport trucks, flavor is diminished every step of the way.
Try this: bite into a ripe tomato just picked from the vine. Let the juice run . . . Freshness—taste’s twin—is what we’re guaranteed when we eat food straight from the plant. Even if it’s not the best green pepper ever (though how often have you heard a gardener say that what they’ve grown is not delicious?), it is certainly the freshest ever. There are no other food-chain shortcuts we can take (even buying directly from farms or shopping at farmers’ markets, for example, valuable as those are) that reduce the harvest-to-dinner distance, in time, to mere minutes. (Some gardeners take this to extremes. I have a friend who will only eat corn that is picked just as the pot on the stove hits the boil.)
As to what effect industrial growing methods have on nutrition, Thomas Pawlick also presents some disturbing data based on his investigations into the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) “food tables,” which measure the nutritional content of various foods. Comparing recent measures of nutritional value with figures from roughly fifty years ago, Pawlick itemizes one staggering loss of nutritional goodness after another: 30.7 percent less vitamin A in today’s fresh tomatoes compared with those of 1963; a 57 percent decrease in vitamin C in potatoes; 45 percent less vitamin C in broccoli. His conclusion: “for the past 50 years the nutrients have been leaching out of nearly everything we eat . . .”
If homegrown food provides us with an instant wake-up call in flavor and freshness, and takes us outside of an industrial system that is depleting our food’s nutritional value, it likewise increases our chances of conscious consumption. There are deeply political dimensions to this issue, and I’ll turn to those later, but the awareness I’m referring to here is of a much more personal nature. It seems to me that one of the most meaningful gifts we receive from the food we grow ourselves is the gift of story. What we consume with each bite are the narratives embedded in the fruits of our labor. These stories emerge from the struggles (the squirrels or the mysterious fungus or the munching insect or whatever); the successes (the tricks to increase yield, the weeding that works); the surprises (the plant that survives neglect, the eggplant flowers that are as beautiful as any prized ornamental), and the triumphs (the cabbages bigger than the biggest of human heads). The food we grow ourselves is invested with dozens of daily dramas that give it a flavor and a meaning more enriching than anything we can buy. Our gardens are narrative forms of self expression that reveal our tastes and desires, our particular histories, who we are and how we want to create a place for ourselves in the world.
Of course, these stories, while deeply personal, are also the same stories that people have been telling for millennia. Try saying the words to reap and to sow with a straight face, and not at church. It’s hard, isn’t it? But these ancient words, and these ancient acts, connect our stories across time. That may sound like a heavy historical weight for a little plot of salad greens to carry, but as you pick the slugs off the lettuce and later tell the story of the slippery guck they left on your fingers, you can be sure that the trail oozes back a very long time.
It was a melon that brought this historical and narrative dimension home, most powerfully, for me. A dear friend is involved with the Cantaloupe Garden, a collective garden in Montreal. I’d always found the name charming and evocative, but didn’t give it much thought until I found out that growing in the Cantaloupe Garden is a particular melon variety called the Montreal Melon that dates back to the French settlers of the seventeenth century. This is truly a melon with a capital-H History, and stories galore. Grown on the island of Montreal since the late 1600s, this enormous melon—it can reach 20 pounds or more—was once so popular (the melon’s green flesh carries a hint of nutmeg) that by the late 1800s it was one of the three main exports from the city. According to a publication on the melon’s history (yes, this fruit rates a booklet), compiled by Lee Taylor and Adrian Gould, a package of the fruit was sent overseas to King Edward VII; thereafter, melons shipped to hotels in Boston, Chicago, and New York were stamped with the royal name and commanded top dollar. Taylor and Gould characterize this time as a period of “Montreal melon madness,” a mania fed by fashion and flavor.
The fruit’s fortunes started to change in the 1920s, when melons that were easier to grow and transport began to dominate the market. The city’s melon farms were plowed under for suburban homes, and the Montreal Melon virtually disappeared in just a few decades. But not completely. In the mid-1990s Montreal writer Mark Abley tracked down a packet of seeds from an Iowa seed bank and passed some along to a local grower, Ken Taylor of Windmill Point Farm. The melon was suddenly back in cultivation and it has since caught on. Festivals have celebrated this unusually spicy musk melon; growers have held competitions to try to tip the scales with giants. And everyone who plants it is growing its story, cultivating its history.
STORIES ARE A very particular kind of knowledge—information multiplied and transformed through the creative and generative urge to share—but homegrown food also offers us a much more basic, and reassuring, form of knowledge. Quite simply, when we’re the ones doing the planting and the growing, we know exactly where our food comes from. It is a rare commercial transaction where we can say this with much confidence. But for the food we produce ourselves, there’s little doubt. In the language of agricultural production, we control the inputs.
To a degree, anyway. While we control what we add to the soil, we don’t necessarily know what’s already there. Many people who are thinking about growing food in cities raise this issue as a major concern. They worry that urban soils are, by definition, contaminated. It’s prudent to wonder. But I’d argue that it’s equally important to ask different questions as well. Do we know what’s in the agricultural soils where the great majority of our food comes from—in China and Latin America, for example? Do we know what chemicals are regularly used to produce the fruits and vegetables grown globally and shipped to North America? Are any of these chemicals banned here but used elsewhere, and do any of these chemicals remain in the imported food we eat? According to the Progressive Policy Institute’s 2007 report Spoiled: Keeping Tainted Food Off America’s Tables, 98.7 percent of imported food is never inspected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the USDA. What are the health and environmental standards related to the use of sewage sludge on agricultural lands? Ask these questions and the soil in our cities might start to seem like something we can control, something a little less worrisome.
But definitely not altogether worry free. Each of us will find our own comfort level, but for anyone with even a smidgen of doubt about the health of their soil, there are some straightforward steps to take. In my first home, for example, I was worried about growing food beside the fence, which had the suspicious green glow of pressure-treated wood. (This was in the late 1980s, before chromated copper arsenate was a restricted-use product.) I certainly didn’t want to eat any vegetables contaminated by the stuff. So I sent soil samples to the provincial environment ministry. The report came back that yes, there were elevated levels of heavy metals but still within consumption guidelines. I guess my comfort level has a slightly paranoid edge to it—I ditched the root vegetables and stuck with fruiting plants such as tomatoes, which absorb less in the way of metals from the soil. At my current home, however, in an area of Toronto that has no history of industrial activity, I didn’t bother to do a soil test. Most of my vegetables are in pots, anyway. But at the community garden where I grow vegetables directly in the ground, we did have soil tests done. The site had formerly been a fire station, a lumber yard, and who knows what else. Again, the results weren’t worrying, but we replaced the soil and built up the soil level in the beds just to be entirely safe.
Worrying about the health of our urban soils serves an obvious, useful purpose in that it often leads us to soil testing—a good
> City Soil Safety
Just how safe are urban soils for the growing of food? Short of having your soil tested, it’s impossible to know for sure what contaminants might be present.
But there are risk factors you can take into account: exterior paints (on buildings and fences) that may have been applied before lead in paints was regulated; nearby industries or autobody shops that may be releasing or leaking toxic substances; historical industrial uses of your land; heavily traveled roads and highways in close proximity that may have left a legacy of elevated lead levels in soil from the era of leaded gasoline.
If any of these risk factors are present, it would be prudent to have your soil tested. In the U.S., contact the local agricultural extension agent or your city’s public health or environment unit. In Canada, contact your province’s environment ministry or your city’s public health or environment office. If a soil test reveals elevated lead levels, consider taking the following steps to reduce your risk:
> Use raised beds or containers filled with clean topsoil, and place a semi-permeable barrier, such as landscape cloth (available at nurseries or hardware stores), between the existing soil and the newly added soil.
> Maintain alkaline soil conditions (a pH of 7 or higher) through additions of lime, and add compost high in phosphate, which has been shown to reduce the mobility of lead in the soil, making it less likely to be absorbed by plants.
> Avoid inhaling dust or soil particles when gardening, and (it hardly needs saying) wear gloves and wash your hands after digging in the dirt.
> Wash all fruits and vegetables (some people recommend using detergent) before you eat them. This will remove the lead risk from any soil or dust adhering to the plant.
> If you’re still worried, only grow fruiting crops, such as tomatoes, beans, peas, and squash, which absorb much less lead than root crops. (Leafy vegetables absorb more lead than fruiting crops but less than root crops.)
> Plant vegetables and fruits away from the foundations of buildings and painted surfaces.
> Finally, if you’re an adventurous soul with time on your hands and a yen for home science experiments, a backyard phytoremediation project might be worth looking into. Phytoremediation involves the use of plants to accumulate contaminants and “clean” the soil; obviously, the plants are destroyed rather than eaten. Samantha Langley-Turnbaugh of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Southern Maine did tests using spinach, sunflowers, and Indian mustard as phytoaccumulators for lead. She found that these plants, grown in soil with a pH of 5–6.5 (that is, moderately acidic) and with low organic matter, removed at least 100 ppm of lead from the soil after one growing season. Interestingly, a community garden in Portland, on land owned by the Oregon Sustainable Agriculture Land Trust (osalt), is in the early stages of experimenting with a low-tech, low-cost method of remediating lead-contaminated soil. Using plants to take up lead, then composting the plants and spreading the compost throughout the site, the researchers are studying whether it is possible to disperse the existing lead evenly and lower the readings to safe levels on the whole site. “The traditional way to deal with lead contamination is to dig it up and put it somewhere else. That’s not sustainable—it just makes it someone else’s problem,” explains Will Newman ii of osalt. “We’re experimenting with spreading it evenly into a larger area, to see if we can reduce the total lead burden on site to a low enough level to grow food.” first step if we plan to eat what comes out of the ground. But it’s valuable in another way, too. That worry encourages us to pose questions and delve into the state of our urban environment. And I suspect that the more we learn, the more surprised, and possibly outraged, we’ll be. Who is dumping what where, with legal sanction? Do our laws require disclosure? Is that information available to the public? Do we really know, or is there any meaningful way to find out, what surrounds us in the air, lurks in the ground, swirls in our water? How would our cities change if we all started asking these questions? For the better, no doubt.
I know, I know, we just want to grow some good tomatoes, not necessarily change the world! But that’s the wonderfully insidious thing about food gardening. It creeps in and takes us places we didn’t expect to go. Consider garbage, for instance. You will know that you are garden-obsessed when you begin to scout your neighborhood on garbage day looking for bags of dead leaves. (You can never have too many leaves for mulching purposes, leaves for leaf-mold production, leaves for compost-making.) From there, it’s not too much of a conceptual leap to wonder: why is my city wasting this precious resource, sending leaves to the dump? Or, for those of us lucky enough to live in a city that already composts organic waste, to ask the questions: is the compost my city produces of high-enough quality to use on my food garden, and if not, why not, and does the city make this compost readily available to any gardener who wants some?
In sometimes subtle, sometimes declarative ways, the food garden takes us to politics. We may not acknowledge it as such (I am just growing tomatoes!), and there’s no imperative in the equation that says we must consider it in such terms, but politics hovers around the edges of urban food production.
And sometimes front and center. Ten years ago, one rarely heard the term “food miles.” Now, the large U.K. supermarket chain Tesco labels some of its products with carbon footprint figures, showing how many grams of carbon were emitted as a result of growing, manufacturing, transporting, and storing the product. In a relatively short time, we have begun to add greenhouse gas emissions to the mental ledger on which we do the accounting for our decisions. The focus of our guilt seems to shift regularly. One year it’s SUVs people apologize for (if they own one) or deplore (if they don’t). Another year it’s airplane travel in the shame spotlight, relegated to the status of carbon indulgence the planet can no longer afford.
While a guilty conscience is a great motivator, and awareness of the impact of our choices is always good, I wonder if we’re not in danger of missing the bigger picture when we focus exclusively on the personal. By all means consider whether or not each and every car trip is necessary, but walking or biking or taking the bus to the store won’t change the fact that the items for sale at that store got there through a system based on globalization, centralization, and concentration. As writer and food-policy expert Wayne Roberts has pointed out, so much of the current focus on “buy local” downloads the responsibility (and the guilt) to the consumer, yet the system itself—a system of government and corporate policies—does little to support, and meaningfully supply, consumer desire for the local.
Nowhere are the carbon costs of such a system more clustered and readily locatable than at the food store. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), agriculture, along with deforestation and land-use changes related to agriculture, generates, globally, one-third of the total man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, including one-half of methane emissions and three-quarters of nitrous oxide emissions. That’s a lot of belching cows and a lot of nitrogen fertilizers. Indeed, the UN calculates that animal farming alone accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions (almost one-fifth) than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined.
Well, we gotta eat. But we don’t need to eat a globalized, centralized, and corporately concentrated menu. And if we didn’t, the food-miles portion of the greenhouse-gas-emissions pie, as it relates to agriculture, would be a significantly smaller slice. There are researchers who spend their days calculating such things (Just as there are researchers who spend their days complicating the calculations with “what if’s,” “but’s,” and “have you thought of that’s”). Given that the distance food travels has been steadily increasing for the past fifty years, what they’ve found is hardly surprising, but what they’ve now calculated is how that distance translates into atmospheric emissions.
Marc Xuereb, a public health planner with the Region of Waterloo Public Health department in Ontario, conducted a study, published in 2005, that looked at fifty-eight commonly eaten imported foods, all of which could be grown or raised in Waterloo Region. The study found that the imported items traveled almost 4,500 kilometers on average to reach the dinner tables of that southern Ontario city, producing through transit 51,709 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions annually (5.9 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions generated by households in the region). The report notes that this is equivalent to more than a quarter tonne per household, or more than 16,000 cars on the road. The study also calculated how the emissions would compare if the imported items were instead sourced locally or regionally, from within a 30-kilometer radius. Under that scenario, greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by almost 99 percent—from 51,709 tonnes for the imported items to 2,224 tonnes for the local items, a savings of 49,485 tonnes. (Even within a distance of 250 kilometers, the local items represented savings, in greenhouse gas emissions, of 96 percent.)
Other studies bring these numbers down to dinner-plate level. The Toronto nonprofit organization FoodShare, for example, went on two shopping trips in 2003 for the ingredients of a typical meal (lamb chops, sweet potatoes, Swiss chard, carrots, salad, and fruit): one trip to a farmers’ market and the other to a supermarket. Using the product labels to compare the origins of the food, they found that the supermarket items traveled, on average, eighty-one times farther than the farmers’ market items. They calculated that a year of choosing local over imported foods would save a half-tonne of greenhouse gas emissions per household.
Of course, such comparisons carry all the practical deficiencies of any ecological footprint analysis. Things are just too complicated for any straightforward calculation to take all the variables into account. And how far back in the complex chain of production can researchers—should researchers—go anyway? While it’s clear that in terms of simple tailpipe emissions trucking trumps air freight, how much would that calculation change—and how much more complicated would it become—if it included the emissions resulting from highway construction? Likewise, how does one account for the infinite variations in growing methods used across the globe? A totally non-mechanized farm in India certainly uses less energy to grow its crops than most farms in North America. So even if the food arrived here in the biggest fuel-guzzling jumbo jet there is, it could still have a lower energy footprint than its North American equivalent. As a 1997 Swedish study found, it might indeed be more energy efficient for eaters in that northern country to buy Spanish-grown tomatoes rather than local greenhouse tomatoes because Spain’s climate is conducive to heat-loving crops, whereas Swedish production requires great gobs of energy to keep greenhouse tomatoes growing.
Even principles that we might think provide certainty and comfort in this morass of complication—for example, thinking local is always more energy efficient than regional—are not straightforward. A 2001 study done by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University found that a local food system can require more energy and emit more carbon dioxide than its regional counterpart when the trucks used to supply local foods are smaller than the trucks delivering regionally produced food. The smaller trucks require more trips, thus negating the carbon savings of food grown closer to market. In other words, longer distances don’t always equal higher emissions.
Another criticism leveled against food-miles analyses is that they’re too focused on one simple measure—energy—and ignore a whole host of other factors. Any complete accounting of the impact of our food choices would need to consider water use, biodiversity values, animal welfare, labor practices, income distribution, and soil erosion, to name the most obvious examples. And, of course, hovering around the edges of the food-miles discussion are the broader, and arguably much more important, issues of security, sovereignty, autonomy, and control. If we depend on food from around the globe to feed us, can we really consider ourselves to be safe, secure, and sovereign? As Mark Bittman points out in his book Food Matters, “America no longer grows enough edible fruits and vegetables for everyone to eat our own government’s recommended five servings a day.” In other words, we are vulnerable and dependent on factors over which we have little or no control.
It’s enough to make one despair at the impossibility of ever making meaningful, sustainable decisions about what we eat from where. Is there no simple principle that can guide us? I’d suggest that there is one, right in front of us. As we stand in the food aisles, confused by the choices, trying to make good ones, we can ask ourselves a question that goes much deeper than distance and is much more revealing: is it possible to truly locate the source of a particular food and meaningfully determine the details of its production? When we shift our focus from proximity to traceability, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to do the all-consuming work of tracing the sources and conditions. (Who has the time for shopping excursions as investigative reporting projects?) No, what it means is that we determine whether or not it’s actually possible to trace the source, should we choose to exercise such informed control over what we consume.
If this seems like one too many questions at the supermarket, Canadian writer Noah Richler has proposed another, admittedly much more pleasure-ful, principle to guide us, one that I think we could all happily follow. In an essay about local food, published in 2008 in the Toronto Star, he offers this grace note: “the better arbiter is the palate’s common sense.” Amen to that. In the final analysis, we don’t necessarily need to agonize over the complexity of it all. We don’t need to pore over the data of competing studies, wondering if the use of the Weighted Average Source Distance formula rather than the Weighted Average Emissions Ratio formula is really a methodological research flaw. Because in the end, it comes down to fresh flavor, the palate’s commonsense judgement of what tastes best: the strawberry near or the strawberry far? And that is a question all of us can answer for ourselves.
OKAY, I HEAR what you’re thinking. In fact, I share the thought. It’s easy enough to talk about the benefits, to compare homegrown strawberries to imported strawberries and know which one will win the taste test. But there’s something missing and, for me, what’s missing can best be summed up with two words, two words that strike a dagger into the heart of my “let’s grow as much of our own food as we can” enthusiasm: coffee and chocolate.
When I went to see a presentation by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, the engaging writers behind the book The 100-Mile Diet, I felt inspired by their talk, energized by their passion, and awed by their gumption. But I sat there the whole hour with the words coffee and chocolate on the tip of my tongue—and not just because it was a lunch-hour presentation and my stomach was grumbling.
You might have different words in mind—pineapples, cinnamon, and cashews, perhaps—but the point remains. We crave access to foods that we just can’t grow in North America’s climate. Not only do we crave them, but we expect that they will be available pretty much everywhere, all the time. Our choices and desires march to the imperative of now.
Allow me a digression that you’ve probably heard before— probably from a grandparent. And yes, it starts with the phrase when I was growing up. Back then, if there was a movie you wanted to see, there was a two-week window of opportunity at the local cinema, and then it was gone. If you were lucky, it would reappear on television (on one of the four channels) in about a year, but if you happened to be out or your TV’s reception was wonky that night, you missed it again. No videotaping, no downloading, no pirate DVDs in the dollar stores. Or let’s say you found yourself low on cash—at nine PM on a Saturday night. Disaster. The banks were only open during the week, and only for very limited hours during the day. No bank machines or debit cards, and few places took credit.
In short, life—its pleasures and necessities—required planning for the future, taking the future into account in our decisions and perhaps, if necessary, delaying gratification.
And here I will get more grandparent-ish by saying: is advance planning and occasional delayed gratification such a bad thing?
Isn’t it, in fact, one of the grand cognitive features that distinguishes adults from children, humans from other animals? Okay, strike that. I’m sure foxes spend a lot of time planning their next hunt, and kids are masters of scheming ahead for the next treat. But as an adult, human pursuit, I’d say that advance planning defines a great deal of what’s best in us. Just as a lack of advance planning defines the worst. If we were to pick the most dire of global problems, wouldn’t we agree that a common culprit in all of them is an entirely id-directed focus on the now at the expense of what’s to come?
If that sounds like shrill moralizing, let’s cut the id some slack. Because the id—guided as it is by the pleasure principle—suffers in all this, too. Another when I was growing up example, this one food-related and, I’m afraid, rather clichéd. But truly, we really did get a mandarin orange in our Christmas stocking, stuffed at the bottom of the toe end. To me, it tasted better than any candy, and it was a treat I looked forward to all year. It was from a faraway place and we valued it as something special. Now, I’m never without at least one box of mandarin oranges from October to February. I eat them like cheap candy. And, alas, the experience of them has indeed been cheapened for me. I still put the label from the season’s first box on the fridge (it is a banner occasion in my life’s calendar), but something’s been lost. I eat them and love them, but by the third or fourth box, they aren’t quite as special. They enter the autumn routine, and at least some of their sharply satisfying flavor gets sanded down through repetition.
One of the defining features of our time is the slow and steady erosion of seasonality. As the specificities of seasonal changes get lost, we progress into sameness. And it’s in the sphere of food that the loss of seasonality can be felt most acutely. One by one, the foods that once marked a particular period of time—a window of taste—have devolved into a condition of always available. I first noticed it with peas, then cherries and raspberries. I thought asparagus and peaches were holdouts, until about a decade ago,
> The Benefits of Growing Your Own Food in the City
> It saves you money.
> You’ll enjoy some of the freshest and most nutritious food you’ll ever eat, as fewer nutrients are lost in storage and transportation.
> It involves zero packaging.
> You’ll know where your food comes from and what’s required to grow it.
> The activity of gardening gets you outside and stretching.
> Nothing’s more local than the 10-foot diet—and it’s great for assuaging carbon footprint guilt.
> Every homegrown bite takes you out of a broken, profit-driven food system that feeds us fat, salt, and sugar.
> You can grow varieties of fruits and vegetables that aren’t available commercially.
> Chances are you’ll eat more vegetables.
> By recycling organic waste, you’ll be turning a waste product into a resource: compost.
> Food gardening is a creative recreation that will give you immensely satisfying results.
> Food crops increase urban biodiversity and habitat for pollinators and enhance the soil.
> Fruit and vegetable gardens can be creatively designed to add beauty—and surprise—to the ornamental landscape.
> Food gardening calms the mind and enriches the soul and belly.
> Tinkering in the garden provides an outlet for exercising the caring gene.
> By growing food, you’re participating in an ancient skill that too many of us have lost.
> Gardening weaves food in a meaningful, productive way into our everyday lives.
when South American imports started to appear in my local stores in the winter. About the only truly seasonal fruits and vegetables left—in my city anyway—are corn on the cob and watermelon. Their window of availability remains intact.
I’m sure that to some ears, this sounds like the strangest of whining complaints. Why on earth would we be anything but thrilled by the fact that we can eat raspberries in January? Our options have expanded. Our desires are sated. Our taste buds are tickled. But I wonder if we haven’t lost celebration.
Of all our basic needs—to breathe, to sleep, to eat—food is the one most strongly associated with celebration. Special occasions call for special meals. These unique but repeated events punctuate the progression of our lives. As, at one time in our not too distant past, did the march of seasonal fruits and vegetables through the calendar. Even if the appearance of the first juicy pear of the year wasn’t accompanied by some kind of ceremony to mark the occasion, surely our taste buds did a little jig. But it’s much harder to carve out moments of conscious celebration when we’ve been lulled (and, I’d argue, dulled) by constant availability. Ho hum, it’s just another pear, like the one I had last month, and the month before that, and the month before that, every month in fact.
Growing some of our own food, on the other hand, links us with seasonal celebration and conscious consumption. The fact that we can’t pick peas from our backyards in August heightens our appreciation for the pea-picking possibilities of early summer. The seasons of the garden give and they withhold—and celebration marks their passage.
As for the coffee and chocolate (and pineapples, cinnamon, and cashews), no way am I giving them up. (And I’d snarl at anyone who tried to guilt me into it.) But let’s eat them while alert to the choices, priorities, and values that deliver them to our plates, aware of the privilege and the cost that make the impossible-to-grow-here, possible-to-eat-here. And while we’re at it, when we’re fired up on coffee and chocolate, let’s devote some of that caffeine-and sugar-fueled energy to creating alternative structures that support local foods and local farmers, and thus make the grown-here as economically viable (for farmers and eaters) as the grown-elsewhere.
IT’S EASY ENOUGH for the well fed to wax on about celebration, feel virtuous about reduced food miles, and feel nostalgic about seasonal pleasures, but when a food garden is occasioned by necessity, the food grown takes on a different sheen. It can mean a meal that includes fresh and healthy vegetables when all that’s available at the food bank are packaged items. It can mean good nutrition when food dollars otherwise couldn’t be stretched beyond inexpensive processed foods. It can mean easier access to readily available produce when the closest supermarket is miles away in a tonier section of town. It can mean food bounty in a food desert.
However much our culture tells us that widespread food production doesn’t belong in cities; however much we may fear the challenges unique to urban food-growing efforts; however much our gardening desires may be tempered by limitations of time and space; however comfortable we’ve become in the role of global consumers rather than local producers—in short, whatever the personal, social, and political obstacles in the way of a more committed embrace of urban food-growing potential, maybe all we really need to do is to open ourselves up to possibility. If we look around and ask ourselves about all the could’s that surround us, chances are very good indeed that we will find places of possibility, ideas of do-ability, and corners ripe for sowing and reaping.
