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Backyard Bounty: Finding food closer to home for the sake of dollars and sense
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Published: May 18, 2008
Our spring garden is yielding two kinds of leafy lettuce, spinach, kale, green onions, varied herbs and, best of all, lots of fresh asparagus. The new potatoes and edible-podded peas won't be far behind. Tomatoes, eggplant, corn and other warm-season delicacies will take a bit longer.
My husband, especially, is spending long hours tilling, planting, weeding and most of all trying to keep the deer from eating everything green that we grow. That last endeavor of his involves the creation of elaborate constructions of wire, decorated with bars of a brand of green soap whose distinctive smell is supposed to repel hungry critters.
Years ago, when we moved to our patch of land in Stokes County, we tried serious gardening. We planted big gardens and spent a lot of time tending them. We stored potatoes for winter. I stayed up late at night canning tomatoes and green beans. This was the late 1970s, and we were going back to the land. We gardened because we thought it was kind of cool.
Somewhere along the way, jobs, children, graduate school and long commutes made us think it was a little less cool to spend hours wielding a hoe or stringing beans. Being up to your elbows in vinegar, making okra pickles at midnight, has less appeal when you know that you've got to get up at dawn to get the kids to school and yourself to the office.
Now we are working our way back into gardening more, with a sense that growing as much of our own food as we can is necessary as well as cool. Not only is homegrown food better; growing your own also just makes more sense. That's especially true now that food prices in the supermarkets are going up almost as fast as gas prices at the service stations.
Anybody who has taste buds knows that "fresh" vegetables and fruits that have been shipped long distances aren't as good as what's grown nearby when the good Lord meant for it to grow. The tomatoes that are available in grocery stores in winter bear pitifully little resemblance to a real sun-ripened tomato from the vine in your backyard or a farm a few miles away.
I'd known that for years, and I'd also more or less understood that it doesn't make sense to keep sacrificing North Carolina's farm lands to development while having more and more of our food trucked in from Florida or California or shipped from halfway around the globe.
Nearly two years ago in Pittsburgh, Ruth Reichl, the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, told a group of editorial writers in no uncertain terms just how flawed America's food and food-supply system are. Time has proved just how right she was. She criticized the way our meat is produced on factory farms, making the livestock miserable and putting our health at risk. This was, of course, before we saw the "downer cows" on TV news. She talked about the need to change the nation's farm policy, particularly which crops and farmers get subsidies -- change that, once again, is not happening in Washington this summer.
And Reichl talked about the twin ills of vanishing family farms and too much dependence on fossil fuels to cultivate food crops and to transport them long distances. She warned that in the not-too-distant future, those trends could combine to mean that we'd be spending more on both fuel and food, while getting food of poorer quality.
This spring, with each week bringing new sticker shock at the gas pumps and on the grocery shelves, it seems that Reichl's future has become the present.
Of course, Reichl is not the only person who's been crusading for change in the way we get our food. More and more voices are joining the chorus, made more urgent by the spike in food prices. Last month, against a backdrop of food shortages and riots, the United Nations released a comprehensive study saying that major changes in the way food is produced and distributed are urgently needed. Emphasizing the link between rising oil prices and rising food prices, the report said that reliable supplies of locally grown foods are essential.
At our house, we are trying to do our part. The garden is expanding again, and we're shopping more at the farmers' markets.
And last week, after checking prices of even old standbys such as ground beef and chicken legs, I told my husband that if prices keep going up, we are going to have to become vegetarians.
Not a chance, he said. We are going to eat some of those deer that graze in our garden.
n Linda Brinson is the Journal's editorial-page editor. She can be reached at lbrinson@wsjournal.com.
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