> 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.
EMBRACING 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”