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
