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.
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
