Table of Contents
FOR LOUIS
PREFACE
W hen my husband, Louis, and I were first married more than twenty years ago, we lived in a tiny student apartment in Connecticut. When the weather permitted, we hauled pots of dirt onto the concrete steps outside the back door and grew spindly beans up the pipe railings. When our sons, Jesse and Sam, were eleven and one, we bought our first house in San Diego. On the day we moved in, we planted two beds of tomatoes and basil before we even put our own beds together. Five years later we moved to Northern California and the whole family helped dig up the two dozen heirloom roses from our new yard so that I might plant fruit trees in their stead.
Gardening was a hobby, like making furniture or pottery. I enjoyed taking something that might seem worthless, old wood and clay (or a seed), and making it into cabinets and bowls (or eventually lunch). Gardening was especially good because the plant itself did most of the work of growing into a plant and then producing food. If I didnt forget to water it, that is.
It was great seeing the kids standing under a tree grazing on fruit, picking cherry tomatoes for lunch, or munching snap peasespecially because I knew that in our garden they wouldnt be ingesting chemical residues as they ate. When Sam toddled out of the garden scented by basil, I knew the worst he could have eaten was an organic caterpillar.
I dreamed of enlarging our garden into a place that we could live off of; a place resembling something between the Big Rock Candy Mountain and Eden. I thought about it enough over the years that it began to seem possible, albeit without lemonade springs or, hopefully, snakes. Years later while researching a book I was writing on World War I, I became intrigued with victory gardens, which the American government encouraged citizens to grow fruits and vegetables in whatever space they could find (yards, roofs, vacant lots) to help supplement family diets and feed overseas troops. I dreamed about how much my own small plot might produce.
I might have been content with mere dreaming, if not for the road trip we took in the summer of 2008. Louis and I had a conference to go to, research to do, and family to visit, which would take us on a meandering voyage from Davis to Los Angeles to Arizona, through Wyoming and North Dakota, and back home again.
It was a bad time to travel. Fuel prices were at an all-time high and when I gassed up at the pump, I felt like I was calling down environmental ruin. Furthermore, the fuel shortage coincided with a salmonella outbreak. Over 1,400 people were sickened by food-borne illness. The authorities thought the source was tomatoes. Suddenly there wasnt a tomato to be found on dinner salads, burgers, or as a garnish on the side of plates. BLTs became BLs, and summer lost its rosy culinary icon.
Then, just as you thought you were safe if you managed to skirt tomatoes, those same authorities announced that the source might be onions instead... or peppers. As the investigation went on, it became ever more clear that we might never know what food caused the outbreak.
Hence, food was constantly on our minds as we traveled. At roadside cafs we not only wondered what was on the menu but also how the vegetables had been grown, stored, and washed. And for that matter, how far the food had been shipped using our dwindling petroleum reserves.
On our way south we drove through Californias Central Valley, passing the town of Coalinga, where the enormous Harris Ranch is located. We dubbed the town Cow-a-linga and steeled ourselves against the brick wall of stench we had to drive through to get to the other side of the immense feedlots there. The hellish crowding of animals was terribly sad and enough to make me swear off commercial beef. Knowing that the animals were often fed byproducts of other animals didnt help, especially since Louis and I had been in England eating meat pies the year that mad cow disease started killing people. The idea of eating prions from the tissue of sick cattle, then having those prions eat my brain, was a little off-putting. And where I once may have thought sick cattle wouldnt end up in my grocers case, I now knew better. Activists had just aired film footage of dying cattle splayed out on the floor being prodded with shock rods, jabbed with forklift tines, and shot by sprays of water until they stood up and took their last tottering steps toward our kitchen tables. Large-scale meat and egg production was not pretty.
And still other issues with food were making headlines that year: genetically altered wheat, perchlorate in dairy products, transfats in baked goods. Hormones in our food were making some children grow breasts and body hair by the age of five; fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides laved produce we ate; and to top it all off, lead-tainted candy had been sold in stores. In short, what nourished us might also kill us.
Sitting in the passengers seat of our rental car, with nothing but time to sit and think, I ruminated over these issues. It was time to do more than talk. I wanted to do what was right for the planet, my family, and me. As soon as we returned to Davis, I announced that I would start to grow most of our food in our own yard.
As I outlined my plans, Louis and Sam caught on that I was no longer woolgathering about a few raised beds; I was seriously plotting the transformation of our yard, our eating habits, and maybe the fabric of our entire universe. Louis and Sam paid sudden and nervous attention.
Louis said, Youre not serious. You cant grow your food in the yard. Youd starve.
As I noted the you rather than the we in Louiss comments, Sam pointed out that he ate responsibly while at home. Certainlyby the age of eight Sam shopped for vegetables at the local farmers market. Further, he researched companies for their environmental and humanitarian records and we made many of our food purchases at the food co-op in town where the checkers wear hemp clothing and the meat department is filled with organic free-range pork, chicken, and beef. I was the one in the family who was most likely to be caught eating a machine-extruded yummy pie laced with petrochemicals and wrapped by toddlers in a Malaysian sweatshop.
It was true that I likely had the most to atone for. (The road trip was even my idea.) However, I pointed out, we could all do more. The free-range chickens that we envisioned contentedly pecking in an open field are more likely living in a steel Quonset hut and seldom, if ever, going out into the concrete yard that constitutes their range. Even health foodwhich might have been packaged in Pawnee, Nebraska, or Des Moines, Iowawas likely to be aggregates of ingredients from anonymous factories in China, Mexico, and other far-flung places. Less than 1 percent of food coming into the country is inspected and the cost of shipping in fossil fuels is staggering. Even the food at the farmers market, though local, has to be trucked into Davis from the fields.
Sam then said that perhaps I should wait another year to start since we were already well into summer. Louis pointed out that I was a self-described slacker gardener, after all, and I might do better with my plan after a bit more practice first.
I do hate weeding. I forget to water. My garden is a testing ground for plants able to withstand abuse. But while I seemed to have been a slacker gardener in the past, I explained that I was merely in my larval stage. The time had come to kick off my chrysalis and extend my farmers wings.
