it all. “They’re selling food on the sidewalk!” said my nephew with disbelief, no doubt thinking of trips to the grocery store where everything edible comes securely wrapped in plastic.
This was food as they’d never seen it before. This was close contact. Peas in a pod.
WHEN EXACTLY DID we become so removed from the source of our sustenance, a disconnect that reached an extreme expression in my nephew’s bollixed reaction to fresh peas? For my generation (a demographic cohort that entered the world in the 1960s, shaped and solidified our habits and patterns in the ’70s, and stumbled into independence in the ’80s), I blame the astronauts. Okay, maybe not each one personally, but the whole space program. This was the miraculous, mind-bending, perspective-exploding, boundary-busting leap into the unknown that not only brought us a new conception of our planet and our place, but also launched Tang into popularity. Perhaps you remember the stuff? It was the “drink of the astronauts”—juice that came not from the messy pulp of oranges but from pouches of “flavor crystals.” In much the same way that K-Tel’s Patty Stacker (in those late-night television ads for the gadget, which shaped ground hamburger into perfectly stackable rounds) promised that “your hands need never touch the meat,” Tang offered a fruit drink whose relationship with actual, touched fruit was about as distant as the moon. We drank it by the gallon, vicariously thrilling to the modern out-there-ness of it all. How convenient it was to reconstitute food—from a bag.
The antiseptic compression of edibility that is Tang couldn’t be any further from real food if we tried. Real food carries its dirt along with it, no matter how hard we scrub. Soil memory lurks in the folds and wrinkles and even in the smooth skins of fruits and vegetables, giving them their character and their flavor. The French call this terroir, and while the term is mainly deployed for wine (bien sur, the idea comes from French food culture, after all) it applies equally well to everything edible. Flavor and identity come from place, ineluctably and inevitably.
But how often do we put that idea on our plate and eat it? Not very. Our dinner tables sag under the weight of food trucked, flown, trained, and otherwise transported across the globe. Estimates vary, but the standard statistic for the average distance traveled by the food we eat is 1,500 miles. Our dinners are often more globe-trotting, more worldly, than we are.
If our taste buds demand raspberries in February, artichokes in December, and corn on the cob in March, global agricultural production feeds our seasonally jumbled desires as quickly as you can say greenhouse gas emissions. And that is what we’re producing and consuming with each forkful. Well, that and six-syllable chemicals banned in North America, plus labor practices that would put us to shame if we took more time to consider them. In short, we eat in ignorance of what our food costs us, costs others, and costs the earth.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and increasingly it’s not. In the past few years there has been a groundswell—is revolution too dramatic a word?—of interest in where our food comes from, how our food choices affect the world, and what we might do to create a saner, healthier, fairer, safer, and greener food system. The fact that all of these er’s add up to tastier food is icing on the quintuple-layer cake.
Getting closer to our food—becoming eaters who are deeply, intimately, connected with what we eat—necessarily involves learning more of the details of its production. Even if we’re not the ones actually growing the beets or nurturing the chickens, the more we know of the work involved, all the how’s, where’s, why’s, what’s, and when’s that collide to create sustenance, the better able we’ll be to make informed decisions about how we sustain ourselves. And when that production occurs near where the majority of us spend our lives, in cities, the better chance we have of seeing, learning, knowing, or at least being somewhat curious about, those details.
Of course, people have been growing food in cities for millennia. The residents of the world’s first cities raised vegetables, fruits, livestock, and grains in close proximity to their homes. Urban agriculture is as ancient a practice as gathering together to live in urban communities. Yet as Brian Halweil points out in his book Eat Here, “a range of forces in the modern era—the industrial revolution, the evolution of the megacity, the invention of refrigeration— helped to render urban farming obsolete . . . The engines of modern civilization began to squeeze farming out of cities.”
While few feel nostalgic for the pre-industrialized city (I, for one, love my refrigerator, and I know my grandmother said a prayer of thanks every time she turned on the water tap), an impulse deeper than romantic wistfulness now leads us to reflect on what we lost when food production was squeezed out of our lives. My generation is probably the most de-skilled in all of history in terms of knowing about the basic practices of food production: saving seeds, planting seeds, nurturing and growing plants. In other words, out of sight can lead to out of mind, which in turn can lead to the defeated attitude of “well, that’s just the way things are, isn’t it?” It’s not much of a leap to say that such an attitude can lead to flavorless tomatoes, hard as rocks, grown halfway around the globe and delivered to us as grim industrial offerings—not food.
THERE ARE, NO doubt, huge problems with every aspect of our food system, from the seeds planted (for the most part, corporately controlled seeds that are chosen for industrial efficiency instead of flavor, nutrition, and diversity), through to growing methods that deplete or contaminate air, water, and soil, to distribution and retailing that favor global over local priorities and thus allow us to download true costs (in carbon emissions, in pollution, in waste) to the future. Transforming this skewed infrastructure is necessary work that could consume a lifetime—if indeed we had the luxury of such a slow pace. Many have argued that we don’t.
In the face of this enormous challenge, planting a food garden might seem like an act of miniscule proportion, laughably obscure in the grand scheme, the equivalent of fiddling (or hoeing) while Rome burns. But hope is the defining and guiding force that sends shovels into soil. We garden for the future. And what is hope if not nourishment for an idea of what the future might be?
This is a lot of symbolic weight for a radish to carry. Especially a radish grown in the city, a place where food gardens are usually conceived of as products of hobby and leisure, not as things of necessity. But more and more North Americans—80 percent of whom live in urban areas—are looking at the broken food system and instead of throwing down forks in despair, or gagging on dinner, they are planting edible gardens. Some are doing it for the simple pleasures of productivity; others are making more declarative political, social, cultural, and economic statements. All are participating in a transformative gesture toward a different future.
Even when we take small steps to gain control of what we eat, we know that these acts are neither the whole answer nor are they possible for everyone. But each carrot grown, each backyard egg collected, each community plot tended, and each rooftop tomato plucked is fertile nourishment for the growing revolution that’s changing our relationship with food.
And connection with food doesn’t get much closer than hands in the dirt.
SOWING THE CITY, REAPING THE BENEFITS
AS A YOUNG child growing up in the small southwestern Ontario city of Galt, I wanted to hide my family’s vegetable garden, pretend it didn’t exist, erase it from the neighborhood. I felt embarrassed by our rows of beans, peas, tomatoes, and strawberries. They were like a banner announcing our less-than-robust financial circumstances to the community. Everyone else seemed to be straining for the upmarket trappings of consumer culture— buying glamorous cars like convertibles while we made do with a Rambler station wagon; eating exotic fare like avocadoes while we had pigs’ tails for dinner. And growing food was a decidedly down-market thing to do. Our garden signaled need, just one more item in the long list of evidence that my family did not fit in. It didn’t help that, one year, during a period of compost experimentation, my father buried food waste directly in the soil between the rows. After a particularly heavy rain, egg shells started poking up through the dirt. Yet another advertisement for