the garden began to change from embarrassment to engagement. It was after a summer dinner, when I was six. For dessert we’d had watermelon and I’d hoarded the seeds. After dinner, I sprang up from the table with the stash in my hand and a vision in my head: I was going to plant those pips. I was going to have my own little garden, tucked under the shrubs by the side of the house.
I don’t know how long it took for me to realize that nothing was going to come of my plantation, that shade equals watermelon failure, that late summer is not the time to seed an annual crop in southern Ontario. But I can still summon the yearning stretch of my dreamy plan, the way it fired me up with hope for a future that included a small corner of my own tending.
I AM GLAD that I learned early on about the rhythms of food production and connection with the soil. I see so much of my adult self nascent in my childhood excitement and yearning for seasonal progression. Shelling fresh peas was an event I longed for. Hulling strawberries was a labor that made me happy. Cutting beans for the pot felt good. And eating my father’s homegrown tomatoes was best of all: summer meals involved jostling with my younger sisters to be first in line for the big spoonful of seeds my father separated out from the slices. He salted the slices just right, and we couldn’t wait to eat the seedy slurry that he found hard to digest.
I wonder what it’s like to grow up without growing things, without connecting your food to a particular time and place and to your own labor. Perhaps because my family had that tradition, motivated by frugality, I carried it with me into adulthood through a series of apartments and houses. However unlikely the circumstances, I always managed to make room where I lived for even just a few pots of edible plants. Roommates cast dubious glances at the buckets of basil sunning on the roof and were otherwise engaged when it came time for the dangerous and daily acrobatics of rooftop watering. But they lined up when it came time for pesto suppers. I also lugged deep plastic trays (okay, I confess, they were unused cat litter trays) to balcony corners and planted them with radishes. One year, I “borrowed” the backyard of a friend’s rented house and carried shovels and hoes across town on my bike, all in an effort to turn a neglected lawn into a food garden. Another year, I accepted an offer to babysit a friend’s allotment garden. Squatting her plot, I invented a whole new way to grow tomatoes: letting the weeds grow high so they served as no-fuss tomato stakes. Later still, when I owned my own bit of city land and had filled that up with lettuce and bean plants, I continued to colonize any empty backyard space that friends and family would allow me, even going so far as to plant watermelons and blackberry canes 40 miles away, in another city.
In short, I’ve always been on the lookout for productive space— anywhere, anybody’s—to enlist in the adventure of growing at least some of my food. (Luckily, most of my adventures have turned out better than my watermelon plantation did.)
HOWEVER SMALL MY tentative gestures might have been, they participate in a much larger story—a story that is chipping away at convention and inverting notions we’ve held dear for decades. Food comes from farms, we’re told, farms that exist in the countryside, separated from cities not just by physical distance but by an attitudinal divide that is much harder to breach. The countryside is “clean” and pure, close to nature. Cities are “dirty,” far from nature, essentially nature corrupted. Urban soils and air are contaminated; vandals lurk around every corner . . . And even if we could overcome these dangers, there’s simply not enough room in North American cities to “waste” space doing something that properly belongs in the country. So the old story goes, anyway.
But when we dig in the dirt and cultivate food, what we’re also doing—beyond growing the basil—is staking out territory for an expanded notion of what our cities might be. We’re making room for productivity in a place defined for too long as incapable of meeting, even partially, one of our most basic needs.
Maybe this explains, to some degree at least, the giddy high that comes from unearthing an urban potato. Yes, it’s most definitely just a potato, and that is reason enough for deep satisfaction (for those of us who love the lowly spud). But it’s also a possibility— of a different way of living in cities.
Given the heightened interest in urban food production, one could be forgiven for thinking that to live a virtuous life now requires that we garden 24/7. If we’re not hoeing, seeding, weeding, watering, harvesting, canning, and otherwise preserving the mountains of food necessary to sustain us through a year of eating, are we not shirking duty? No, we’re living our lives and making choices that are dictated by a whole host of complex circumstances. So, let’s dispense with the should’s and imagine, instead, the could’s. Could I plant a few pots of cucumbers, herbs, and tomatoes on my balcony? Could I do with a bit less lawn and a few more veggies? Could I plant an edible fruit tree on the boulevard? Could I grow beans up my apartment building’s wall? In our answers to these questions, some of us might find a small sliver of do-ability. Others might find an obsessional pursuit that keeps us busy for the whole growing season. There’s a lot of room in between.
The benefits accrue, whatever the scale. First and foremost, of course, is flavor. Ask any gardener why they’re growing their own veggies and chances are that superior taste will be at or near the top of their list. Ask an industrial agronomist, on the other hand, why they’ve chosen a particular variety of tomato, for example, to grow by the acre-ful, and flavor rarely rates a mention. Thomas Pawlick tried this experiment. In his book The End of Food, he recounts his conversations with tomato-breeding experts and industry spokespeople, discussions in which he asked them what characteristics were most important in the top fifteen tomato varieties in their markets. The experts mentioned yield, size, firmness, resistance to disease, heat tolerance, uniformity of shape, and uniformity in time of ripening. Pawlick gave them a chance to add the obvious, but no one bit. As he writes, “No one mentioned the two characteristics that any ordinary consumer would likely put at the top of his or her list, namely: flavor and nutritional content. They were simply not there, not important, not even worth mentioning.”
Industrial agriculture cares not one bit for our taste buds. And it would hardly matter if flavor were a top priority of the agricultural giants, because every aspect of the industrial food system works against it. From harvesting machines that demand uniform unripeness to storage methods that do ripening work best left to the sun, to the final indignity of time spent in transport trucks, flavor is diminished every step of the way.
Try this: bite into a ripe tomato just picked from the vine. Let the juice run . . . Freshness—taste’s twin—is what we’re guaranteed when we eat food straight from the plant. Even if it’s not the best green pepper ever (though how often have you heard a gardener say that what they’ve grown is not delicious?), it is certainly the freshest ever. There are no other food-chain shortcuts we can take (even buying directly from farms or shopping at farmers’ markets, for example, valuable as those are) that reduce the harvest-to-dinner distance, in time, to mere minutes. (Some gardeners take this to extremes. I have a friend who will only eat corn that is picked just as the pot on the stove hits the boil.)
As to what effect industrial growing methods have on nutrition, Thomas Pawlick also presents some disturbing data based on his investigations into the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) “food tables,” which measure the nutritional content of various foods. Comparing recent measures of nutritional value with figures from roughly fifty years ago, Pawlick itemizes one staggering loss of nutritional goodness after another: 30.7 percent less vitamin A in today’s fresh tomatoes compared with those of 1963; a 57 percent decrease in vitamin C in potatoes; 45 percent less vitamin C in broccoli. His conclusion: “for the past 50 years the nutrients have been leaching out of nearly everything we eat . . .”
If homegrown food provides us with an instant wake-up call in flavor and freshness, and takes us outside of an industrial system that is depleting our food’s nutritional value, it likewise increases our chances of conscious consumption. There are deeply political dimensions to this issue, and I’ll turn to those later, but the awareness I’m referring to here is of a much more personal nature. It seems to me that one of the most meaningful gifts we receive from the food we grow ourselves is the gift of story. What we consume with each bite are the narratives embedded in the fruits of our labor. These stories emerge from the struggles (the squirrels or the mysterious fungus or