Kitchen Gardeners International: The lighter side of food security

National food security:
Let's grow it over here so we don't have to grow it over there!

By John Hershey

"Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day," President Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, quoting his favorite aphorism about self-reliance. "But give him a large cache of weapons that he can illegally sell to a hostile middle Eastern theocracy, and he can covertly finance a guerilla war in Central America."

Wait a minute, that's not it.

Oh, now I remember. It goes like this: "Teach him to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."

Reagan might have chosen gardening as well as fishing for his metaphor. Ralph Waldo Emerson used the garden as a symbol of self-reliance in his famous essay of the same name: "Though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."

So if we translate Reagan's old saying into horticultural terms and balance it out gender-wise while we're at it, it might go something like this:

"Give a woman a can of Spaghetti-Os, and she'll eat (in a manner of speaking) for a day. But give her some tomato and pepper seeds, a few onion sets, and a basil seedling or two, and she'll have fresh, delicious pasta sauce in just 10–12 weeks."

Yes, it takes a bit longer to grow a meal in a garden than to pull a fish out of a stream, although in my case it might be close. So we have to get by in the meantime. That's the role of the food banks and food drives, and they provide an essential service for people who don't have enough to eat.

But our updated saying is different from Reagan's original in another important way. With gardening it's not just an analogy. It's literally true. You don't see many charities dispensing trout, or idealistic young people traveling to the inner city to offer free fly-casting lessons. But when community gardening organizations like Denver Urban Gardens distribute free seeds and transplants, they help thousands of people become more self-reliant every year.

Self-reliance is part of what motivates all gardeners, I suspect. We feel a primal urge to provide for ourselves and our families directly, asserting a bit of independence from the industrial food grid. When we eat from the garden, we know where our food came from and what's in it. In a small way, we opt out of a food system whose chemical inputs and highly processed outputs make us feel increasingly insecure.

But, a cynic might say, an urban gardener can never really be self-reliant. A city is the antithesis of self-reliance: it's about specialization and economies of scale, work and consumption. The feeling of independence you get from growing a few radishes and carrots is just an illusion.

Au contraire! Gardening does provide relief from the over-scheduled urban life. But the benefits are not just emotional. Growing just a small amount of your own food can noticeably increase your food security, as I discovered during the snowstorm that paralyzed Denver in late December.

For a few days after the big blizzard, many of us couldn't get to the stores, and when we did they were running low on many essential items like fresh produce, milk, and beer. But on those snowbound days, I enjoyed salads of fresh mesclun lettuce and stir-fries of kale and chard, all picked moments before in my little backyard greenhouse. I had to shovel my way through deep snow just to open the lid, but when I got there I found the plants warm and lush inside. What a feeling of pride and self-reliance!

This was food security in action. The supply chain from farm to market was disrupted by the snow, as it could be by any number of natural or human disasters, yet I did not go hungry. I was independent, if only for the few days my supply of fresh greens would last. And it's all thanks to my little greenhouse, really just a glorified cold frame slapped together from scrap lumber at almost no cost. But it can keep these cold-tolerant greens alive year round, even in a blizzard, due to the skill and ingenuity with which I designed and built it. Well, actually it's not because of that. Buried in the soil is an electric heating cable, which probably accounts for a major chunk of my utility bill in the winter.

So I'm not really self-sufficient, and my garden produce isn't devoid of fossil fuel inputs. My veggies aren't free, no matter how free I feel when growing them. We can't escape the industrial food system entirely, and we wouldn't really want to. We live in a city because we want community, not autarky. Still, by growing just some of what we eat, we diversify the food system, and that's a big part of food security.

Wendell Berry said it this way: "We cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free."

In a community garden, we all live a bit more free. And the free seed programs open this opportunity to many new gardeners every season.

This taste of freedom is as delicious as the fresh food we grow. It's hard to feel powerless when you're the midwife of the amazing process by which a tiny seed turns into a huge sprawling vine, with giant leaves and heavy pumpkins that keep you baking breads and pies and cookies all winter long. As Emerson put it: "When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands."

When the next disaster strikes, I may have to do without milk and beer again for a while. City authorities would probably deny me a permit to keep a cow in my small yard, and I have no time for another hobby like home brewing. But to paraphrase Reagan (or was it Heston?) again, they can take away my arugula when they pry it from my cold, dead hand.

To read more garden-variety humor, visit John's website: www.rakishwit.com.

Posted by KGI on March 15, 2007 11:27 AM to Kitchen Gardeners International
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