Diggin' in the Dirt

By A.C. McMullen
Copyright © 2006.
All rights reserved.

I couldn't wait. The first 70-degree day of the year, I rushed out and clawed up a couple of rows in the dirt patch we call a garden and threw some peas at it. Then I loosened up the dirt in another square foot and tossed in some mixed lettuces. Then I pulled a bunch of weeds, moved some perennial herbs around, mulched the grapes and raspberries.

My momentum in full swing, and with a forecast of rain, I raked all of the flower beds and hauled the rakings to the compost pile. There. All ready to drink in the heaven-sent water, and grow!

Then I took a shower and collapsed on the bed for the first really good night's sleep I've had in a while. Fresh air, sweat, and dirt under your fingernails will do that for you!

A really good article appeared on my desk recently. It's by Barbara Kingsolver, and about her family's experiment to eat only food grown close to home for one year. The family garden, she says, was one aspect of the experiment, and central to that effort was the tomato.

(My friend Gregor's favorite tomato thing is to halve the tomatoes, drizzle them with olive oil, sprinkle them with garlic, and roast them in the oven until they're leathery. They keep in glass jars until he snips them onto pizza, among other things.)

"We couldn't have too many," Kingsolver writes. She soon learned, however, that "we wish for them in leisure and repent in haste." Her days, nights, weekends, and social calendar all revolved around tomatoes. "Rare is the August evening when I'm not slicing, canning, roasting, and drying (tomatoes) -- often all at the same time."

During high season Kingsolver spends Saturdays canning with friends. "A steamy kitchen full of women talking about our stuff is not so different from your average book group," she writes, "except that we end up with jars of future meals."

In fact, "I think of canning as fast food, paid for in time up front," Kingsolver confesses. "A jar of our spaghetti sauce, a box of pasta, a grate of cheese" provide a fast, healthy meal on those busy days that sneak up on all families and leave them wondering what to fix for dinner.

Even if home gardening is beyond the realm of the possible, Kingsolver recommends canning as a good deal for anyone who can buy local produce. And, if canning seems like too much of a stretch, she says, "twenty pounds of tomatoes will cook down into a pot of sauce that fits into five one-quart freezer boxes, good for one meal each." She says that tomatoes can even be frozen whole on a cookie sheet, then dumped together into large bags from which you can take a few at a time for winter soups and stews.

"Having gone nowhere in the interim, they will still be local in February," she says.

Buying local produce for canning, freezing, drying, and otherwise preserving, helps the farm families who have to live in December on what they earned in August. If they're making a good living on what they grow, the farmers are more likely to return with more tasty homegrowns next season. Buying at local farmer's markets is a social as well as shopping event, and I feel really good about the food I bring home, knowing it's been grown by a friend. Maybe a friend I just met.

"When we give it a thought, we mostly consider the food industry to be a thing rather than a person," Kingsolver writes. "We obligingly give 81 cents of our every food dollar to that thing: the processors, marketers, transporters, and so on. Less than one-fifth goes to farmers." That's twenty cents, just two thin dimes out of every dollar, that goes to the humans putting seeds in the ground, weeding, composting, mulching, de-bugging, irrigating, harvesting, stooping in the fields on the hottest of days.

Because I plant my own garden, small though it be, I appreciate the effort that goes into producing a pound of string beans. Because I have friends who do chickens and eggs and pigs and sheep and goats, I know where my food comes from -- and it isn't little plastic cartons. Because we spend several months each year living off the grid, I also know how much electricity is burned when we leave lights, radios, TV's, working needlessly. Because during those off-the-grid months we also carry all of our water, I know how much of that precious liquid goes down the drain unheeded while we brush our teeth or wash our hands.

It is important to be close to the source of what we consume, especially as world population threatens to outpace the availability of key consumables: power and water, certainly, but also the food that is produced and delivered by using power and water. A good first step: go dig in the dirt and invite a kid!

(Read Kingsolver's article in full in the May/June 2007 issue of Mother Jones.)

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