Fields of Plenty

"Our inability to feed the world is not an agricultural failure; it is a failure both of the imagination and of kindness."

Alisa Smith (p. 162)

When I first picked up the book Plenty:One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon, I was bored. I don't know why, exactly, except that perhaps I thought the idea of eating locally was old news and, therefore, not very interesting. When I finished reading Plenty Thursday, I was inspired. Maybe not inspired to the point of eating only what I can find in a 100-mile radius, but inspired none-the-less. And, yes, eating locally is an old idea--people have done so for centuries before cheap oil was able to transport exotic foods half way around the world to more affluent consumers.

A few facts from the book before I share on what I'm inspired to do and some real connections I made when reading the book.

• "From mad cow disease to E. coli bacteria to genetically modified ingredients, many North Americans have begun to fear their daily nourishment; 300,000 Americans are hospitalized each year by the food they eat..." (p. 48)
• "...in 1952, just 11 percent of American corn was treated with pesticides and herbicides; today that statistic is over 95 percent." (p. 56)
• "At the farthest end of the spectrum, millions of pounds of seafood taken on North American coasts are now shipped to China to be processed--and then imported back into the United States and Canada. (p. 67)
• "The daily food supply in America now contains enough calories to feed almost double the American population, without reducing food exports by one iota. People spend 7 percent of their disposable income on food, down from 22 percent in 1950." (p. 99)
• According to the biologist and author Edward O. Wilson, some 7,000 species of plant are known to have been used by different human societies throughout history. Today, just twenty species provide 90 percent of the world's food." (p. 103)
• "In 2005 a team of academics from the University of Essex and London's City University estimated the environmental price tag of U.K. farming at £ 1.51 billion. A switch to strictly organic production, the study found, could reduce those costs by 75 percent." (p. 222)

I found the above facts interesting because it seems to support the idea that when we eat foods outside of our local region, we lose control--and sight--of how our food is produced, as in using GMO crops and dousing everything with pesticides and herbicides; we let multi-national corporations decide which foods we can eat based on which are the most profitable and easiest to raise, reducing food security (remember the Irish potato famine, caused in part by a lack of genetic diversity in the potato crop); and we waste enormous amounts of energy we can no longer afford to waste through transportation and petroleum-based fertilizers. And, we blindly accept the word of multinational corporations who say GMO crops, pesticides, inorganic fertilizers, and herbicides are the best ways to feed the world. Not only does the UK study question this, but a United Nations report, "Agroecology and the right to food" questions it as well.

The book, however, is not a dry compendium of food-related facts. There was a recipe for each month related to a local, in season food, and countless "reminders" of simple truths. At least twice the authors remarked on how satisfying and flavorful fresh, local food is in comparison to "imported," non-local food. I recently had a friend remark, wide-eyed, how delicious and rich and visually beautiful her recent locally "grown" egg had been. The yolks are a deep orange, especially in the warmer season when chickens are allowed to peck at grass and grubs, and the taste is more luxurious and satisfying. Compare, if you can, tomatoes and strawberries shipped to the grocery store versus the tomatoes and strawberries you find in your garden or roadside stand.

Smith and Mackinnon also write about how the taste of their food seemed better, more satisfying because they were directly connected to the sources of their food--the farmers in some case and the land itself in others. The authors lived in Vancouver during the writing of the book, and they lived in an apartment, so they were unable to grow anything on their own except herbs. Luckily, Anthony and I can grow a few things, and I readily identify with their idea about being connected to the food. I made fried green tomatoes for the first time in my life last weekend because we had green tomatoes, and I wanted to include something in the meal that came from our garden. They were simple and delicious, and maybe only because I picked them from our yard.

I recently made strawberry jam, as readers of this blog already know, for the first time in my life because I had a local source of fresh strawberries from a farmer I know. I also used honey from a beekeeper about two miles away in place of some of the sugar, and I think the local, fresh, connectedness of the ingredients are what make me think it's the best strawberry jam I've ever eaten (as was the strawberry ice cream we made from said berries).

And I can't tell you how excited I am to include in some future meal the potatoes, carrots, and beets from our garden.

Now for what I'm inspired to do. Even though I don't think that I could live without coffee or the occasional grouper or salmon filet, and I don't want to live without wine, I am inspired to eat more locally and to see what more I could grow on our little urban lot. The authors mentioned several foods that had been grown in their 100-mile radius in the distant past but that had disappeared with "modern" agriculture. Some pioneers in their area were trying to bring back old, familiar and beloved crops. I'd like to see what more I could grow, including chickpeas, black turtle beans, and a lemon tree. I also want to find out just exactly what we have in our 100 to 200-mile radius, and I'm curious to see if there are crops that had previously been grown in that area which have now been abandoned--and why. I'll let you know what I discover.