Part One: Living in the Country
I live in Northeast Iowa, about 25 miles from town. Except for a small country church across the road, I am surrounded by cornfields. I live in an abandoned school building which was built in 1915, and which sits on a five acre plot. Those five acres were intended not only to provide a playground for the children, but also a place for horses, as many of the students in 1915 would have arrived by horse drawn buggies.
I deliberately allowed some of the acreage to revert to trees. At 42.5 degrees north latitude and with 35 inches of rainfall per year, any ground not mowed, grazed, or burned will soon grow up in trees. It was barren of trees when the white man first came here, but only because the native peoples had regularly burned it off so as to cause new growth of tender shoots of grass that would attract the herds of buffalo which they hunted. I occasionally mow about three acres with the tractor, and then allow it to remain fallow as prairie. I do these things to make a place for wildlife, both plants and animals. And I also grow vegetables on about three quarters of an acre. It’s a pretty place, especially in winter. Sometimes when I look out the window on a snowy day, my world looks like a Currier and Ives print.
But there are disadvantages to living this far from town. There is no municipal sewer or water supply, so I need my own water system and septic tank. We have electric power and a phone line, but there is no cable service, either for cable TV or a broadband computer link. (I use an “air card,” which I presume to mean that data are transmitted one byte at a time via carrier pigeon.) But the main disadvantage is that one consumes a lot of fuel commuting to work in town. Today I’m retired, but for many years the fuel which conveyed my wife and me to work consumed a significant part of our income. And even today, my groceries, medical care, and social connections are at the other end of a long and fuel-intensive road. When I bought the place in 1969, fuel was cheap and few people besides M. King Hubbert had realized that the world would soon start to run short of petroleum, and almost no one anywhere suspected that burning carbon was affecting the climate. By the oil crisis of 1973, this had changed-- but by then I had invested all that I own into this little patch of ground. For years I felt guilty about the fuel I consumed, yet selling the place to someone else would only transfer the fuel use problem to someone else, not actually reduce it. I tried to minimize the problem by driving a fuel efficient car. I owned VWs, a Ford Escort, and today I have a tiny Chevy Metro that gives me 44 miles per gallon. And I have always tried to strategically plan my trips to town so as to eliminate unnecessary trips. Someday soon, plug-in hybrids will be cheap enough so that we can all have one, and Iowa already leads all other states in the percentage of power produced by wind. We could eventually have almost 100% of our electricity from renewables. When that day comes, if I’m still alive, I will drive without guilt, as my driving will pollute nothing and consume nothing.
Of course, there are other disadvantages to a rural address. When my wife and I were still working, every winter was a death-defying struggle. Several days a month we would risk our lives as we set out on snow and ice covered roads. Fortunately, in forty years there was only one serious ice-related accident and no one was hurt. We were lucky.
Yet, besides the rural solitude, there is an advantage to a place in the country. You can grow some of you own food--and we always have.
Part Two: Growing Your Own Food.
The advantage of raising a large vegetable garden is not that you save a great deal of money. You probably save a little, but not enough to be worth bothering with. The advantages are that you get much better food, and get it more sustainably. The average American meal has been hauled 1,400 miles. Some of it goes by rail, but most of it is shipped via refrigerated diesel trucks. This is a very fuel-intensive way of obtaining our vegetables, and some day this fuel won’t be available. We can respond by shipping more by rail, which is how we used ship this food. But much of it will have to be produced locally, so we may as well begin the culture of food self-sufficiency now. Iowa is a net food exporting region. What we mostly export is meat and corn fed to animals to produce that meat, although we also grow soybeans eaten by both humans and animals. But the fruits and vegetables eaten by most Iowans are grown in California, Texas, and Mexico.
Before telling you why the things you grow will be better, let me explain why they won’t be cheaper. America already has the cheapest and most abundant food supply in the world. The only Americans who have problems buying enough food are those with little or no income, or those who pay an absurdly high percentage of their income on housing or medicine. Americans spend a lower proportion of their income on food than any country in the world. If you doubt this, visit any country in Europe. Whether you buy prepared food or groceries, every meal costs about twice what you would pay in the U.S. Not all parts of the U.S. have the same prices. Food in large cities like New York will be pricier, and the same pattern holds in Europe. But on average, food costs double in Europe.
There are many reasons why we have cheap food. One reason is the U.S. has 30% of the world’s arable land and less than 5% of the world’s people. America has exported food for over 200 years. Another reason is that America was the first to industrialize its agriculture and the first to establish colleges of agricultural technology. We also have the kind of terrain where large scale farming operations are possible. One wheat farmer in Kansas can grow enough wheat to feed 200-400 people, and our livestock production is also highly industrialized. Yet there is another reason why food is cheap. Our vegetables are grown in places like California and Texas where immigrant labor toils to harvest food at much lower wages than are paid to most of the people who eat it. This is a national shame and should be corrected, yet if and when it is corrected, food will cost more—not less. Also, the large farming operations in the Central Valley of California are irrigated by water that is provided by the government at less than its true cost, and that may not be sustainable much longer anyway. So while the American food supply is cheap, it is not without problems. It is produced at a high fuel cost, a high environmental cost, and in the case of immigrant labor, a high social cost. Our other problem is that industrialization of the food supply has given us foods that are increasingly unappetizing, unhealthy, and even unsafe to eat.
An article in the Sep 2005 issue of Life Extension Magazine pointed out that most American vegetables have only about half the nutritional value of food grown a generation ago. As plant breeders have selectively bred vegetables for high yield, for a firm texture that makes them easier to ship, and for bright color that makes them attractive to buyers, they have also bred out some of the flavor and vitamin content. The same chemicals in a plant that provide flavor also provide most of the vitamins. So if the tomato you buy is as firm as a tennis ball, then it probably tastes like a tennis ball and has about as many vitamins as a tennis ball.
Another problem is that commercial production of fruits and vegetables relies on chemical fertilizer, so it’s not likely that these foods have much mineral content. Dr. Joel Wallach, a longtime advocate of mineral supplements, says that whenever the same crop is repeated year after year, the soil becomes depleted of minerals in just a couple of decades. Most American crop land has been tilled for at least a century and some for over 300 years. As soil becomes depleted, farmers add fertilizer, but all they add is nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and occasionally calcium. That’s just four minerals—but the human body needs at least thirty minerals, according to Dr. Wallach. Using animal waste provides these minerals, but the commercial products do not. Dr. Wallach claims that Americans have much more serious health problems from mineral shortage than from vitamin shortage. I take a multi-mineral supplement every day, but I still prefer to eat food with a normal mineral content because the supplements I take will address only those needs which we have thus far identified. Natural food can provide a lot of things which we probably need, but do not yet know that we need.
Commercial production also relies on chemical weed control and pest control. Most pesticides are nerve poisons which kill insects on contact and frequently injure farm workers exposed to them. So why would it be safe for humans to eat this stuff?
Buying from local, organic growers can reduce the number of miles your food has been trucked, can limit your exposure to pesticides, and can give you food with a normal mineral content. But as for vitamins and taste, buying local may not help much. Why? Because small, local growers have the same dilemma as the large commercial operations. To make a profit, they need to plant cultivars that mature quickly, yield heavily, and that are firm enough to be trucked. So they end up planting the same varieties of “tennis ball” tomatoes as the commercial growers. If you want good tasting, nutritious food, you have to grow it yourself. And even the seed you plant will have to be ordered from a catalogue, because your local garden shop probably won’t even stock any varieties worth eating. Since sugar enhanced varieties of sweet corn were introduced, most young adults have never tasted an ear of corn that actually tastes like corn. If you want to know what sweet corn used to taste like, plant a patch of Early Golden Bantam, or Iochief. Then grill it slowly, in the husk. Your barbecue guests will secretly feed your steak to your dog and stand in line to get more corn.
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