304 animal, vegetable, miracleadvice of a different ilk from the duct- tape-and-plastic response to terror-
ist attacks, or the duck- and-cover drills of my childhood. We now have
looming threats larger than any cold- hearted human’s imagination. Global
climate change has created dramatic new weather patterns, altered the
migratory paths of birds, and shifted the habitats of disease- carrying or-
ganisms, opening the season on catastrophes we are ill- prepared to pre-
dict.
“It’s not a matter of ‘maybe’ anymore,” my friend from D.C. told me
over the phone. A professional photographer, she had been to New Or-
leans several months after Hurricane Katrina to document the grim de-
mise of a piece of our nation we’d assumed to be permanent. “I’m starting
to feel disaster as a real thing—that it’s not if but when. And I feel help-
less. When they say you should be keeping that much food on hand, all I
can think to do is go to Costco and buy a bunch of cans! Can’t I do better
than that?” We made a date for the end of next tomato season: she would
drive down for a girlfriend weekend and we could can stuff together. To-
mato therapy.
Our family hadn’t been bracing for the sky to fall, but we now had the
prescribed amount of food on hand. I felt thankful for our uncommon
good luck. Or if not luck, then the following of our strange bliss through
the labors it took to get us here, like the industrious ants of Aesop’s fable
working hard to prepare because it’s their nature. Our luck was our prox-
imity to land where food grows, and having the means to acquire it.
Technically, most U.S. citizens are that lucky: well more than half live
within striking distance of a farmers’ market (some estimates put it at 70
percent), and most have the cash to buy some things beyond their next
meal. One of those things could be a thirty- pound bag of tomatoes, pur-
chased some Saturday in July and taken home to be turned into winter
foods. Plenty of people have freezers that are humming away at this mo-
ment to chill, among other things, some cardboard. That space could be
packed with some local zucchini and beans. Any garage or closet big
enough for two months’ worth of canned goods from Costco could stash,
instead, some bushels of potatoes, onions, and apples, purchased cheaply
in season. Even at the more upscale farmers’ markets in the D.C. area,
organic Yukon Gold potatoes run $2 a pound in late summer. A bushel