306 animal, vegetable, miracle
vested our own. The value- added products, our several hundred jars of
tomato sauce and other preserved foods, plus Lily’s full- year egg contribu-
tion, would add more than 50 percent to the cash value of our garden’s
production.
That’s retail value, of course, much more than we would have earned
from selling our goods wholesale (as most farmers do), but it’s the actual
monetary value to us, saved from our annual food budget by means of our
own animal and vegetable production and processing. We also had saved
by eating mostly at home, doing our own cooking, but that isn’t fi gured
into the tally. Our costs, beyond seeds, chicken feed, and our own labor,
had been minimal. Our second job in the backyard, as we had come to
think of it, was earning us the equivalent of some $7,500 of annual in-
come.
That’s more than a hill of beans. In my younger days I spent a few
years as a freelance journalist before I hit that mark. And ironically, it now
happens to be the median annual income of laborers who work in this
country’s fields and orchards. We who get to eat the literal fruits of our
labors are the fortunate ones.
I harbored some doubts that our family of four could actually consume
(or give away as gifts) this dollar- value of food in a year. But that is only
$1.72 per person, per meal; that we’d spent that much and more was con-
firmed by the grocery receipts I’d saved from the year before we began
eating locally. As I sat at my desk leafing through those old receipts, they
carried me down an odd paper trail through a time when we’d routinely
bought things like bagged gala app org, ntp panda pff, and orng valnc
4#bg (I have no idea, but it set me back $1.99), with little thought for the
places where these things had grown, if in fact they had grown at all.
We were still going to the supermarket, but the receipts looked differ-
ent these days. In the first six months of our local year we’d spent a total
of $83.70 on organic flour (about twenty- five pounds a month) for our
daily bread and weekly pizza dough, and approximately the same amount
on olive oil. We’d spent about $5 a week on fair- trade coffee, and had also
purchased a small but steady supply of nonlocal odds and ends like ca-
pers, yeast, cashews, raisins, lasagna noodles, and certain things I consid-
ered first aid: energy bars to carry in the purse against blood sugar