Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

(Tina Sui) #1
time begins 343

cents per family member, per meal—probably less than I spent in the
years when I qualified for food stamps. Of course, I now had the luxury of
land for growing food to supplement our purchases. But it wasn’t a lot of
land: 3,524 square feet of tilled beds gave us all our produce—that’s a
forty-by-twenty-two-foot spread, per person. (It felt a lot bigger when we
were weeding it.) We appreciate our farm’s wooded mountainsides for
hiking and the rare morel foray—and for our household water supply—
but in the main, one doesn’t eat a nature preserve. Adding up the land
occupied by our fruit trees, berry bushes, and the pasture grazed by our
poultry brings our land- use total for nutritional support to about a quarter
acre—still a modest allotment. Our main off- farm purchases for the year
were organic grain for animal feed, and the 300 pounds of fl our required
for our daily bread. To put this in perspective, a good wheat fi eld yields
1,600 pounds of flour per acre. In total, for our grain and fl our, pastured
meats and goods from the farmers’ market, and our own produce, our
family’s food footprint for the year was probably around one acre.
By contrast, current nutritional consumption in the U.S. requires an
average of 1.2 cultivated acres for every citizen—4.8 acres for a family of
four. (Among other things, it takes space to grow corn syrup for that hypo-
thetical family’s 219 gallons of soda.) These estimates become more
meaningful when placed next to another prediction: in 2050, the amount
of U.S. farmland available per citizen will be only 0.6 acres. By the num-
bers, the hypothetical family has change in the cards. By any measure,
ours had discovered a way of eating that was more resourceful than I ever
could have predicted.
In the coming year, I decided, I would plant fewer tomatoes, and more
flowers. If we didn’t have quite such a big garden, if we took a vacation to
the beach this summer, we’d do that thanks to our friends at the farmers’
market. The point of being dedicated locavores for some prescribed
length of time, I now understand, is to internalize a trust in one’s own
foodshed. It’s natural to get panicky right off the bat, freaking out about
January and salad, thinking we could never ever do it. But we did. With-
out rationing, skipping a meal, buying a corn- fed Midwesternburger or
breaking our vows of exclusivity with local produce, we lived inside our
own territory for one good year of food life.

Free download pdf