'How to Become Food Self-Sufficient' Competition

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Now lest you snicker at the very idea of an urban family attempting to grow its own food, consider a half-page article by Bea Pixa which appeared in the May 19, 1974 San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle. The illustrated piece described—in sketchy detail—how Helga and Bill OIkowski raise "all the meat and vegetables" for six teenagers and adults on a 20 X 50-foot backyard and a small section of the roof area of their urban Berkeley, California home.

Or think about the amount of nourishment that might be harvested on a year-round basis from the backyard ecosystem that Jim DeKorne is currently describing in a series of MOTHER articles.

And then there's the $400 greenhouse that Clifford Ridley attached to his home out in Boulder, Utah and in which he claims he grows all the vegetables his five-member family can eat every month of the year . . . for a total annual cost of $100.

Or the rumors we keep hearing about the Community Technology Project in either Washington, D.C. or Philadelphia. According to unverified reports, someone in that project produced 1,000 pounds of trout in a tank located in the basement of a big city apartment house.

And don't forget Michael Dillon—the Britisher now living in Athens, Georgia—who raises the equivalent of a 175-foot-long garden row on a six-foot-tall rooftop tower (see Bits And Pieces, MOTHER NO. 28).

Still not convinced? Then you haven't seen the $4.00 book, How to Grow More Vegetables (than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine). It's by John Jeavons, Ecology Action of the Midpeninsula, 2225 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, California 94306. Get a copy, read what Alan Chadwick has done with the Bio-dynamic/French Intensive method of gardening . . . and then ponder for a few days.

Let's see now. What would happen if we used Chadwick's ideas in Ridley's greenhouse? Or tried Dillon's towers on the Olkowski roof? Or backed up a DeKorne-type ecosystem with all the sprouts and herbs and yogurt and other do-it-yourself provender that can be grown right in the kitchen? Or . . . .

So all right. So there does seem to be a real possibility for nutritional self-sufficiency for the average American family when we come at the problem from the production end. Now let's turn our attention for just a minute to the processing and consumption segments of the equation.

How much does it needlessly cost the planet every time our society ships a chicken from Arkansas to Chicago, cuts it up, cooks the bird, freezes it into a TV dinner . . . and then hauls that dinner to Cincinnati for sale to a consumer? And what does it cost the planet for that consumer to heat the meal for a half hour . . . and then dispose of the aluminum tray and the cardboard box it came in? What does it cost in terms of money, squandered nutrition, poor health, gasoline, steel for trucks, concrete for cold-storage warehouses, etc?

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