Viewpoint: Lily’s Chickens

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The Union of Concerned Scientists notes that there are two main areas where U.S. citizens take a hoggish bite out of the world’s limited resources and fuels. First is transportation. Anybody would guess this. Area number two, and this may surprise you, is our diet. Americans have a taste for food that’s been seeded, fertilized, harvested, processed and packaged in grossly energy-expensive ways and then shipped, often refrigerated, for so many miles it might as well be green cheese from the moon. Even if you walk or bike to the store, if you come home with bananas from Ecuador, tomatoes from Holland, cheese from France and artichokes from California, you have guzzled some serious gas. This extravagance that most of us take for granted is a stunning energy boondoggle: Transporting 5 calories’ worth of strawberry from California to New York costs 435 calories of fossil fuel. The global grocery store may turn out to be the last great losing proposition of our species.

Most Americans are entangled in a car dependency not of our own making, but nobody has to eat foods out of season from Rio de Janeiro. It’s a decision we remake daily, and an unnecessary kind of consumption that I decided some time ago to try to expunge from my life. I had a head start because I grew up among farmers and have found since then that you can’t take the country out of the girl. Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve gardened, even when the only dirt I owned was a planter box on an apartment balcony. I’ve grown food through good times and bad, busy and slow, richer and poorer — especially poorer. When people protest that gardening is an expensive hobby, I suggest they go through their garden catalogs and throw out the ones that offer footwear and sundials. Seeds cost pennies apiece or less. For years I’ve grown much of what my family eats and tried to attend to the sources of the rest. As I began to understand the energy crime of food transportation, I tried to attend even harder, eliminating any foods grown on the dark side of the moon. I began asking after the processes that brought each item to my door: what people had worked where, for slave wages and with deadly pesticides; what places had been deforested; what species were being driven extinct for my cup of coffee or banana bread. It doesn’t taste so good when you think about what died going into it.

Responsible eating is not so impossible as it seems. I was encouraged in my quest by This Organic Life, a compelling book by Joan Dye Gussow that tells how, and more important, why, she aspired to and achieved vegetable self-sufficiency. She does it in her small back yard in upstate New York, challenging me to make better use of my luxuries of larger space and milder clime. Sure enough, she’s right. In the years since I started counting, I’ve found I need never put a vegetable on my table that has traveled more than an hour or so from its home ground to ours.

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