21st Century Homesteading: Why Grow Your Own Food?

(Page 2 of 6)

February/March 2007
By Harvey Ussery 
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Concerns about food quality. It’s hard to believe there are people who — having the choice between meals prepared “from scratch” with basic ingredients, or prepackaged or franchise fare — would prefer the latter. But there are. Ellen and I once gave one of our roasting chickens to an elderly neighbor. “Oh, my!” she later assured us, “that was chicken like we used to eat when I was growing up.” But when we offered her another, she sadly declined: “No, my family didn’t like it — too much flavor.”

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Perhaps an interesting experiment for many people would be the following: For six weeks, eat anything you like — so long as it has been made from whole, unprocessed primary ingredients, and has been prepared by your own hands. Whatever your tastes at the moment, at the end of the six weeks I predict you will have a wholly different notion about what you’re looking for on your plate.

But when I think of food quality, I think not only of gustatory pleasures, but of food’s nutritional value. Judged by that standard, there is no question that the conventional American diet gets a failing grade. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s own figures indicate that the nutrients in the American food supply have been declining for decades. Many factors are at fault, from the declining levels of minerals in our soils because of our agricultural practices (more mining operation than farming) to the enormous distances we move our foods (an average of 1,500 miles from field to table), necessitating harvest before peak ripeness and peak nutritional content.

The picture gets worse when we consider processed foods. The truth is, many of the products in the supermarket today are concoctions from a narrow base of commodity ingredients that are not the nutritional equivalents of the traditional foods they replace.

Consider this food, for example, which is made up of 98 percent “water, corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil and high fructose corn syrup.” (The remaining 2 percent is the usual list of additives neither you nor I have ever heard of.) Now, pop quiz: What is this food, and what is its nutritional content?

Surely none of us would guess that this food is meant to be a replacement for whipped cream (yes, it’s Cool Whip), since none of its major ingredients ever saw the inside of a cow. And there’s no nutrition in this food other than raw calories to burn in our cells, or convert to fat. That’s in marked contrast to real cream, which is rich in fat-soluble vitamins, enzymes and the high-quality fats needed to make and maintain our cell walls, especially those in our brains and nervous systems.

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