Obviously, if you live in Manhattan, your child can't have chickens. But I'll wager you're within walking distance of a farmer's market where you can make the acquaintance of some farmers and buy what's in season. (I have friends in Manhattan who actually garden--on rooftops, and in neighborhood community plots.) In recent years nearly three thousand green markets have sprung up across the country, giving more than a hundred thousand farmers a place to sell their freshly harvested, usually organic produce to a regular customer base. In some seven hundred communities, both rural and urban (including inner-city New York), thousands of Americans are supporting their local food economies by signing up with Community-Supported Agriculture, a system that lets farmers get paid at planting time for produce that they then deliver weekly to their subscribers until year's end. Thousands of other communities have food cooperatives that specialize at least in organic goods, if not local ones, and promote commodities (such as bulk flours, cereals, oils, and spices) that minimize energy costs for packaging and shipping. Wherever you are, if you have a grocery store, you'll find something in there that is in season and hasn't spent half its life in a boxcar. The way to find out is to ask. If every U.S. consumer would earmark just ten dollars a month for local items, the consequences would be huge.
I realize there are deep, traditional divisions of class between white bread and whole wheat. I grew up among many people who would feel uncomfortable saying the word organic out loud. But I know I am witnessing a reordering of tradition when some of my rural Virginia neighbors who've heretofore grown, and chewed, tobacco become comfortable saying (and growing) "Chardonnay" and "Merlot grape." A dear friend of mine who has gardened for over six decades using the fertilizers and pesticides recommended by her farming father and husband, while they lived, confided to me not long ago that she'd secretly gone organic. (Her tomatoes that summer were some of her best ever.) It's clear that this movement is reaching across class lines, when farmers' markets redeem more than $100 million in food stamps each year. Community food-security initiatives in many areas are also working to link organic farmers with food banks and school lunch programs. Growing and eating are both infused with new politics.
Before anyone rules out eating locally and organically because it seems expensive, I'd ask him or her to figure in the costs paid outside the store: the health costs, the land costs, the big environmental Visa bill that sooner or later comes due. It's easy to notice that organic vegetables cost more than their chemically reared equivalents, but that difference is rarely the one consumers take home. A meal prepared at home from whole, chemical-free ingredients costs just pennies on the dollar paid for the highly processed agribusiness products that most Americans eat at restaurants or heat up in the microwave nearly every day. For every dollar we send to a farmer, fisherman, or rancher, we send between three and four to the shippers, processors, packagers, retailers, and advertisers. And there are countless other costs for that kind of food. Our history of overtaking the autonomy and economies of small countries with our large corporations, the wars and campaigns we wage to maintain our fossil-fuel dependency--these have finally brought us costs beyond our wildest fears. Cancer is expensive, too, as are topsoil loss and species extinction. The costs of global warming will bring us eventually to our knees. When I have to explain to my kids someday that, yes, back at the turn of the century we did know we were starting to cause catastrophic changes in the planet's climate that might end their lives prematurely, do I have to tell them we just couldn't be bothered to alter our convenience-food habits?
It doesn't, in principle, take more time to buy a local peach than a world-weary banana, and cooking from whole ingredients is not prohibitively time-consuming, either. As a working mother I am possessive of my time; I have to log in hours on my job--about forty a week--my spouse does the same, and our kids require of us the usual amount of kid-attention. But sometimes our family outings involve picking apples. I can peel the fruit and cook it into pies, jam, and purees for flavoring yogurt while I listen to the news on the radio or hear about my kids' day at school. Like many busy families, we cook in quantity on the weekends and freeze portions for easy midweek dinners. And we've befriended some fascinating microbes that will stay up all night in our kitchen making yogurt, feta, neufchatel, and sourdough bread without adult supervision. (I think copulation is involved, but we're open-minded.) Gardening is the best way I know to stay fit and trim, so during garden season, when it's up to me to make the earth move, I don't waste hours at the gym. Eating this way requires organization and skills more than time. Our great-grandmas did all this, and they may not have had other employment, but they did have to skin hogs for shoe leather, cut stove wood, sew everybody's clothes, and make the soap to wash them. Sheesh. My kitchen's on Easy Street.
It seems to me that giving up junk foods and jet-lagged vegetables is something like giving up smoking: It takes some discipline at first, but in the long run it's hard to see the minus sign in the equation. If there's anyone left who still thinks eating organically is a bland, granola-crunching affair, he or she must have missed the boat back around midmorning in the Age of Aquarius. The movement has grown up. Most Europeans think we're fools to eat some of the tasteless gunk that passes for food in our supermarkets. The Italians who pioneered Slow Food have forged a conscientious movement for preserving farms and the culture of unique, sustainable foods, but their starting point was pure epicurean disgust with fast food and watery, transported vegetables. Now that I've gotten into local eating I can't quit, because I've inadvertently raised children who are horrified by the taste of a store-bought tomato. Health is an issue, too: My growing girls don't need the hormones and toxins that lace American food in regulated quantities (the allowable doses are more about economic feasibility than about proven safety). But that is only part of the picture. Objecting to irresponsible agriculture for reasons of your personal health is a bit like objecting to having a nuclear power plant in your backyard for reasons of your view. My own two children are the smallest part of the iceberg. The millions of children in sub-Saharan Africa and other places now facing famine and historically unprecedented climatic extremes because of global warming--they are the rest of the iceberg.
Developing an intimate relationship with the processes that feed my family has brought me surprising personal rewards. I've tasted heirloom vegetables with poetic names--Mortgage Lifter tomato, Moon and Stars watermelon--whose flavors most never will know because they turn to pulp and vinegar in a boxcar. I've learned how to look a doe-goat right in the weird horizontal pupil of her big brown eye, sit down and extract her milk, and make feta cheese. (Step 1 is the hardest.) I've learned that with an unbreakable jar and the right music, a gang of kids can render butter from cream in eleven minutes flat. I've discovered a kind of citrus tree that withstands below-zero temperatures, almost extinct today but commonly grown by farm wives a hundred years ago. I've learned that the best-tasting vegetables on God's green earth are the ones our garden-wise foremothers bred for consumption, not hard travel. And I seem to be raising kids who like healthy food. When Lily streaks through the crowd at the farmer's market shouting, "Mama, look, they have broccoli, let's get a lot!"--well, heads do turn. Women have asked me, "How do you get one like that?"
I'm not going to tell you it's a done deal. If there were a bin of Twinkies at the farmer's market, the broccoli would go to rot. Once upon a time, when I had my first baby, I believed that if I took care not to train her to the bad habits of sugar, salt, and fat, she would grow up not wanting those things. That delusion lasted exactly one year, until someone put a chocolate-frosted birthday confection in front of my sugar-free child and--how can I say this delicately?--she put her face in the cake. We humans crave sugar, fat, and salt because we evolved through thousands of years in which these dietary components were desperately scarce; those members of the tribe who most successfully glutted on them, when they found them, would store up the body fat to live through lean times and bear offspring. And now w
e've organized the whole enchilada around those latent biochemical passions--an early hominid's dream come true, a health-conscious mom's nightmare. If my cupboards were full of junk food, it would vanish, with no help from mice. We have our moments of abandon--Halloween, I've learned, is inescapable without a religious conversion--but most of the time my kids get other treats they've come to love. Few delicacies compare with a yellow-pear tomato, delicately sun-warmed and sugary, right off the vine. When I send the kids out to pick berries or fruit, I have to specify that at least some are supposed to go in the bucket. My younger daughter adores eating small, raw green beans straight off the garden trellis; I thought she was nuts till I tried them myself.
The soreness in my hamstrings at the end of a hard day of planting or hoeing feels good in a way that I can hardly explain--except to another gardener, who will know exactly the sweet ache I mean. My children seem to know it, too, and sleep best on those nights. I've found the deepest kind of physical satisfaction in giving my body's muscles, senses, and attentiveness over to the purpose for which they were originally designed: the industry of feeding that body and keeping it alive. I suspect that most human bodies have fallen into such remove from that original effort, we've precipitated an existential crisis that requires things like shopping, overeating, and adrenaline-rush movies to sate that particular body hunger.
And so I hope our family's efforts at self-provision will not just improve the health and habitat of my children but also offer a life that's good for them, and knowledge they need. I wish all children could be taught the basics of agriculture in school along with math and English literature, because it's surely as important a subject as these. Most adults my age couldn't pass a simple test on what foods are grown in their home counties and what month they come into maturity. In just two generations we've passed from a time when people almost never ate a fruit out of season to a near-universal ignorance of what seasons mean. One icy winter I visited a friend in Manhattan who described the sumptuous meal she was making for us, including fresh raspberries. "Raspberries won't grow in the tropics," I mused. "And they sure don't keep. So where would they come from in the dead of winter?" Without blinking she answered, "Zabar's!"
Apparently the guys running the show don't know much about agriculture, either, because the strategy of our nation is to run on a collision course with the possibility of being able to feed ourselves decently (or at all) in twenty years' time. I can't see how any animal could be this stupid; surely it's happening only because humans no longer believe food comes from dirt. Well, it does. Farmers are not just guys in overalls, part of the charming scenery of yesteryear; they are the technicians who know how to get teensy little seeds to turn into the stuff that comprises everything, and I mean everything, we eat. Is anybody paying attention? For every farm that's turned over to lawns and housing developments, a farmer is sent to work at the Nissan plant or the Kmart checkout line. What's lost with that career move is specific knowledge of how to gain food from a particular soil type, in a particular climate--wisdom that took generations to grow.
I want to protect my kids against a dangerous ignorance of what sustains them. When they help me dig and hoe the garden, plant corn and beans, later on pick them, and later still preserve the harvest's end, compost our scraps, and then turn that compost back into the garden plot the following spring, they are learning important skills for living and maintaining life. I have also observed that they appreciate feeling useful. In fact, nearly all the kids I've ever worked with on gardening projects get passionate about putting seeds in the ground, to the point of earnest territoriality.
"Now," I ask them when we're finished, "what will you do if you see somebody over here tromping around or riding a bike over your seedbeds?"
"We'll tell them to get outta our vegables!" shouted my most recent batch of five-year-old recruits to this plot of mine for improving the world one vegable at a time.
Maria Montessori was one of the first child advocates to preach the wisdom of allowing children to help themselves and others, thereby learning to feel competent and self-assured. Most of the teachers and parents I know agree, and they organize classrooms and homes that promote this. But in modern times it's not easy to construct opportunities for kids to feel very useful. They can pick up their toys or take out the trash or walk the dog, but all of these things have an abstract utility. How useful is it to help take care of a dog whose main purpose, as far as they can see, is to be taken care of?
Growing food for the family's table is concretely useful. Nobody needs to explain how a potato helps the family. Bringing in a basket of eggs and announcing, "Attention, everybody: FREE BREAKFAST" is a taste of breadwinning that most kids can attain only in make-believe. I'm lucky I could help make my daughter's dream come true. My own wish is for world enough and time that every child might have this: the chance to count some chickens before they hatch.
The One-Eyed Monster, and Why I Don't Let Him In
Nobody ever gets killed at our house," begins a song by Charlie King, and it continues with a litany of other horrors--"no one gets shot at, run over, or stabbed, / nobody goes up in flames"--that you'd surely agree you wouldn't want to see in your house, either, until you realize he's discussing what routinely happens on the screen that most people happily host in their living rooms. Maybe you have one in yours, and maybe you don't, but I'm with Charlie. People very rarely get killed at our house, and I'm trying to keep it that way.
The subject isn't entirely closed, of course, because we are not Amish. We are what you'd call a regular American family, surrounded by regular America, and I believe in raising children who express themselves freely. This they do. The other night they raised the question once again of whether it might not be time for us to join the twenty-first century and every other upright-walking family we know of, at least in this neighborhood, and get cable TV.
"Why are you asking me?" I said, pretending to be dismayed. "Do I look like the dictator of this house?"
My efforts to stall weren't fooling anybody. I am not the dictator of this house, but I am the designated philosopher-king of its television-watching habits. That is to say, when my subjects become restless on the topic of TV, as they do from time to time, I sit down once again and explain to them in the kindest of tones why it is in their best interest to drop it.
But this time I'd been blindsided. Teenager and kindergartner were in league, with perhaps even the sympathies of my husband, though he was precluded from offering an opinion by his diplomatic ties. But the indentured serfs were fomenting a small rebellion.
"OK, look," I said to my serfs. "Watching TV takes time. When are you going to do it?"
They answered this without blinking: Evening. Morning. Prime time. Only when something good is on.
Which was just what I was afraid of. I explained that while I could understand there were probably some good things on TV that they were missing, they would have to miss out on other things in order to watch them, and when I looked around at what everybody was doing in our house, I couldn't really see what would give. I asked them, particularly my teenager (who likes to watch Daria and MTV at other people's houses, and whom I immediately sniffed out as our Robespierre here), to spend a few days paying careful attention to the hours of her life and exactly how she spent them. Kind of like keeping a calorie record, only with minutes. If she could come up with two expendable hours per day, I'd consider letting her spend them with the one-eyed monster.
She agreed to this, and at that moment I knew I'd already won. Here is what she does with her time: goes to school, does homework, practices the upright bass, talks with friends on the phone, eats dinner with the family, does more homework, reads for fun, hangs out with friends at their houses or ours, works out, listens to music, jams on the electric bass, tries to form an all-girl band, maintains various pets, participates in family outings, and gets exactly enough sleep. (In summertime the routine is different but the subject is moot, because then we live beyond the reac
h of cables, in a tiny house with no room for a TV and antique electricity that likely wouldn't support one anyway.) Her time card, in short, is full. Friends, exercise, music--not one minute of these would she give up, nor would I want her to. Even hanging out with friends--especially that--should not be sacrificed for solitary confinement with a talking box. If she wants to watch MTV at a friend's house, fine, that's their way of socializing--at our house her pals like to beat on my conga drums. And while she might have offered to trade in some hours of math homework, she knew better. Everything else she simply likes too much to cut out of her day.
So the discussion was shelved for the time being. I intend to keep a firm hand on at least this one aspect of my kingdom. To me, that ubiquitous cable looks an awful lot like the snake that batted its eyes at Eve.
Probably I shouldn't use such a morally loaded metaphor. I don't mean to equate my freedom from TV with freedom from sin, or to suggest that it confers on me any special virtue, though others generally interpret the discussion that way. If ever it comes up in conversation that my life is largely a TV void, people instantly get defensive about their own television-viewing habits and extol the value of the few things they like to watch (invariably citing something called the History Channel). But no defense is necessary, I promise; this is not about high-culture snobbery. If you knew me, you'd know there's almost nothing that is categorically beneath my dignity: I can get teary-eyed over a song about family reunions on the country radio station; I love to borrow my teenager's impractical shoes; on a dance floor I'm more at home with salsa and hiphop than the tango; I have been known to do the Macarena. At a party more recent than I care to admit (I was definitely past forty), my friends voted me Most Likely to Dance on the Table. Before I dig this hole any deeper, why don't you just take my word for it? I'm not too high-minded for television, I really just don't like it. It's a taste I never got to acquire, having been raised by parents who made it painfully clear that life offered no bigger waste of time than watching the "boob tube" (one of the rare slang terms that've become more apt with the years). From there I proceeded to live an adult life with lots to do and very little cash, so that purposefully setting out to pay money for a time-wasting device just never crossed my mind. I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?