What We Talk About When We Talk About Food

One of my earliest memories is of my mom preparing and canning my baby food. Or of being stuffed into the baby backpack and trundled off to pick wild blackberries for preserved. When I begged for snacks as child, I was told to “go into the backyard and pick some beans to eat.” Modern American would sneer about my hippie upbringing, but I come from a line of extremely working class people with a strong streak of farm and ranchers in the mix. The idea that you understand where your food comes from seems like the most natural and important thing to me. If you were to try to explain the concept of food pressed into nugget form or prepackaged for the freezer case to anyone from three generations back, they might just laugh in your face.

The hill behind our home...

What we talk about when we talk about food now is class. We say “organic,” but we mean “not sprayed with chemicals that most people cannot pronounce.” We say “heirloom,” but we mean “the strongest of the plants that can still breed with each other.” We say “free range,” and “grass-fed,” but we mean “the way nature intended things to be.” When we talk about factory farming and food sold in bulk, we talk about trading substance for volume. When we talk about convenience foods, we are talking about freeing up time better spent feeding ourselves for entertainment time.

This isn’t meant to be a lecture, but when it is easier for someone in a lower-income neighborhood to get a candy bar and fast food than it is for them to get a fresh piece of fruit, something is tremendously wrong. It’s a lot easier to microwave a can of food or buy a hamburger from McDonalds than it is to eat a salad or make a meal, but what’s the cost? When I began to travel, I noticed that the vast majority of the world does not have this type of relationship with their food – we seem to be alone in the desire to detach from this most basic need.

When Jake and I first found our home on 23rd Street, a little voice inside of me was screaming “A garden! You can finally have a garden!” It was at this new home that we began semi-regular treks to the farmer’s markets, co-op groceries, and basically recommitted ourselves to treating the act of eating with the respect it deserves. Respect, of course, that came with a price tag. It’s not easy schlepping bags of heavy veg up our hill, and more than a few runs of bruised fruit has resulted in bright-red strawberry juice stains on my clothes. But we eat better, we feel better, and we spend far less than many of our friends on food.

I began plotting how to transform the side yard (what we call our backyard) of our little home into an urban farm – something that could sustain us in both the Spring and Fall planting times. Heirloom seeds were purchased, fertile herbs were sequestered in our back office (where they’d have the benefit of the light and warmth), and plans were drawn for planter boxes that my younger brother (also named Jake) has been legendary for building from untreated planks of redwood.

In just a few weeks, after our very brief frost period (in our zone, the frost starts in late December and lasts until mid-January), a short time after my seedling starters begin to poke their shoots out of their egg cartons, we’ll embark on the great urban farming experiment.

Words cannot begin to express how excited this little experiment makes me, and how close to my fairly back-to-the-land upbringing this makes me feel.