We had my folks over for dinner a few days ago. I served up a Caesar salad with Husky cherry tomatoes from the garden, which went well alongside my wife’s excellent meat loaf and baked mac and cheese. But my mom one-upped us with her homegrown contribution: a pie stuffed full of Anna Apples from the tree in her and my dad’s front yard.
The tree produces phenomenally well for only having been in the ground two seasons in an area of San Diego that gets no frost and about as many chill hours as you’d expect for “America’s Finest City”. But the Anna likes heat, having originated in Israel, and doesn’t require the dose of cold that most apples do to flower and set fruit. This season the tree nearly bent itself to the ground with hundreds of huge apples. In the winter I’ll try my hand at grafting with a few branches from this tree. We have two Galas that are doing better this year but aren’t nearly as fruitful.
Mom left us the pie, and I’ve been eating it all week and thinking about the community benefit of home-growing. Civilizations of the past have always organized around the production of and exchange of food with neighbors. It’s only recently that people have become completely detached from such sustenance networking, and, for the majority, completely lost the capability of producing their own food. Despite this distance, we still come together around food — it’s just not food we’ve had a hand in. Why not make it something we’ve grown and shared? There’s a lot of potential in such exchanges, both in terms of relationship building and quality food production. Maybe one yard’s good for squash but not for apples, one is all shade and another all sun, maybe one person has a green thumb but no yard and another space but can’t grow. In each relationship there is potential for cooperation and food. Figuring out such relationships involves getting to know people nearby, which is good for the neighborhood. And, like most things, increasing the amount of homegrown food (the most local kind) is easier and more fun with friends and family.
There is a certain autonomy for a community that produces part of its own food cooperatively. It means that for some portion of a meal people can opt out of the market or the restaurant for their food — two places that often offer little transparency in terms of how the food is made, where it comes from, and how it is grown. Without home-growing there is little chance of changing the practices that are problematic in industrial food production, such as heavy use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides, because the industry has an ace: People have to eat. And it is hard for people to hold accountable an industry they rely on to live. Much like pharmaceuticals. People are as likely to stop taking their meds as they are to stop eating. Protesting a practice while funding it is not effective.
But it’s not all about protest gardening. Sometimes you just get good pie.
Love this post-especially the emphasis on community. You’re right, the more that we grow and eat together, the tighter that communities will be.
This post is inspiring me to go to the Hillcrest Farmer’s market. You know, for the first time in 2.5 years.