If this effort were just a hobby garden, I would wholly agree with the assertion that the deaths of several squirrels presents a waste unbalanced by the return of a handful of veggies, but this has never been about a few summer tomatoes, half cared for in a pot on the porch.  It is not an idyll or lark to mark the time while the weather’s warm.

For me, this is about the future of food, or at least what agriculture must look like, in part, if we want any squirrels left and anyone to appreciate them.  We each have to achieve some level of food independence from industrial farming if we really want any say in how the entities that control what we eat produce those goods.  And we have to distribute the responsibility for feeding billions of people among billions of people, because concentrating that food production concentrates waste and encourages environmental, human, and economic degradation.

I find a few critiques interesting and emblematic of the food debate.  First, I have been talking about killing insects for months, in a variety of ways, such as luring them into bowls of sugary beer so they will drown, crushing them, and releasing predators in the yard that will catch them and eat them alive — yet no one has spoken out on behalf of the bugs, which are no less alive than the squirrels.  They’re just not mammals, and so harder to relate to because we cannot see ourselves in them, or don’t find them as aesthetically pleasing as, say, a cuddly squirrel on whom we can project human qualities.  Secondly, there is a presumption that just because someone elects not to eat animals, somehow their food choices are clean and guiltless, with no impact on the environment.  Yet, industrial agriculture results in massive environmental impacts that kill thousands of animals of all kinds — insect, amphibian, fish, and mammals like squirrels and things even cuter and more kin to us than that.  Lastly, there is the suggestion that if I had eaten the squirrels, their deaths would somehow have not been wasted, and instead would have had purpose as their meat and organs made their way through my gut.  No less dead, but somehow more justified than killing that same squirrel so that I can choose to eat a squash or a tomato.  This is a self-serving rationalization that allows us to eat meat without feeling bad but not kill so we can eat something else.  And it is argued in surprising disregard of the wants of the squirrel, which would probably find neither option satisfying.  The squirrels I killed will nourish the soil, and the environment, but not me directly, and this, for some, is not okay.  Don’t kill it unless you’re going to eat it.  Well, why not have the same policy for grasshoppers and pill bugs and flies?

These critiques come in part because there is the presumption that I don’t have to eat from my yard because I can just go to the store and buy what I’m trying to grow, thus making my effort invalid or odd and the deaths of a few squirrels completely unjustified because going to the market doesn’t result in the deaths of those same squirrels.  But it definitely results in the deaths of other squirrels and other animals by supporting the large-scale, commercial agriculture that devastates the world to stock those shelves with food so that I don’t have to grow my own, so that I don’t have to kill those few squirrels.  It is only an illusion that a head of lettuce or an apple or a beet is a vegetarian dish considering the amount of dead animals that likely went into its successful raising and harvesting.

Generations past have so degraded the ecology in the neighborhood I call home that the squirrels flourish in numbers that can’t be supported by the local environment, and so they have become dependent on humans.  In other words, they’ve become unbalanced, they’ve become pests, and because they exist in such a way they make any effort to be self-sustaining near impossible.  Does this mean that each year I’ll start the season by killing squirrels?  I sure hope not, because for me, I recognize and live with the conflict it poses to my ideals, my aspirations.  I don’t even want to kill the grasshoppers.  I have always liked grasshoppers and found them interesting.  But until the ecology sings a little bit better here, killing a few squirrels might be a last-ditch option a time or two again.  Or maybe I’ll find another way, for which I’m intently searching.  Or maybe next year I’ll eat them, instead, as well as the bunnies that gnaw my carrots, and we’ll see what kind of heat I take then.

I hate that the squirrels died, but I want to eat food I know, with a history I recognize.  I want unquestionable food, squash I don’t have to wonder about where it’s been as I use it for a base in baby food for my daughter.  She’ll take her first bites in a few months, and I’ll damn sure know where at least that first meal comes from.  Last year, I stuffed my pregnant wife with strawberries for nine months only to hear on NPR shortly after she delivered that those same California strawberries were covered in toxic pesticide residue that increases the risk of miscarriage — a situation I refuse to repeat.  Yeah, the squirrels died, but I can own that impact and grow from it like I can’t do with items bought at a market, whether its super or farmer’s.

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.