gathering

Yard by Yard: Reclaiming our food, by the bite

Late in May, volunteers across Milwaukee County rolled up their sleeves, grabbed shovels and dug in the dirt. 

The goal of The Great Milwaukee Victory Garden Blitz is a simple one: creating as many  backyard, front yard, rooftop and patio gardens as possible. The aim of the Victory Garden Initiative is equally simple: to help facilitate people growing their own food.

The consequences of that simple act, however, are widespread, complex and profound.

Control over the food we eat is an elusive concept these days. While you can drive through the countryside and see acre after acre planted with soybeans and corn and fields dotted with cows, the fact is that food is a global enterprise and that many of us consume a diet that is, intentionally or not, international.

A single fast-food burger might contain ingredients from several continents; a bag of chips or can of beans the same. 

We’re becoming aware of this; and more and more people are paying attention to the food miles involved in what they eat.

But the geography of food production is just one way we have lost control over much of what we eat.

Large corporations control much of the food supply. Megastores promising low prices have turned to overseas suppliers for the natural and organic ingredients more people are seeking. And on the farm, a misplaced trust in the efficiency of scale has pushed out small family farmers and blighted the interdependent economies of rural America. We don’t really have control over the food we eat.

On small farms across the world, farmers face numerous challenges beyond the weather as they try to subsist. Monopolies threaten the international seed market and global giants like Monsanto vigorously push GMO seeds - seeds for which they hold the patents.

Vía Campesina, an international farmers confederation, has called Monsanto an enemy of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty because of its efforts to control the supply of seeds that farmers can plant. But there are other enemies, a tag team of giant corporations fighting for ever more control over our farmland.

Building a simple four-foot by eight-foot raised vegetable garden in a backyard must seem like such a small act – it’s not as though a family’s entire food needs can be met by a few baskets of produce, after all.

But it is a start. It is a five-pound bag of carrots that doesn’t need to be flown from South America; it is a supply of sweet, tart tomatoes left to vine ripen in the warmth of the sun.

And there is more we can do. We can spend our money locally, shopping at independent businesses and stores such as Outpost which are committed to supporting local farmers.

Bite by bite, we can learn to better sustain ourselves and our neighborhoods.

Dig in.

Blessing our food

It has become our routine.
At my house, as we sit down to eat a meal together, we join hands and say “blessings on our meal.” When the kids were younger, the blessing was longer and more elaborate, but it has shortened as they have grown into adolescence.
Blessings on our meal.
But those four words mean a lot to me.  Even in passing, even in this brief moment, it is a recognition of the food we eat, the men and women who grow it and the ways by which it reaches us.
Years ago, I was friends with a reporter who wrote for the newspaper I edited, who was an avid hunter. Each fall, he took his bow and arrows and went into the woods in search of deer. The hunt’s appeal to him was as much about the chance to commune with nature as it was about anything else, but he was also a good hunter, and he often returned with a deer, which he used to feed his family.
He used to say he considered it an honor to be able to hunt and he always offered thanks and blessings to nature for the gift of food.
I was fresh out of college and repulsed by the notion of hunting back then. But I readily acknowledge that his relationship with food was far more honest than mine.
He was all too aware that a sacrifice had been made to deliver him that food - something I, picking items from freezers and shelves at a grocery store, never thought much about back then.
I do think about it now.
It’s why it matters that the bin full of Honeycrisp apples at Outpost carries a photo of the Barthels in Mequon and that the maple syrup comes from a friend’s family in Northern Kettle Moraine and that some of the greens on sale come from Milwaukee’s northside Growing Power.
It’s why I worry about cheap foods grown far away and transported around the globe. I read an interesting and horrifying piece in the New York Times recently about the journey taken by frozen ground meat patties sold in large warehouse stores and some fast food restaurants. The various ingredients in a single patty might come from six or seven different suppliers both within and outside of the US. Try tracking that burger to its place of origin.
I think when we can picture the path the food has taken from the ground where it was grown and harvested to our kitchens, we can’t help but feel some gratitude to the men and women who have shared in its journey and to the world which provides us this sustenance.
And, maybe, it’ll inspire us to take a bit better care of those men and women and this precious planet.