At the farmers market, my table overflows with produce. I watch an inquisitive customer as she takes a nibble of some sorrel. “It’s like lemon spinach,” I tell her. “Fabulous in a wrap, diced on tacos, or with hummus.” Her whole face puckers into a giant prune and she emphatically spits the wad of green onto the concrete floor of my booth. She wipes her mouth furiously. I fumble for a way to assuage her shock. “It’s pretty strong! You have to have some tough tastebuds for greens!” She scurries away. I stand there defeated, looking at my baskets of chickweed, purslane, perpetual spinach, and wild arugula—all workhorses in the age of climate precarity, none of which one might find in a normal grocery store. Bundles of succulent kale—which I have carefully placed forward to draw passers by—glisten at the edges of the table, and customers reach for them as jelly donuts drip down their arms. King kale is all the rage right now. Unfortunately, other farmers have caught on, and $2 is the most I can charge, even for my generous bundles. I’m doing the math. How many bundles of kale do I need to sell in order to replace the truck tire? How many more to take my kids to Payless?
I don’t know how to explain to people that we are eating a wake of destruction behind us. That our insistence on having all the things all the time, regardless of the season, is burning fossil fuels faster than we can hit “place order.” Our grocery carts are filled with items trucked in from West Coast port communities, where more than 383,000 metric tons of fruit and vegetables enter our country annually. These communities have alarming rates of health risks due to air pollution—respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and premature mortality plague poorer neighborhoods closer to port operations: ships, diesel powered equipment, and freight movement.
Most people don’t give a second thought as to whether the fruit and vegetables they purchase are in season. They want watermelon on the fourth of July, eggplant at Christmas, tomatoes year round. I take it personally. I have to—I want my kids to have a livable planet. I also understand it. I lived in cities when I was younger, and I never considered seasonality. I simply looked for the least expensive organic items at the grocery store. Now, I make it my mission to teach people about sustainable foods—those varieties that can survive without much water, that require few soil inputs, that are perennial and excellent for permaculture. I proselytize about the financial and climate benefits of growing your own produce. My city friends ask what makes a garden. I say one plant is a plant. Two plants are a garden.
My girlfriend’s eyes gleam at me. She’s sitting upright, twirling her wrist in the air, trying to describe all the flavors she is experiencing. I have infused our pot pie with rhubarb and aronia berry, and a thick cashew-miso gravy to blanket fall’s plethora of root vegetables. Every bite unleashes a waterfall of descriptive words. “It’s a mouth journey!” she declares. She’s eating heartily, as though the food is love and it’s filling a cavernous need. Hers is a hunger wrought by years of city life and its incessant speed, the breakneck pace that meant too much takeout and a recycling bin filled with Amy’s lasagna boxes. Eating this pie, she’s filled with a kind of bliss. Watching her, I am filled with meaning. I feel like a doctor, therapist, and best friend all at once. I am healing her, and she loves the medicine. That’s what we call it. “Here’s a plate of medicine!” “Enjoying that mouthful of medicine?” We do not tire of this refrain. We’re both women who endured adolescence in the 1980s, when we learned to put duct tape over our wounds. Now in our fifties, we ache to heal. One way we know how is through food.
I’m a farmitarian. That means I grow most of my own food. I also purchase food from farmers in local counties. I have a small list of things I consume with a hidden price tag—the true cost of transporting items from afar on a truck. That invisible cost is not only monetary. It also speeds up our race toward the climate precipice.
My girlfriend is a cancer survivor who has always wanted to live near trees. I am an artist and a single mother who started gardening so I could afford to feed my kids organic food. When my kids grew up and went off to college, no longer having anyone to grow for changed my whole purpose. But now, I have her to grow for.
For those of us trying to reconnect with the soil and regain lost skills, gardening is a slow and arduous journey. All the gardening books in the world cannot replace familial wisdom. When I read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a switch flipped inside of me. She writes: “For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.” All my yearning was articulated in those words. My grandfather was an avocado farmer who hailed from Sicily. He raised his family on that fruit of the gods, along with Tromboncino squash, figs, and other delicacies that grew well in Riverside, California, before it became tract housing. But he died when I was five years old. I still have a picture of me at four, picking a giant watermelon up out of his field, his gentle hands helping me. I went through my entire young adult life basically not remembering there was earth under the concrete. Enter a cataclysmic shift that changed my trajectory forever. I set off on a statewide listening endeavor, interviewing women leaders in California’s environmental justice movement. The words of Jane Williams, from California Communities against Toxics, altered my course: “Nothing is as important as our children’s health.” I was a new mother of two, breastfeeding as I interviewed her. She explained that for the first time, umbilical cord blood was being tested to show chemical body burden across all income levels and ethnicities. For the first time ever, the placenta was not able to protect our newborns. Babies no longer could be born with a clean slate, a fair chance at health. That’s when all my other dreams and ambitions faded away, as fast as day is swallowed by night. That was the day I began becoming a farmer.
Being a farmitarian has nothing to do with deprivation. Instead, it’s born from a connection too many of us fail to make—that healing our bodies will heal the planet, and conversely, that healing the planet will heal our bodies. Eating locally is not only an other-worldly experience; it also pulls us back from the climate precipice. Seasonal food requires less energy to grow, less packaging, less travel, and zero corporate intervention. It supports planet protective farms, increases food security and sovereignty, and helps prepare us for climate disasters. But there is something else—a pleasure principle so robust it is more like a force of nature.
Growing one's own food exponentially increases our capacity to enjoy it. Before I started growing rhubarb, I never knew it was delicious in savory stir fries, that it can make a thick sauce reminiscent of a marriage between lime and banana. Before I started growing berries, I never knew that the tannins in a single aronia berry can be like a glass of fine wine. It turns out that foods able to withstand climate precarity are some of the healthiest out there, requiring less from the earth, and giving more nutrition to the people who eat them.
When our consumption comes out of a deep, long, and slow relationship that ripens seasonally, health and pleasure are simultaneous. Both are possible at once. Also, everything we grow provides a measure of relief from capitalism and its dysfunctional systems. Gardening is an act—one of the last in the world—that empowers people to purge their lives of corporate subservience. Mouth journeys are trips that do not burn fossil fuels.
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