Could You Grow Enough to Live On?

Could you totally feed your family out of your garden? 

Well, if you supplement it with some locally raised meat and dairy products, could you mostly eat out of the garden for a whole calendar year?

Barbara Kingsolver tried a few years ago when they moved their family of four from suburban Tuscon to a small Appalachian family farm, and lived to tell about it in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle  (HarperCollins).

Kingsolver started out with several objectives.

First, she recognized (as every gardener does) how much better homegrown tastes than supermarket fare. But she also recognized her family’s inadvertent addiction to hydrogenated corn syrup, oils, and fats that are added to every fast food meal or prepared foods. And she saw how much in fossil fuels America spends in fertilizers, pesticides and shipping things like bananas from Central America, or apples from Washington State or strawberries from California or Mexico.

Their “farm” really was tiny. They cultivated 3,524 square feet on the sides of their Appalachian hillsides. When you think about it, that’s not much more than most Plano houses have as lawns.

Add in room for a few chickens and turkeys, and she figures they used about an acre to feed the family.    

When they bought milk, beef or lamb, they committed to only buying locally grown produce.

You might say they were “spiritual, not religious.” Admittedly, they had to go international to buy coffee or chocolate, and they couldn’t find local wheat for bread-making. They ate out now and then, and went to friends’ houses without acting holier than thou.

They weren’t trying to re-enact “Little House on the Prairie.” She relied on modern conveniences like freezing, and electric food dehydrators, and they took a trip to Italy in the middle of it all.

It all makes for an interesting journey, outstandingly written. One thing Kingsolver found along the way was the damage shipping food around the country does to our local farmers. They just can’t produce oranges in October, or asparagus in August. But she makes a convincing argument that the slightly higher prices you pay for quality local organic produce is worth every penny.

Their primary meat was chicken and turkey, and no, those birds don’t come naturally wrapped in plastic. Her goal was to start a breeding flock of turkeys, but as luck would have it, modern turkeys are artificially inseminated. They’ve just about forgotten how to “do it.” So she went to extraordinary lengths to coax the “lovebirds” into a family way. She admitted to watching. “Hey, we don’t have cable out here.”  

Did they succeed in living off the land for a whole year? I’m no spoiler, you have to read it yourself, but at the end of the year they were looking forward to some lobster, Alaskan salmon and a few other delicacies not raised in Appalachia.    

But maybe that's her point: perhaps we don't have to limit our diet to the backyard or the neighborhood, but be conscious of what we eat, where it comes from, and what it took to get here.