No farms, no food

Being a (vegetable) gardener is humbling. And thinking about local foods (and thinking about folks trying to be locavores), even more.

It's fascinating to consider how we (at least Americans) are finally embracing the idea of trying to grow more vegetables and buy locally. There's an initiative to encourage the next incumbent of the White House to grow an organic vegetable garden; there are blogs encouraging us to grow Victory Gardens again; what an encouraging trend.

But, if you actually think about whether you could grow all of your own food -- that's an eye-opener. Once you get past the things that would be impossible to grow here (coffee, rice, and bananas are staples in our house), and then think about spices like cinnamon and cloves, and then think about how much wheat you'd have to grow, and thresh, and grind, simply to make a few loaves of bread (and I make all of our bread), that's humbling, too.

And if you'd like to eat lettuce in the summer (at least here in a hot summer climate), and have potatoes all year round (uh, my harvest was delicious, but it wasn't exactly large enough to store), and enough onions to cook with, and what about the cheese that we eat and milk that we use in our cereal and my coffee (hmm, not much room in the back garden for a cow) and chickens would need to be 'underground' as I think they're prohibited in our small college town's zoning scheme.

The American Farmland Trust is a sponsor of 'Best Green Blogs' -- and they had a nice click-link to their site where I could order a 'No Farms, No Food' bumper sticker. Two arrived today, and I'll be sticking one on the back window of my car tomorrow.