WHEN I WAS SMALL, people had Victory Gardens. This was during the Second World War, and the idea was that if people grew their own vegetables, then the food produced by the farmers would be freed up for use by the army. There was another strong motivator: rationing was in effect for things you were unlikely to be able to grow yourself, such as sugar, butter, milk, tea, cheese, and meat, so the more you could grow, the better you would eat, and the better the soldiers would eat too. Thus, by digging and hoeing and weeding and watering, you too could help win the war.
But people did not live on vegetables and fruit alone. Anything resembling protein or fat was precious. Shortening, margarine, and bacon drippings were cherished; gizzards, livers, feet, and necks were not scorned. Bits and scraps that today would be carelessly tossed into the trash were hoarded and treasured, making their way from their first appearance as, say, a roasted chicken, through various other incarnations as noodle-and-leftovers casseroles, soups and stews, and mystery ingredients in pot pies. A housewife’s skill was measured by the number of times she could serve up the same thing without your knowing it.
Careful planning was required; waste was frowned on. This meant that everything, not only from such things as chickens but from the garden, had to be used, and, if necessary, preserved. Home freezing hadn’t arrived yet, so canning and preserving were major activities, especially in the late summer, when the garden would produce more than the family could eat. Housewives cooked up vast quantities of tomato sauce, pickles, green beans, strawberries, apple-sauce — vegetables and fruits of all kinds. These would be eaten in the winter, along with the cabbages and the winter squash and the root vegetables — beets, carrots, turnips, and potatoes — that had been stored in a cool place.
As children growing up in this era, we knew that every seedling was precious. We were part of the system: we weeded and watered, we picked off cabbage worms and tomato worms and potato bugs. We dug peelings and cores and husks back into the soil; we fended off woodchucks; we sprinkled wood ashes. If lucky enough to be near a source of blueberries, we picked them; and we picked peas and beans, and we dug potatoes. I can’t claim that all of this was spontaneous labour, joyfully performed: such tasks were chores. But the connection between tending the vegetables and eating the results was clear. Food did not come wrapped in plastic from the supermarket — there were hardly any supermarkets, anyway. It came out of the ground or it grew on a bush or tree, and it needed water and sunlight and proper fertilization.
My mother’s generation was brought up strictly: children were expected to finish everything on their plates, whether they liked it or not, and if they failed to do this they were made to sit at the dinner table until they did. Frequently they were told to remember other children who were starving — the Armenians, the Chinese. I used to think this was both harsh — why force a child to eat when it wasn’t hungry? — and ridiculous — what good would eating your bread crusts do for the Armenians? But this method doubtless had at its heart an insistence on respect. Many people had laboured to produce the food on the plate, among them the parents, who had either grown it or paid hard-earned cash for it. You could not snub this food. You should show a proper gratitude. Hence the once-widespread practice of saying grace at meals, which has fallen into disuse. Why be grateful for something — now — so easy to come by?
In the plot line of life on earth, gardens are a recent twist. They date back to perhaps ten thousand years ago, when the gathering and hunting that had been the prevailing model for 99 percent of human history could no longer sustain societies in the face of diminishing game and wild food supplies.
When the total population of the earth was less than four million people — before, the experts estimate, about ten thousand years ago — the gathering and hunting way of life was still viable. The myth of the Golden Age appears to have some foundation in fact: food was there in the wild, for the taking, and people didn’t have to spend much of their time obtaining it. After that point, conditions became harder, as communities had to adapt more labour-intensive stratagems to feed themselves. “Agriculture” is sometimes used to denote any form of cultivation or domestication — of herd animals for meat and milk, of garden crops and fruit trees, of field crops such as wheat and barley. Sometimes a distinction is made between “agriculture,” in which large areas are farmed using the plough to break the ground — traditionally a male activity — and “horticulture,” in which smaller, individual garden plots are cultivated, traditionally by women. “Horticulture” is thought to have come first, but all agree that there was a long period of transition in which gathering and hunting, horticulture and agriculture, existed side by side.
Many ills have been ascribed to agriculture. In gathering and hunting cultures, food was — as a rule — obtained and eaten as needed. But once agriculture became firmly established — once crops could be harvested and stored, once surpluses could be accumulated, and, not incidentally, transported, exchanged, destroyed, and stolen — social strata became possible, with slaves at the lower end, peasants above them, and a ruling class on top that made no physical effort in order to eat. Armies could march on surplus food supplies; religious hierarchies could tithe; kings could preside; taxes could be levied. Crop monocultures became widespread, with a dependence on only a few kinds of food, resulting not only in malnutrition, but in famine at times of crop failure.
A city dweller’s relation to food is — as a system — closer to the gathering-hunting model than to the horticultural-agricultural one. You don’t grow the food yourself, or raise it in the form of an animal. Instead you go to the place where the food is — the supermarket, most likely. Someone else has done the killing, in the case of animal food, or the primary picking, in the case of vegetables, but essentially the shopper is a gatherer. His or her skills consist in knowing where the good stuff is and tracking it down if it’s rare. The shopping experience is given all the trappings of a walk in a magic forest — soft music plays, the colours of packages are supernaturally bright, food is displayed as if it’s there by miracle. All you have to do is reach out your hand, as in the Golden Age. And then pay, of course.
Such a system disguises origins. The food in shops is dirt-free, and as bloodless as possible. Yet everything we eat comes — in one way or another — out of the earth.
The first garden I can remember was in northern Quebec, where my father ran a small forest-insect research station. The area was a glacial scrape — a region where the glaciers had removed the top-soil thousands of years ago, scraping down to the granite bedrock. Thousands of years after their retreat, the soil was just a thin layer on top of sand or gravel. My parents used this sandy soil as the basis for their garden. Luckily they had a source of manure, from a lumber camp — in those days, horses were still used in winter to drag the felled trees down to the lake for eventual transport to the mill by water. My parents ferried boatloads of this manure to their fenced-in sandy patch, where they dug it in. From this unpromising ground they raised — among other things — peas, beans, carrots, radishes, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, and even the occasional flower. Nasturtiums are what I remember, and the vivid blossoms of the scarlet runner beans, a favourite with hummingbirds. The moral: Almost any patch of dirt can be a garden, with enough elbow grease and horse manure.
That garden occurred in the 1940s, when the war was still going on, horticulture in the form of Victory Gardens was still widely practised, and every morsel of food was treasured.
After the war the postwar boom set in, and attitudes underwent a major change. After a long period of anxiety and hard work and tragedy, people wanted more ease in their lives. Military production switched off, the manufacture of consumer goods switched on. Home appliances proliferated: the outdoor clothesline was replaced by the dryer, the wringer washer by the automatic. Supermarkets sprang up. Prepackaging arrived. Simple-minded abundance was the order of the day.
The period from 1950 to 2000 might be characterized as the Disposable Period. Waste — including preplanned obsolescence — was no longer seen as an evil and a sin. It became a positive thing, because the more you threw out, the more you would consume, and that would drive the economy, and everyone would become more prosperous. Wouldn’t they?
This model works fine as long as there’s an endless supply of goods funnelling into the In end of the pipe. But it breaks down when the source of supply becomes exhausted. The ultimate source of supply is the biosphere itself. But in the 1950s, that too appeared to be inexhaustible. And so the party continued. What a thrill, to eat only half of your hamburger, then toss the rest!
There was an undeniable emotional charge to throwing stuff out. Scrimping, saving, and hoarding make a person feel poor — think of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol — whereas dispensing largesse, whether in the form of a prize goose, as in Scrooge’s case, or in the form of filling up your garbage can with junk you no longer want, makes you feel rich. Saving is heavy, discarding is light. Why do we feel this way? Once we were nomads, and nomads don’t carry around grand pianos. They don’t hoard food; instead they move to where food is. They leave a light footprint, as the green folk say. Well, it’s a theory.
But we can’t all be nomads any more. There isn’t enough space left for that.
Many people gave up their gardens after the war. My parents kept on with theirs, because they said fresh food tasted better. (This is actually true.) The age of full-blown pesticides was just arriving, and that may have had something to do with it as well. My father was an early opponent of widespread pesticide use, partly because this was his field of study. According to him, spraying forests to kill infestations of budworm and sawfly simply arrested the infestation, after which the insects would develop a resistance to the poisons used on them and would continue on their rampage. Meanwhile you’d have killed off their natural enemies, which would no longer be around to fight them. The effects of these poisons on human beings was unknown, but could not be discounted. At that time his views were considered quaint.
Thus the second major garden in my life was in Toronto. Again, the soil was unpromising: heavy clay, which was sticky in the rain but would bake to a hard finish during dry spells. The soil was particularly good for growing giant dandelions and huge clumps of couch grass. It took a lot of work to turn it into anything resembling a garden. Kitchen scraps were composted, fall leaves were dug into the ground by the bushel.
By this time I was a teenager, and was expected to do quite a lot of weeding and watering. News for parents: weeding and watering someone else’s garden is not quite as engaging as weeding and watering your own. The high points were the time when I shot a marauding woodchuck with my bow (the arrow was a target arrow, not a hunting arrow, so it bounced off) and the other time when I pulled up all of my father’s experimental Jerusalem artichokes by mistake.
Once past my teenage years, I gave up gardening for a time. I’d had enough of it. Also I wasn’t in a location that permitted it: I was an itinerant student and sometime teacher and market researcher and writer, and I moved fifteen times in ten years. In the early 1970s, however, I found myself on a farm that had a barn with a large supply of well-rotted horse manure, and the temptation was too great to resist. For eight years we grew everything imaginable. To the staples we added corn, kohlrabi, asparagus, currants — red and white — and elderberries. We tried out new methods — potatoes grown in straw, marigolds to catch slugs. We canned, froze, dried; we made sauerkraut, not an experiment I would choose to repeat. We made wine, jams and jellies, beer. We raised our own chickens and ducks and sheep; we buried parsnips in holes in the ground, and carrots in boxes of sand in the root cellar.
It was a lot of work. This is one reason people don’t do more home gardening.
The other, of course, is lack of land. The number of pumpkins you can raise on your apartment balcony is finite, and your wheat crop in this location would not be large.
Lack of land. Lack of arable land. To that we may add “lack of sea,” because the sea’s resources are being destroyed as fast as the earth’s. Soon we may have to add “lack of fresh water” and even “lack of breathable air.” There’s no free lunch after all.
As a species, we’re suffering from our own success. From a population of four million ten thousand years ago, we’ve increased to six billion today, and growing. The exponential population explosion that has occurred since 1750 was unprecedented in human history, and it will never be repeated. We must slow our growth rate as a species, or face a series of unimaginable environmental and human catastrophes. Arable land is finite, and much of it is rapidly being paved over, eroded, polluted, or depleted. The same rules apply to us as to other animals: no biological population can outlive the exhaustion of its resource base. It’s an easy thing to demonstrate to children. Get them an ant farm, feed the ants, watch the ants increase in number. Then cut off the food supply. End of ants.
For Homo sapiens, the major question of the twenty-first century will be, How will we eat? Already 80 percent of the world’s people exist on the starvation borderline. Will we see a sudden enormous crash, as in the mouse-and-lemming cycle? And if so, what then?
These are alarming thoughts to place in the foreword to a kindly and attractive book on school gardening. Such an admirable demonstration of care and careful planning, so much variety, such a symbol of hope. I don’t apologize for these thoughts, however: the world I have just described is the one today’s children will be facing unless there are some fairly large changes of direction.
The reasons for encouraging the school gardening movement are many. Gardens are educational, teaching as they do many lessons. Food grows in the ground, not in supermarkets; air, soil, sun, and water are the four necessary ingredients; composting is a fine notion; front lawns are a water-gobbling waste of space; the individual can be an instrument for positive change; unless you’re a geologist, plants are more interesting than gravel; beetles come in many forms; worms are good; nature must be respected; we are part of nature.
All of these are positive concepts, but fifty years ago — even thirty years ago — they would have been viewed as extra, frilly, prissy, goody-goody. Even now, some in our society would place them in this slot: the hard stuff, the right stuff to grind into the minds of children, is how to make a lot of money.
But money’s useless when there’s nothing to eat. So there’s another set of skills to be learned from school gardens: how to grow your own food. Perhaps today’s children will need these skills. Perhaps they’ll find themselves in some grim collective dedicated to turning golf courses back into market gardens and superhighways into very long grain fields, and front lawns into potato plots. Perhaps the Victory Garden will make a forced comeback due to scarcity.
Or perhaps our species will solve its problems before droughts and famines become endemic.
Then again, perhaps not.