What's for dinner tonight?

Jill Severn

If you’re not a vegetable gardener yet, perhaps today’s column will make you consider becoming one. Here’s why: 

 We’ve been bombarded lately by alarming messages about the food we eat: it’s too processed, too salty and too sugary. It contains questionable if not outright harmful dies and other additives. It makes people eat more, alters our taste buds, and contributes to an epidemic of obesity. Americans have become, in physical size, great. 

 At the same time, the fresh vegetables we’re advised to eat more of are at risk from climate change. The lion’s share of the lettuce in our markets this month comes from Arizona, where it is irrigated by the drought-plagued, dwindling Colorado River — an unstable and unsustainable situation. Similar threats to production of all kinds of crops are multiplying across the country.  

 More droughts, fires, floods and hurricanes are in our future, but we don’t know where or when. Scientists acknowledge that their models of what climate change will do in the coming years are imperfect and incomplete. All they can predict for sure is that there will be surprises that could create turbulence in our food supply. 

 Into this troubled context comes a vision so radical it’s surely impossible, but fun to think about: Kristin Kimball, a farmer and Real Organic activist, envisions a world without grocery stores; a world in which we all eat locally grown organic food, in season, bought from farmers we know or grown in our own yards.  

 TJ Johnson, proprietor of Urban Futures Farm in Olympia, acknowledges the impossibility of this vision, but he thinks it’s a useful “stretch goal.” Traveling in that direction, he says, is key to adapting to climate change, and improving our health and the health of the natural world – especially the soil. 

 TJ is also a fan of the Real Organic movement, which promotes a higher standard of organic ideals. The Organic Food Production Act of 1990, which sets standards for what can be labeled organic, is inadequate, he says.  

“Their standards are based on a different set of inputs, but include nothing about soil health,” he says.  

 In fact, those standards don’t even require soil; certified organic hydroponic growers use a water-based nutrient solution to grow crops from lettuce to raspberries. Some are indoors, over pavement; others are in acres of hoop houses (unheated greenhouses), where the soil has all been smothered with a heavy landscape fabric. 

 Healthy soil, teeming with bacteria, fungi and microbes, contributes to the nutritional value of food. It also sequesters more carbon, reduces pollutants, and promotes biodiversity. There are four principles that promote soil health:  

• Minimize disturbance: Limit tilling or digging.

• Maximize living roots: Harvest plants by cutting them off at the ground rather than digging them up. 

• Maximize soil cover: Don’t leave any bare ground; plant clover, sweet alyssum or other low-growing ground covers around vegetable plants.

• Maximize biodiversity: Rotate and mix crops and use biologically active soil amendments, such as compost or well-rotted animal manure, which help all those living soil organisms.

Ideally, we should all adopt these principles in our gardens. But that might be the easy part. 

 In the no-grocery-store food utopia, in addition to becoming more productive Real Organic gardeners, we would only buy food grown by local Real Organic farmers.  

 We would also break lifetime habits and make radical changes in how we plan our meals.  

 “Why do we think we have to have every food in every season?” TJ asks. “If you want a salad in the winter, make it with chard, collards or kale.” (Those are crops that usually live through all or most of the winter.) 

 But of course, eating only locally grown, truly organic food would require more research, more time planning, preserving and cooking, and a lot more of our money. Growing more of our own food would become a much more important money-saver. 

 Calling all that a “stretch goal” might be a huge understatement. But there are also elements of this utopian scenario that may become vital to adapting to climate change and its ever more likely disruptions to our current food system. Still, even pursuing this goal would make us healthier, and reduce the anxiety and confusion of reading the small print on processed food labels. 

 The scale of this challenge doesn’t faze TJ. 

  “We just need to do our best,” he says. “We need to find joy, make a difference, feed and educate people, and go local.”  

 Even if we don’t achieve that stretch goal, progress is a better alternative than paralysis. 

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com