Food Not Lawns March 4, 2008

I got a new book from the library. It’s called “Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community”.

Here’s what the author writes about her upbringing:

For the first twenty years of my life I never thought about where my food came from; nor did I question the deeper workings of the food system or society as a whole. Though marginalized by my half-Mexican blood and low-income status, in many ways I was just like any other kid in the suburbs: I struggled to fit in, I fought with my parents, and I ate sugar and industrial meat almost every day.

Public school taught me to obey authority, and that words are more important than actions. Television taught me to buy my way to happiness, and that I should starve myself and keep my opinions to myself so I could find a husband and make babies. My family taught me to tolerate abuse in the name of love, and the mainstream workforce taught me that my time isn’t worth a living wage.

She tells how she rejected her upbringing and moved to San Francisco at age 21, started riding a bicycle, canvassing for Greenpeace, and stopped watching TV.

I can relate! I moved to San Francisco at 18. When I was 24, I worked as a canvasser for an environmental group, raising awareness for curbside recycling.

Some amazing facts from the book (and I am only on page 14!):

The average urban lawn could produce several hundred pounds of food a year.

Today 58 million Americans spend approximately $30 billion every year to maintain more than 23 million acres of lawn. That’s an average of over a third of an acre and $517 each. The same sized plot of land could still have a small lawn for recreation and produce all the vegetables needed to feed a family of six.

The lawns in the United States consume around 270 billion gallons of water a week — enough to water 81 million acres of acres of organic vegetables, all summer long.

Lawns use 10 times as many chemicals per acre as industrial farmland. These pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides run off into our groundwater and evaporate into our air, causing widespread pollution and global warming, and greatly increasing our risk of cancer, heart disease, and birth defects.

The pollution emitted from a power mower in just one hour is equal to the amount from a car being driven 350 miles.

I LOVE this book!!! Those facts are absolutely staggering to me. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous that we have all this wasted land that requires maintenance — and for WHAT? We spend money to maintain lawns, when we could be SAVING money by growing food!

It’s absurd that many people say they can’t afford organic produce. Do you know how easy it is to grow things? I have lettuce, all kinds of herbs, tomatoes (we ate them on our salad last night). And I barely have anything growing yet. Just wait till this summer! (I’ll have to post before and after pictures of the garden.)

You know what else I keep thinking about? Community. When you have a garden that bears fruits and vegetables, you end up giving a lot of them away. It would be so cool to be able to share vegetables with neighbors. Barter for eggs and chicken and milk. Some people could make honey, others goat cheese, others wine.

And we would share seeds — ha ha, Riana and I are already sharing seeds long distance — and she is in France! Sharing seeds and saving them from year to year makes so much sense to me.

It’s the same thing with fermented foods. You share your starters. They proliferate so it makes sense to give them away. And it’s also insurance — if you ever lose a starter, you can just get another one from a friend.

There is something so wonderful about a real community where people share with each other. And something so liberating about not having to buy a huge cart full of food from a supermarket. It’s so freeing to be able to grow your own food in your own backyard.

Plus gardening is so fun and it’s such good exercise. I love being outdoors, soaking up the sun and breathing fresh air. The truth is, there is so little work involved. Organic gardening is a lot less work than maintaining a lawn.

More to come from this book — I have a feeling I am going to learn a lot!