The Philosphy of Sustainable Urban Farming
April 23rd, 2011 · 4 Comments · Posted in garden, Sustainability
A man out standing in his field
I was invited to lead a workshop on urban farming Friday at my alma mater—American University here in D.C. I was surprised to learn that this all-day “Eating Green” conference was sponsored by the university’s philosophy department. But when you think about it, what could be a more existential question than the one that concerns our future survival in a world where fertile soil and water are being rapidly depleted and we’ve come to depend on an unsustainable supply of fossil fuels to feed the growing multitudes?
The keynote speaker for this event was Lisa Heldke, a philosophy professor at Gustavas Adolphus College in Minnesota who explores truth, certainty and the meaning of life through food. She’s penned several books along these lines, including Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, and The Atkins Diet and Philosophy. The title of her keynote address was especially tantalizing: “Pleasure Once Removed: Eating, Suffering and Violence.”
My own presentation was not quite so lofty–60 minutes of slides showing how we grow much of the food we eat on a busy residential corner here in the District of Columbia, two miles from the White House. The underpinnings of this thriving kitchen garden (no livestock on this urban farm) are probably more instinctual than intellectual. As I explained to my audience yesterday, my wife and I after 9/11, like many others, began to re-examine our lifestyle and tried to put more energy into the things that were most important to us.
We started walking more and taking public transportation, leaving our car in the driveway. We began to recycle everything. We made a point of eating dinner together as a family, and serving Sunday suppers to friends. Remembering the small garden and fruit trees my father maintained on our tiny lot in the Chicago suburbs when I was a kid, I decided to bust some sod and grow food. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. For some reason, the yard around our house had never been landscaped in more than 100 years. The two large trees that had once towered over it had since died and been removed.
The only thing standing in my way of becoming a full-fledged urban farmer was my wife’s plans to turn the property into a formal Victorian-style garden. Occasionally as I was digging a new vegetable bed she would remind me there was nothing permanent about what I was doing: that’s where the new path to the front door was supposed to go.
But you can’t grow food without experiencing an occasional moment of profound insight. As I quickly learned, growing vegetables brings me face to face with the same issues that have bedeviled farmers since the beginning of agriculture: Do I have enough sun? How to provide water? And, perhaps most importantly, what means to employ to keep my soil fertile and productive?
Answering this latter question has been the most challenging and the most rewarding for me. You might not think of a city lot as either fertile or infertile. But the lessons of agriculture are unavoidable. If you are going to remove nutrients from the soil by growing food, you have to find a way to replace those nutrients or eventually you will exhaust your means of growing. Nature does this by decomposing dead matter and returning it to the soil. Human civilizations learned that manure would do the same thing. The Chinese for at least 2,000 years fed themselves by recycling everything–including their own droppings. But modern agriculture took a chemical shortcut, inventing a way to manufacture nitrogen from natural gas.
Our supply of natural gas won’t last forever, and we are rapidly depleting the earth’s stores of other essential nutrients such as phosphate. What then?
I had originally hoped to make our kitchen garden entirely self-sufficient–a closed system, as it were. But that turned out to be impossible. We became avid composters, but we did not have enough materials to make the compost we needed in sufficient quantities. I turned into a stealthy forager, stealing the bags of leaves neighbors placed at the curb in the fall, collecting coffee grounds from a local Starbucks, trekking to a convenient riding stables for buckets of horse manure. All of this we turn into “black gold” that we store in trash cans and use as needed to produce copious quantities of carrots and beets and green beans and okra and tomatoes.
In the process of growing all this food, we’ve also re-oriented our approach to eating. I am no longer a slave to recipes, hiking from one market to the next collecting the ingredients called for in some dinner menu out of Bon Appetit magazine. Now when we are planning a meal we look out the window to see what’s growing. Along the way we’ve developed many of our own recipes using the ingredients we have at hand. How else do you arrive at a dish like curried okra stew with eggplant, pepper and coconut milk? (We originally made this with sweet potato leaves after we discovered they are edible, but now we use fistfulls of Italian basil, which grows exuberantly in our garden.)
Had we approached this project philosophically, I’m not sure we would have found our way to where we are now. Building an urban farm, I’ve learned, is not an event, but a slow, incremental process that not only provides us with food, but also has changed us for the better. We’ve reconnected with sun, soil and water, rediscovered our place in the natural order of things. We are different people from when we started: more aware of the basic urges that drive us, the fragility of the environment we live in, our responsibility to feed ourselves in a manner that does not diminish anyone else’s ability to thrive.
Growing your own food, it turns out, is not just a matter of survival, but an act of kindness toward yourself, our planet and all of humanity. As philosophies go, that one suits me just fine.
What in the dell are we going to do about the alien stink bug invasion? They decimated my food crops in my garden last year. How were you affected?
We have not seen any stink bugs here.
I love that it was sponsored by the philosophy dept. As people become more involved in food movements they undergo a process that is uniquely their own, influenced by their own experiences and way of thinking. I am totally fascinated by the variation in people’s paths. Never have associated the term, but philosophy makes great sense here.
I LOVE this post, Ed!