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agrarian landscape after another. On the outskirts of large cities, most of the green space between apartment buildings was cordoned into numerous tidy vegetable gardens and family-sized vineyards. Growing your own, even bottling wine on a personal scale, were not eccentric notions here. I’ve seen these cozy, packed-in personal gardens in blocks surrounding European cities everywhere: Frankfurt, London, every province of France. After the abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union’s food infrastructure, community gardeners rallied to produce a majority of the fruits and vegetables for city populations that otherwise might have starved.

Traversing the Italian countryside, all of which looked ridiculously perfect, we corroborated still another cliché: all roads actually do lead to Rome. Every crossroads gave us a choice of blue arrows pointing in both directions, for ROMA. Beyond the cities, the wide valleys between medieval hilltop towns were occupied by small farms, each with its own modest olive grove, vineyard, a few fig or apple trees (both were ripe in September), and a dozen or so tomato plants loaded with fruit. Each household also had its own pumpkin patch and several rows of broccoli, lettuces, and beans. Passing by one little stuccoed farmhouse we noticed a pile of enormous, yellowed, overmature zucchini. I made Steven take a picture, as proof of some universal fact of life: they couldn’t give all theirs away either. At home we would have considered these “heavers” (that’s what we do with them, over the back fence into the woods). But these were carefully stacked against the back wall of the house like a miniature cord of firewood, presumably as winter fuel for a pig or chickens. The garden’s secondos would be next year’s prosciutto.

“Dig! Dig! Dig! And Your Muscles Will Grow Big”

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On July 9, 2006, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the world lost one of its most successful local-foods advocates of all time: John Raeburn. At the beginning of World War II when Germany vowed to starve the U.K. by blocking food imports with U-boats, Raeburn, an agricultural economist, organized the “Dig for Victory” campaign. British citizens rallied, planting crops in backyards, parks, golf courses, vacant lots, schoolyards, and even the moat of the Tower of London. These urban gardens quickly produced twice the tonnage of food previously imported, about 40 percent of the nation’s food supply, and inspired the “Victory Garden” campaign in the United States. When duty called, these city farmers produced.

A similar sense of necessity is driving a current worldwide growth of urban-centered food production. In developing countries where numbers of urban poor are growing, spontaneous gardening on available land is providing substantial food: In Shanghai over 600,000 garden acres are tucked into the margins of the city. In Moscow, two-thirds of families grow food. In Havana, Cuba, over 80 percent of produce consumed in the city comes from urban gardens.

In addition to providing fresh local produce, gardens like these serve as air filters, help recycle wastes, absorb rainfall, present pleasing green spaces, alleviate loss of land to development, provide food security, reduce fossil fuel consumption, provide jobs, educate kids, and revitalize communities. Urban areas cover 2 percent of the earth’s surface but consume 75 percent of its resources. Urban gardens can help reduce these flat-footed ecological footprints. Now we just need promotional jingles as good as the ones for John Raeburn’s campaign: “Dig! Dig! Dig! And your muscles will grow big.”

For more information visit www.cityfarmer.org or www.urbangardeninghelp.com.

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STEVEN L. HOPP

On a rural road near Lake Trasimeno we stopped at a roadside stand selling produce. We explained that we weren’t real shoppers, just tourists with a fondness for vegetables. The proprietor, Amadeo, seemed thrilled to talk with us anyway (slowly, for the sake of our comprehension) about his life’s work and passion. He was adamantly organic, a proud founding member of Italy’s society of organic