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By Root 1000 0

an inventory of our pantry. During our industrious summer we’d canned over forty jars of tomatoes, tomato-based sauces, and salsa. We’d also put up that many jars of pickles, jams, and fruit juice, and another fifty or so quarts of dried vegetables, mostly tomatoes but also soup beans, peppers, okra, squash, root vegetables, and herbs. In pint-sized freezer boxes we’d frozen broccoli, beans, squash, corn, pesto, peas, roasted tomatoes, smoked eggplants, fire-roasted peppers, cherries, peaches, strawberries, and blueberries. In large ziplock bags we froze quantities of our favorite snack food, whole edamame, which Lily knows how to thaw in the microwave, salt, and pop from the pod straight down the hatch. I do realize I’m lucky to have kids who prefer steamed soybeans to Twinkies. But about 20 million mothers in Japan have kids like that too, so it’s not a bolt out of the blue.

Our formerly feisty chickens and turkeys now lay in quiet meditation (legs-up pose) in the chest freezer. Our onions and garlic hung like Rapunzel’s braids from the mantel behind the kitchen woodstove. In the mudroom and root cellar we had three bushels of potatoes, another two of winter squash, plus beets, carrots, melons, and cabbages. A pyramid of blue-green and orange pumpkins was stacked near the back door. One shelf in the pantry held small, alphabetized jars of seeds, saved for starting over—assuming spring found us able-bodied and inclined to do this again.

That’s the long and short of it: what I did last summer. Most evenings and a lot of weekends from mid-August to mid-September were occupied with cutting, drying, and canning. We’d worked like wage laborers on double shift while our friends were going to the beach for summer’s last hurrah, and retrospectively that looks like a bum deal even to me. But we had taken a vacation in June, wedged between the important dates of Cherries Fall and the First of Tomato. Next summer maybe we’d go to the beach. But right now, looking at all these jars in the pantry gave me a happy, connected feeling, as if I had roots growing right through the soles of my shoes into the dirt of our farm.

I understand that’s a pretty subjective value, not necessarily impressive to an outsider. It’s a value, nonetheless. Food security is no longer the sole concern of the paranoid schizophrenic. Some of my very sane friends in New York and Washington, D.C., tell me that city households are advised now to have a two-month food supply on hand at all times. This is advice of a different ilk from the duct-tape-and-plastic response to terrorist attacks, or the duck-and-cover drills of my childhood. We now have looming threats larger than any cold-hearted human’s imagination. Global climate change has created dramatic new weather patterns, altered the migratory paths of birds, and shifted the habitats of disease-carrying organisms, opening the season on catastrophes we are ill-prepared to predict.

“It’s not a matter of ‘maybe’ anymore,” my friend from D.C. told me over the phone. A professional photographer, she had been to New Orleans several months after Hurricane Katrina to document the grim demise of a piece of our nation we’d assumed to be permanent. “I’m starting to feel disaster as a real thing—that it’s not if but when. And I feel helpless. When they say you should be keeping that much food on hand, all I can think to do is go to Costco and buy a bunch of cans! Can’t I do better than that?” We made a date for the end of next tomato season: she would drive down for a girlfriend weekend and we could can stuff together. Tomato therapy.

Our family hadn’t been bracing for the sky to fall, but we now had the prescribed amount of food on hand. I felt thankful for our uncommon good luck. Or if not luck, then the following of our strange bliss through the labors it took to get us here, like the industrious ants of Aesop’s fable working hard to prepare because it’s their nature. Our luck was our proximity to land where food grows, and having the means to acquire it.

Technically, most U.S. citizens are that lucky: well more