Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [174]
Our plan to make everything from scratch had pushed us into a lot of great learning experiences. In some cases, what we learned was that it was too much trouble for everyday: homemade pasta really is better, but we will always buy it most of the time, and save the big pasta-cranking events for dinner parties. Hard cheeses are hard. I never did try the French-class mayonnaise recipe. I’d also imagined at some irrational moment that I would learn to make apple cider and vinegar, but happily submitted to realism when I located professionals nearby doing these things really well. On the other hand, making our daily bread, soft cheeses, and yogurt had become so routine we now prepared them in minutes, without a recipe.
Altered routines were really the heart of what we’d gained. We’d learned that many aisles of our supermarket offered us nothing local, so we didn’t even push our carts down those: frozen foods, canned goods, soft drinks (yes, that’s a whole aisle). Just grab the Virginia dairy products and organic flour and get out, was our motto, before you start coveting thy neighbor’s goods. A person can completely forget about lemons and kiwis once the near occasion is removed.
As successful as our sleuthing into local markets had been, we never did find good local wheat products, or seafood. I was definitely looking forward to some nonlocal splurges in the coming months: wild-caught Alaskan salmon and bay scallops and portobellos, hooray. In moderation, of course. I had a much better sense of my options now and could try for balance, buying one bottle of Virginia wine, for example, for every import.
The biggest shock of our year came when we added up the tab. We’d fed ourselves, organically and pretty splendidly we thought, on about fifty cents per family member, per meal—probably less than I spent in the years when I qualified for food stamps. Of course, I now had the luxury of land for growing food to supplement our purchases. But it wasn’t a lot of land: 3,524 square feet of tilled beds gave us all our produce—that’s a forty-by-twenty-two-foot spread, per person. (It felt a lot bigger when we were weeding it.) We appreciate our farm’s wooded mountainsides for hiking and the rare morel foray—and for our household water supply—but in the main, one doesn’t eat a nature preserve. Adding up the land occupied by our fruit trees, berry bushes, and the pasture grazed by our poultry brings our land-use total for nutritional support to about a quarter acre—still a modest allotment. Our main off-farm purchases for the year were organic grain for animal feed, and the 300 pounds of flour required for our daily bread. To put this in perspective, a good wheat field yields 1,600 pounds of flour per acre. In total, for our grain and flour, pastured meats and goods from the farmers’ market, and our own produce, our family’s food footprint for the year was probably around one acre.
By contrast, current nutritional consumption in the U.S. requires an average of 1.2 cultivated acres for every citizen—4.8 acres for a family of four. (Among other things, it takes space to grow corn syrup for that hypothetical family’s 219 gallons of soda.) These estimates become more meaningful when placed next to another prediction: in 2050, the amount of U.S. farmland available per citizen will be only 0.6 acres. By the numbers, the hypothetical family has change in the cards. By any measure, ours had discovered