Eating in Place

By Kate Williams

My kids eat dirt. Occasionally they do this directly: hands hunt for worms in the dirt, hands feed crackers to mouth, hands don't stop at the sink in between. More frequently, their dirt consumption is in the form of our garden peas, bush beans, greens (yes, my kids like kale), tomatoes, and, come winter, the dry beans that we shelled on our mudroom floor one grey autumn afternoon and the pesto that they helped concoct in the blender. Recently, we bought a split half of dirt—I mean beef—from a friend across the Green Mountains that form our back yard.

It's powerful dirt, local dirt, that my kids are eating. Tended for our collective consumption, it is an active player in the shaping of bones, muscles, skin, and temperaments. I love this. I feel a growing sense that my husband and I are sowing invaluable seeds of placedness. We are cultivating children whose very cells are constructed of the radical elements of localness, stewardship, and community, elements that we believe are critical to creating a viable future for subsequent generations.

How does this play out in real terms? Let me reconstruct a recent and fairly common shopping experience for our family. On a summer Saturday, we head for the farmer's market. We've glanced in the garden to see what's coming ripe, and in the fridge to see what we have left from the veggies we picked up mid-week at the CSA here in our valley. We set out to fill what gaps we can at the farmer's market, and then to head to our local grocery stores to get the rest. We chat with friends and eye the produce at various stands. We buy from our local valley vendors, but are often also drawn to the interesting or early produce of one of the out-of-valley stands. We always leave with more than we came for, and we're always glad for these pleasant Vermont surprises.

Then we head to our local grocery store to cover the remaining gaps. We head home with primarily organic, largely local items purchased at Vermont-owned independent stores—but (gasp) we are imperfect. The challenge when we hit the stores is that our kids like candy. At least for our little sweet tooths, brown maple candy produced in Vermont doesn't hold a candle to brightly colored Nerds and seasonally hued Skittles. So, it is sometimes with skillfully bargained M&M Mars products gripped in sticky fingers that our children wander the aisles with us to find the local and organic items on our list.

Vermont has a long tradition of self-sufficiency, and I would say our family's current efforts to shorten the distance between food source and table fits squarely in this tradition. With a twist. While self-sufficiency is certainly at the core, I would describe what my husband and I are doing on our small fold of earth in our river valley of small towns as cultivating community. By growing more and more of our own food, we are not only building our sufficiency, we are binding ourselves to place. By binding ourselves to place, we increase our commitment to filling the gaps in our sufficiency through local markets and producers, and in so doing we are doing our best to build the capacity of our community to sustain itself.

Many Vermonters are far more advanced along this path than are we. My husband and I have learned so much from friends and neighbors who have shared garden techniques with us, have told us where to buy organic chicken feed, have opened their greenhouses to us, have fed us. We have so much more to learn. And this is the edge where it gets really interesting and potent, where food—eating dirt—becomes a vehicle for cultural, political, and social transformation. There's always more to learn, and it is from our neighbors that we learn to cultivate communities that have staying power in a future where energy resources, food security, and human infrastructure face significant challenges. As we bind ourselves through food more closely to the earth, we create new ways to bind ourselves together as partners building communities that have the local wisdom, understanding, and skill to thrive.

It's important to note that all of this cultivation is hard work. Just as an invasion of cutworms can devastate an entire bed of seedlings, or an unusually cold summer can limit the tomato harvest we were counting on, so too can the vagaries of human temperament and communication challenge community collaborations. The anonymity of purchasing food and supplies at a box store can seem astonishingly simple and cheap by comparison. But if we change our thinking about the return on investment for each local transaction—in our own garden, paid by sweat; at the local farm stand, cash to our neighbor; at town meeting, investment in the social capital within our community—then the cheapness of the “conventional” transaction becomes, well, cheap, and the degradations of community connections all too apparent.

We happen to have chosen the dead end of a dirt road in a rural valley of 6,000 lively souls as the place to cultivate community. The dirt tastes pretty good to us here. But dirt can be made to taste good anywhere. Lawn is the fourth largest crop in the United States, behind corn, wheat, and soybeans. There's ample room in suburbia to cultivate backyard gardens, and there's certainly room to build stronger ties with neighbors. “Can I borrow your rake?” and “How do you get such early tomatoes?” could well be the questions that turn the tide on suburban isolation. Not all suburban dwellers are going to want to do this work, but they can, and I think that's important. Even in urban settings, community gardens have proven to be powerful well beyond their minimal acreage. The potential for cultivating community exists everywhere, and my best hope is that more and more small groups in all kinds of places can enact the local power of eating in place.

As I write this, it is the golden harvest of late summer. I lie in bed at night and visualize the way in which the garden earth outside my window is transformed into the growing bodies of my children down the hall. As a family, we are eating in place, eating of place, and becoming place. The activist in me is renewed by the power of these daily domestic choices and actions. The spiritualist in me believes that the coda of grace our family shares before each meal makes sacred this work we are trying to do, and that this matters. The imperfect human in me worries about how much more we have to learn and how paltry are our efforts compared to those of some. The poet in me is made breathless by connected images of stalk and bone, rind and skin, juice and blood, as I hear my son turn in his sleep while the night wind rustles through the pole beans.