Food Anxiety

One of my favorite stories about food comes from the 1950s. When a company first decided to put cake mixes on the market, they did some research first. They gave women two lists of items one might find in a grocery cart with only one difference. In one there was a cake mix. In the other there was a carton of eggs.

Then they asked the women to assess what kind of woman might be in possession of Cart A and Cart B. Well, it was clear to everyone that the woman with the cake mix was nothing but a tramp. She didn’t care about her family. She probably had a disorganized house and its cleanliness was definitely in question.

The first cake mixes had dried eggs in them. All you had to add was water. They found that women would accept them only if they could put in their own eggs and oil. At that point they could convince themselves that they were still making a cake, just in a more convenient fashion.

When I think about the 1960s and 1970s, I think it’s possible that people wanted to eat food out of boxes and cans. In truth, they’d always had canned foods. The ready-made meals that came out of boxes were so full of salt it must have been like a flavor explosion. SO much better than homemade. That’s what I’m thinking. And of course, it was frozen vegetables that convinced people they didn’t need to grow food anymore.

When I think about it, I feel so cheated! How could people have seemingly forgotten how to grow and make food? How did they convince themselves that it was HARD?

Then I open a copy of Organic Gardening and realize that we’re still convincing ourselves it is hard. My mother, whose yard is regularly featured on the garden walk and who has been a member of a garden club for decades, decided last spring to try to grow some lettuce. She always grows herbs (even keeps her Trader Joe’s rosemary tree alive all winter to put it out again in spring!), but has not been one for vegetables.

Seedlings March 15, 2012

She had some questions for me, mostly about soil. What kind of soil should she have? What should the pH be? What did I add to make my lettuce grow well? What exposure did she need?

To tell the truth, I just wait until the ground thaws and then turn over the soil in my beds. I pick one where I didn’t grow lettuce last year and sprinkle some seeds on top. I mix them in with my hands because they should be planted shallow. In a couple of weeks, all kinds of greens come up. I thin the plants as necessary, but always leave the bed pretty crowded, because I eat the leaves when they’re about half-grown, not baby but not a real head either. As long as I can bear to wait.

In Organic Gardening this month there is detailed information on what is meant by “as soon as the soil can be worked.” It does not mean, as I thought, that it is simply thawed out and you can turn it over with a shovel. It means if you hold it in your hand and squeeze it, then open your hand and poke it with your other hand, it crumbles easily. Hmmm. There are photos of soil that is too wet, too dry, and just right. There are warnings about the trouble you will have if you plant in soil that, though thawed, is not ready “to be worked.”

Well, I think this is just another form of food anxiety, really. The crops you put in this early– radishes and lettuce and spinach and beets– are not fussy. They mostly come up. If they don’t, well, it’s early, seed is cheap, so plant some more.

I grew up in a quintessentially suburban environment. The fenced backyard of our quarter-acre lot was particularly nice because there were garden beds along two sides, edged with railroad ties (toxic, I know). My mother mostly grew flowers, but there was also a strawberry bed, and those early June strawberries we ate on our breakfast cereal at the picnic table the last few weeks of school are possibly my favorite childhood food memory.

We also planted carrots one year. Then my mother noticed that the ground was heaving and that a mother rabbit and her babies were nesting in the middle of our yard. We pulled up the baby carrots and arranged them around the rabbit hole so the mother wouldn’t have to leave her babies to get them. (I don’t want to tell you how my mother feels about rabbits these days. As for me, well, the coyotes seem to take care of them.)

It’s nothing short of miraculous that you can put seeds into any old dirt and get food. But you can. It doesn’t even have to be very good dirt or very expensive seed. And if you do it, even just a little bit, only one year, it will change the contents of your grocery cart in no time. Fewer boxes and cans. Without even trying.