The garden would take a while to get going, and despite the fact that we had ample space, it wouldn’t serve all of our produce needs. It isn’t uncommon for people to suggest to us that if we want inexpensive produce, planting a garden is the way to go, and that anyone can do it regardless of space. While I agree to an extent, gardening is not as cheap as I thought it would be. Once things were up and running, the cost of maintaining a garden became affordable, but as a beginning gardener I made plenty of expensive mistakes. Also, with limited space it’s possible to grow some vegetables, but not to meet all of the produce needs of a family.
When I started out, I spent a great deal of time and money at the Armstrong Garden Center in Encinitas. I’m not sure that the employees know me by name, but they certainly know my face. On at least two occasions I’ve run in after work, only a few minutes before they closed, and told an employee that I knew what I was getting and I’d be quick. I was told not to worry; I should take my time. A woman at the counter told me, “Honey, you’re so cute, you just take all the time you need. We know you.” That made my day—and they should know me. For my birthday, I received eighty dollars’ worth of gift certificates to Armstrong, and I used them up in two trips.
If I had to start my garden again, there are things I would do differently. For container gardening, one expensive element was the containers themselves. I had some pots at home, but not enough for what I planned to grow. I should have shopped around to find the lowest prices, but instead I stuck to the store I was familiar with. Furthermore, the cost of organic compost and potting soil added up quickly. It wasn’t until I was several months into gardening and putting in the beds in the backyard that I considered looking for places to get free or inexpensive compost. While this should have been common sense, I was doing quite a bit of guesswork and Internet research to learn how to garden, as well as taking a few free classes at gardening centers.
The seeds alone don’t cost much, but they did cause me another problem. As a first-time gardener, I had no idea how many of my seeds would sprout and survive. I planted a wide variety of vegetables, but too many of each. It was a little late in the season when I started my seeds, so as of this writing, we are still waiting for many of our plants to produce. Our surplus will be shared with friends and family, and I’ll also look for a food bank to donate to. Like a chemist in a laboratory, I am going through the process of trial and error to find the right combinations to get the most from our space. I have six different varieties of tomatoes, with seventeen plants. I also have three varieties of chard with seven plants; three types of kale; and six jalapeños. This is in addition to cucumbers, basil, mint, chives, green beans, bok choy, onions, snap peas, arugula, lettuce, salad greens, and leeks. It’s going to take me a season or two to figure out how much we need. My backyard is my laboratory, and although my results are inconclusive as of yet, I will continue to search for a formula to help us eat well.
I ran into a coworker, and she and I got on the subject of gardening. I explained to her that I knew I had overplanted. She told me that one of the joys of gardening is sharing and trading with others. She listed three other coworkers who garden and told me that they swap produce all the time. Then she whipped out a pen and paper and asked for my address. Just knowing that I was willing to share prompted her to stop by my house that afternoon with a bag full of peaches and plums from her yard. I hadn’t really considered how fulfilling the sharing would be. Christopher’s mom stopped by one day to get some basil from me, and I sent her home with green beans, lemon cucumbers, tomatoes, and figs from an old tree that is in our front yard. She was thrilled with the booty she carted off.
While gardening is one thing that we are doing to help us to live a more healthful lifestyle, obviously it isn’t something that everyone can do. My inexperience made the start-up costs a bit expensive. Our house sits on almost a quarter of an acre, and we have the room to grow quite a bit of food. We also live in San Diego, which gives us a longer growing season. A friend told me I could plant almost anything year-round, a hypothesis I can’t wait to test. I do think it’s possible for most people with a yard to grow some of their produce, but it’s misleading to say that this is an easy solution to the cost of food. Growing your own veggies isn’t an immediate solution, but it might be helpful in the long run if people have the money and time to invest.
To supplement our garden, we signed up for a local CSA (community-supported agriculture). When we called to find out how to sign up, luckily a spot had just opened; usually there is a waiting list. Our CSA is Be Wise Ranch, a local organic farm approximately thirty minutes from our house. We paid $125, which covered our startup fee and four weeks’ worth of produce. Each week we would go to a pickup point, which turned out to be less than a mile from our house, and get a “small” box of produce. The boxes contain whatever is in season, and everything within it is freshly picked. This helps us to eat local, fresh, and organic. Due to the time it took to get signed up and started, we didn’t get our first delivery until the end of our second week of our healthy eating plan.
Before that, we had already faced a few challenges. Because we were on summer break, going to the gym was easy. We made it a priority; it was the first thing we did when we got up in the morning. Within a few days, we came to realize the positive changes we were seeing and feeling. But the end of our first week was Father’s Day weekend. My dad’s side of the family has a tradition of getting together at my grandpa’s cabin and spending Father’s Day weekend with one another. This year it was particularly important that we go, as my grandfather and one of my cousins both had passed away earlier that year. My family needed to come together for a happier occasion.
This meant a road trip for us. My entire family lives in northern California, so for Christopher and me, it is a ten-hour car ride. We left much later than we intended to because we hit the gym before beginning our trip, and we packed a lunch to take with us, so that we didn’t have to stop and eat out. Food on the road turned out not to be our biggest challenge. It was easy to drive by the fast-food chains at the freeway off-ramps when our mini ice chest was filled with sandwiches, strawberries, and almonds. However, when we got to my grandpa’s cabin in the woods, it was harder to control what we ate.
The laughter of my large family filled the deck of the cabin that my grandfather built. Wading through the hellos and hugs, we passed by two picnic tables covered with an array of snacks. My family members walked by the tables and filled their plates with the chips, dip, and treats that had been laid out. It’s hard to resist the crunch of potato chips coming through in surround-sound while everyone else is enjoying them. The sound seemed to increase the pressure to eat the nutrition-deficient snacks. To fight off the urge to dig in, I filled a plate with veggies for Christopher and me to share. They had the same satisfying crunch, but with less salt. We did well throughout the day, sticking to veggies and the food that we brought. But when the cupcakes came out, all bets were off.
My sister Kimberly is famous among my family and friends for the desserts she makes and decorates. Not only does she make things for the whole family, she also takes the extra time to make a batch of vegan treats so that Christopher and I aren’t left out. Twelve gorgeous vegan cupcakes on their own separate tray awaited us.
While the concept of “vegan” is foreign to my family, they have always respected my choice. From the first time I brought Christopher home, my mom has cooked us vegan meals and now stocks her kitchen with soymilk and other vegan staples before we visit. That is not to say it has never been difficult. The first time I came home after becoming vegan, my dad picked me up at the Sacramento airport, which is almost three hours from Redding, where my family lives. On the way home he wanted to stop for food, and sort of shrugged before saying, “I don’t know what to feed you.” Eventually we were able to find a place where we could both eat.
It was more difficult to explain the idea of veganism to my niece Kylie, who was about four when it came up in conver
sation. She and my mom were playing a computer game about dinosaurs, and my mom was explaining the difference between carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores. She explained that humans were omnivores, but as a side note added that Aunt Kerri and Uncle Christopher were herbivores. Kylie promptly asked, “Are they dinosaurs?” While there is occasional teasing—it would be impossible to grow up in my family without developing a sense of humor and a thick skin—my family has always been supportive.
Before we could dig into the desserts, my sister set aside a special tray with some cupcakes decorated to celebrate events from the past year: my grandmother’s eightieth birthday, one cousin’s graduation from eighth grade, my mom’s and uncle Bill’s retirement, another cousin’s first child, and my brother-in-law’s and my thirtieth birthdays. Then the cupcakes were passed around.
I had one cupcake. They were delicious as usual, but I didn’t feel the need to overindulge. But by the time I finished, Christopher had already inhaled his dessert. Wiping the chocolate from his cheek, he asked, “Should I have another?”
“No,” I replied. “You don’t need one.”
“I think I’m going to have another,” he said, smiling.
“Why do you ask me if you’re going to do it no matter what I say?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to have another.”
I shrugged my shoulders as he navigated his way through my family members and leaned over the tray, examining which would be the best choice. Maybe he was looking for the biggest one to make a second cupcake worth it, or perhaps he wanted the one with the most frosting. Either way, it would take some time to change our habits.
14
Bad Brains and Barbecued Black-Eyed Peas
Christopher
I was a chubby kid during most of my childhood, and even now I struggle to maintain a healthy body weight. As a guy, this dilemma has less cultural baggage to unpack, but psychologically it can be just as haunting. I constantly debate about what to eat, how much to eat, and what to buy when we go shopping for food. However, our experiments with eating on a dollar a day and eating on the Thrifty Food Plan helped me get a better sense of the different ways I could nourish myself. As a result, I felt better prepared to enter this new era in our eating lives. Our goal to eat better and to live a more healthful lifestyle, while making choices that captured what we believe is best for the world, forced me to better understand my identity as seen through the lens of food. There are so many factors to consider when deciding what to eat that it’s no wonder many of us battle with how best to feed ourselves. It’s hard to know if the food we are eating is good for us, and if we really need to avoid things like saturated fats and high-fructose corn syrup. Industry-sponsored nutritionism and sound-bite journalism have only made things worse.
So this new adventure in healthy eating came with lots of new questions. If we see ourselves as people who care about the environment, can we really justify buying bell peppers grown in Holland, or shipping a cheesecake from Philadelphia? If we believe that slavery was intolerable, should we be buying chocolate? Do exploited immigrants pick our tomatoes? Is buying local really that important? Our recent experiments in eating allowed us to widen the scope of these possibilities even further, and forced me to consider how I formed my choices surrounding food in the first place. If I wanted to know why I believed what I did about mealtime, I would have to dig up my past and explore the roots of my eating life. So that is what I did.
Growing up, I spent parts of my summers working at my father’s fire protection business, filing papers, shredding documents, doing inventory, and sweeping the warehouse floor. My parents were doing their best to teach me the value of a dollar, and the lesson extended after payday, when they forced me to put that money in the bank for “my future.” At the time, it seemed ridiculously unfair. The fact that I spent large chunks of my summer working, and then was not allowed to spend my hard-earned dollars at the toy store, seemed patently absurd. What if I wanted to buy my own copy of the Nintendo game Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out, or that cool machine that told the stories of baseball players when you put their cards in it? It was my money, and I wanted to spend it. If I had been just a few years older, I might have believed that my parents’ efforts were part of some communist plot that included child labor. As an adult, I now understand their motives, and I have to admit that my work ethic and desire to save money are due in part to their tutelage. Yet the value of a dollar hit home in a more palpable way when I turned eleven years old.
During my sixth-grade year at La Costa Meadows elementary school, I was in a place familiar to many twelve-year-olds. I was about to enter middle school; I had friends, but wasn’t sure what would happen when we split up to go to different schools the following year, and I was anxious about being liked by girls. This was also the year my parents divorced, and I stopped playing little league baseball. What I remember most, however, is being in Mr. Howard’s class. He was the “cool” sixth-grade teacher, and I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have him. While I don’t remember anything about his teaching, or the material, what I do recall is the excitement I felt when he took me and three other students to Taco Bell for lunch one day.
This was the biggest reward a student could gain in Mr. Howard’s class—a special off-campus lunch trip with him on Friday afternoon. I’m not sure this practice would fly these days, but back then it was a dream come true for my classmates and me. I found out about the trip the day before, but unfortunately I forgot to mention the event to my parents (who at that point were still together). The result was that I had no money to buy my own lunch. I had never been to a Taco Bell before, but I knew that the menu items were cheap. I couldn’t access my own bank account before school (not that my parents would have let me), so I scoured the house searching for loose change. I swiped a stack of quarters from my dad’s dresser and pilfered my mom’s purse, making sure to pick the nickels and dimes out of every nook and cranny of that oversized bag. When all was counted, I had two dollars and eighty-nine cents. I put my change in a small Ziploc bag and headed for school.
I couldn’t focus that morning during class, and by the time lunch arrived, my hand was clenched tight around my small bag of coins. The car seemed to fly through our community, and I was so worried about having enough money to eat that I refrained from talking to my classmates on the way there. I remember the wind on my face and worrying about having to ask my teacher to help pay for my lunch. Finally, we pulled up to the drive-through, and while my peers ordered, I planned out every penny of my lunch budget. I settled on two beef tacos and a medium soda, and was left with just over thirty cents. This was the first time I had ever paid for my own meal, and it felt good. The fact that I could afford it, and didn’t suffer an embarrassing moment in front of my cool teacher, made me proud. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was beginning to shape my own food identity. This moment defined my eating habits well into my teen years.
As teenagers, my friends and I could eat a delicious meal very cheaply, and with the added benefit of newly issued drivers’ licenses, hitting the drive-through became a regular part of hanging out. We were hungry growing boys, and our experiences with food were limited to family trips to the grocery store, snacking on junk food, and only having to pay for meals when we wanted to get away from the cul-de-sac. We had no idea how much more went into what we were eating. The struggles of our single mothers to provide for us—by now, many of our parents were divorced—the worker struggles involved with the tomatoes we were eating in our Taco Bell burritos, the treatment of the animals who made up the beef filling, the marketing efforts that convinced us what to eat in the first place: None of this was on our adolescent radar. We ate what we wanted, and when we wanted, without having any idea of the interconnected food web we were a part of. Information about the food system was not widely available or easy to find; not that we were looking. These were the days before wide use of the Internet, the time period that many of us refer to as B.G. (before Google).
However, as my friends and I grew up, our worldview was widened on a daily basis. The schoolteacher in me would love to say that we had great mentors who helped us see the world anew, but unfortunately this wouldn’t be true. School was absolutely irrelevant, and attending classes served only one purpose: to see one another and talk about more important things. When we started going to punk shows, this became our raison d’être. In addition to helping us focus our angst, this community gave us access to information that we couldn’t find anywhere else, information that was central to the challenges facing humanity. We might have been reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy in English class, but this gave us little reason to focus on race issues. Following the organization Anti-Racist Action, and confronting the white supremacists at punk shows, was far more immediate.
It was through this community that we discovered the plight of animals on concentrated animal feeding operations, or “factory farms.” At sixteen, this was the first time I learned where my food came from. The title of a leaflet I picked up at the Good Riddance merchandise table had a photo of a cow lying on the ground, looking up at the camera, and was titled “Downed Cow: This Story Will Change Your Life.” Indeed, it did. I began thinking more about the consequences of eating meat, yet despite this, I didn’t immediately change my diet.
On a Dollar a Day: One Couple's Unlikely Adventures in Eating in America Page 17