Friends sometimes joke that we’re Sacramento survivalists, like “those” people on one of those Doomsday Prepper shows. Irony: We’ve never seen the show. A synopsis from friends, however, lets us know that we definitely wouldn’t qualify. We don’t carry with us a siege mentality, nor think that we could survive for very long on what we grow – at least not without a whole lot of belt tightening and expanding our menu choices. Nor do we believe that somehow our garden and chickens would survive the onslaught of marauding hooligans starving from their own lack of food.
Likewise, we’re not even attempting self-sufficiency. There’s something a bit self-absorbed in that, too anti-social, too closed off from the world. To be “off the grid” with regards food has a certain appeal upon first hearing it. Certainly we strive to produce large quantities of food for ourselves, to eke out what our garden beds can and in a way that builds the land up for future production, not deplete it of all nutritive value. But to be 100% enbubbled in terms of what we eat? That’s almost as frightening a prospect as being completely dependent upon others for your food.
No, we’re just some folks who heard a call to grow food, and we do. Just this evening we sauntered across the street to deliver a few bottles of homebrew to our neighbors. A few days before it was the neighbor bringing olives he’d cured. At work, a friend gave us about ten pounds of extra venison, elk, and fish from his freezer to trade for tomatoes, potatoes, and other garden fare this summer and fall. In front of the church behind us, a fellow who has driven past the open few acres for years heeded a call to tap on the church door to ask if he could farm it. In getting to know him, he’s given us bags of kale, while he has been the recipient of a fig cutting plus some of Rachel’s habanero jelly.
The bottom line is that producing your own food opens the door for building community, not shunning it. Growing your own tomatoes and raising chickens provides a sense of where our food originates, as well as provides conversation and sharing something that is distinctly common for all of us regardless of politics, religion, or creed: food. Sure, we might prepare those calories in different ways, but we all eat. Like water, food is that true universal that one cannot escape. To attempt to escape with it in some isolated garden, eschewing community, shooing humanity… makes little sense.
No, our endeavor is to grow – food, our selves, our land, our children, our community.
We hope - we pray - that our endeavors might influence others to do likewise in the ways that they can.
