Food security is becoming an increasing concern, and it’s more important than ever to find ways to ensure we can feed ourselves. Relying on outside sources for food can feel risky, especially with the challenges facing global food systems. That’s why growing at least some of your own food is a powerful step toward taking control of your food supply.
By starting a garden, you’re not just saving money or eating healthier—you’re building resilience and independence for yourself and your community. In Grow a Sustainable Diet, author Cindy Connor shares her excitement about and the challenges with eating only what you grow.
This sample from the book, explores how growing your own food can help secure your food future, giving you the confidence and knowledge to feed yourself no matter what. Dive in and learn how you can take charge of your food security today.
From Chapter 1: Sustainable Diet
What If the Trucks Stop Coming?
What if the trucks stop coming to the grocery stores? This is the question I posed to my students at the beginning of the Four Season Food Production class I taught at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College. I wanted them to think about how they would feed themselves with homegrown or local food supplies. Their task was to complete a group project that would examine what food was available from farms within a 100-mile radius of where they lived and to estimate how much they would need for a year. Extra credit was given to each student if they brought in a highway map with circles showing distances of 25, 50, 75, and 100 miles from their home. It was essential that it be one of those fold-out maps to show all the secondary roads and small towns.
It was a real awakening for most of the students. First, they had to think about what they were eating. Some could not imagine eliminating processed food from their diet. They had to think about how much food they would need and how they would store it, with the grocery stores closed and all. In reality, those stores only have about a three or four day supply for normal times. Their shelves would be empty sooner if there was a panic. Working in a group was one of the great aspects of the project. Students, who may not have interacted otherwise, were now asking each other what skills, equipment, and other resources they had. My original intent was to encourage them to get to know the local growers at the farmers markets and where their farms were located. They did that but quickly realized that if the trucks actually did stop coming to the grocery stores, local growers wouldn’t be able to meet the demand with current production. Also, not all their food needs or desires would be met with the current local supply. They would have to depend on each other.
This project certainly got everyone thinking and talking to one another, and that is really important. If actually faced with the possibility of the trucks not coming, some people might act out of fear. They would acquire firearms and ammunition, begin to hoard food and supplies and build secret places to put their stash. I don’t believe there are enough guns and ammunition to keep hungry people from helping themselves in times of peril. I have written this book to help people act out of love and compassion. Each community needs to develop resiliency to meet whatever the future brings. Many signs point to the collapse of systems as we know them now. That doesn’t mean the collapse of our society; it just means we have to change to meet our new circumstances. Change is part of the organic process of our life and is inevitable. You have always lived with change. The houses you live in, the clothes you wear, interests, hobbies, jobs, food choices, etc., have all evolved as you have grown into the person you are now. Certainly, we have to do everything we can individually to contribute to our own needs, but without community, we cannot survive. When things change, new opportunities open up. We can help our communities embrace the opportunities that will lead to a future with food enough for all and a healthy earth.
Making Changes
This book will help you learn how to calculate how much food you would need and how much space it would take to grow and store it. Furthermore, it will teach you to do that sustainably by building the soil and using the least fossil fuel in growing your food and getting it to the table. This is actually the food growing part of permaculture. Permaculture is a design system whereby all the energies within a system are used to maximum efficiency, the excess from one operation becoming a resource for another.
Three important permaculture ethics are:
- Care for the people: We do what we can with our resources and increase our skills as much as we can, considering everyone who needs to be fed.
- Care for the earth: Whatever we do needs to be replenishing the earth, not leaving a trail of garbage and toxic waste behind us. Everything is connected. Consider yourself living downstream from anything you have ever done or contributed to.
- Redistribute the surplus: Everyone has talents in certain areas. If you think you don’t, just keep an open mind and know that if you follow your heart you will discover your talents. That’s where redistribute the surplus comes in. When we do what we do best, we probably have more than we need of some things and not enough of others. Share what you have through gift, trade, or sale.
Many people want to develop a small farm that will provide their family with a substantial part of their food. This book will help you understand how to do that. I know many of you are anxious to sell vegetables at the farmers markets and elsewhere. Before we can feed others, however, we need to know how to feed ourselves. I have seen farmers at the markets who have some food items for sale that their families haven’t even had a chance to eat yet. Shouldn’t farm families eat as well as the customers? If you take your time and grow a wide variety of food for your family first, planning out how much you need and how much you will actually harvest and when the harvest will be, and learning how to prepare it for the table in a way your family will eat, you will have undergone an educational process that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Those few short years of learning will also be years of soil building and skill building. Every endeavor on a homestead seems to require additional tools and infrastructure. If you start right in as a market gardener, you will be playing catch-up for years, always needing tools, supplies, or a building that you hadn’t anticipated until then. If you learn to grow for your family first, you can anticipate what it would be like to ramp up production and better plan for it. Even a small urban garden is a step in the right direction to begin your education.
Back up a bit, though. Before you can even imagine growing a large part of your food, you need to imagine eating a diet of those foods. As you travel this journey your eating habits will change, leaving behind food brought to you by the industrial food complex, and incorporating homegrown/local food eaten in season. Stay open to the possibilities and adjust your goals as you learn more. Be kind to yourself and make changes to your diet gradually.
For a few years I was on a committee at my church that partnered with a church in Haiti, providing aid. There was a yearly meeting for all the churches doing that in our diocese. One year when I attended, the lunch that was served was really hard for me to understand. Lunch consisted of sub sandwiches from a chain restaurant, offering three choices of meat or vegetarian, chips, cake and about a dozen choices of soft drinks. The dishes and silverware were disposable, in spite of there being a church kitchen available. I knew that it was volunteers who planned and gathered everything together, and since I didn’t want to do that, I should have been grateful. However, I thought it would be more appropriate if the lunch consisted of something we could imagine the people we were helping in Haiti eating or food local to us. Afterward, I wrote a letter saying so. I never received a response to that letter, but the next year, lunch was provided by the local Food Not Bombs group and consisted of soup, salad, and bread. The beverages were tea, coffee, and water. It made a huge difference to me that day. I hope others realized the change that had occurred. The following year the planning committee suggested that participants bring their own non-disposable plates and cups to use. Things were definitely moving in the right direction.
Sometimes, just taking another look at what you’re doing with specific goals in mind will help you find new ways.
Right now, you might think it’s a good idea to grow all your food, and maybe you can do that. However, once you really get started, you might realize that it would be better to grow some of it and support local growers for the rest. Deciding how to use the resources at your disposal efficiently is a big step. I’ll give you some examples of how to use a limited growing area to your best advantage. Growing your own food is time-consuming and dirty work. You have to be ready to make a commitment to a place (your garden) and to learning new skills. I can only teach gardening in the context of the “whole system.” Besides the ecosystem of what’s going on in the soil and plants, it also means what is going on in your kitchen and lifestyle. If your time is filled with activities now, something will need to change to make time for gardening on a larger scale, because it is not only the gardening, but the eating that will be evolving. Cooking from the garden is different from cooking frozen or canned food from the store. Using food fresh from the garden is even an adjustment for chefs who have only ever used produce trucked in from a distance. Some people like to jump into the deep end, so to speak, and let new projects overwhelm them. Remember, however, to think of the significant others who will be on this journey with you, although not so involved. Take time to think through the changes you are making. Gradually, some things that used to seem important are not so much on your mind anymore as your new lifestyle begins to develop.
