External Factors
Most people won’t be won over to ULFs (ultra-local foods) because they’re nowhere near as cheap, tasty, and convenient as UPFs (ultra-processed foods).
On all three counts, this is a story about what we’ve long been conditioned to experience and thus believe is reasonable.
So here’s an intriguing question: could a ULF version of cheap, tasty, and convenient rival the UPF version, given the latter’s head start in billions of advertising dollars over the last 70 years? Also intriguing is the way ads for UPFs portray them as “natural” despite excessive processing that takes them far away from their natural state. And therein lies hope. Still, morphing hope into the reality of genuinely natural would mean changing the reigning idea of tasty from, say, a crisp, sour cream-flavored potato chip straight out of a new bag to a crisp, sweet, juicy carrot plucked straight out of the ground and rinsed off with cool water.
In an equally advertised and culturally conditioned contest, which would prevail, based on taste alone? Many would say the potato chip. Yet I’ve seen young children, provided with only fresh apple wedges as a snack, ask for them. Even then, I suspect the reason they like them is that those particular children are home schooled, so that their apple wedges don’t get defeated by seeing friends at an ordinary school binge on junk snacks. Conditioning is powerful.
The same kinds of conversions would need to happen with current concepts of cheap and convenient. At the moment, it would be a hard sell to convince the average person that tending a garden would be cheaper and more convenient—all things considered—than simply driving to the nearest grocery to pick up what they want in 15 minutes. I’ve found that even the average home gardener finds it more convenient to get most of their food from a supermarket rather than their garden.
So some say we need a massive campaign to educate people about the benefits of healthier/garden food concepts. Really? Funded by whom? may I ask. To the tune of how many $billions, and over how many decades to even catch up to, let alone compete with, the overwhelming UPF head start? Advertising is powerful.
We don’t have the time or the resources to re-educate at the nationwide scale needed to be effective. The only thing that will turn the tide is the onslaught of environmental disasters, and even then only once they have compromised the industrial system enough to convince people that our taken-for-granted food supply is no longer reliable. As perhaps eggs are already illustrating, what with bird flu rapidly driving down their supply and up their cost. Yet a genuine solution will have to go beyond organic, which is largely distributed through the industrial food chain anyway. No, I think the big switcheroo will happen only when most people are disaster-nudged enough to go the ULF route.
In the meantime, for those who are open to education, it would be wise to start or ramp up a garden, knowing that the real cost of grocery store food is two to three times the check-out price. Especially when you add in the more upfront costs of bad health outcomes: overweight, obesity, diabetes, etc. And how convenient is it to pay for that, either out of pocket or in the form of accumulated suffering when paying out of pocket becomes out of the question? How worth it is the tastiness of potato chips and other UPFs? One rationale is that you can just get the fresh veggies at the grocery store and still have convenience. Right. And for how long will they be easily available, and at what cost? Already we import up to half of our fresh vegetables and fruits, whose prices will only go up substantially with trade problems and climate change. So over not that much time, transforming the experience of cheap, tasty, and convenient will likely be disaster-defaulted from UPFs to ULFs.
What about people who have no space for a garden?
No question, those living in downtowns with no lawns will likely have to continue to depend on the industrial food system. However, turfgrass lawns—often sitting idle—are the largest irrigated crop in the U.S., occupying some 40.5 million acres1. That works out to 3.7 self-sufficiency gardens like mine (a 35’x40’ plot) for every man, woman, and child. Some 80% of us live in urban areas, but 23% of that space is occupied by lawns, a substantial portion of which could surely become gardens. Plus, there’s the 20% who live in rural areas, with more room to raise ULFs. It would be difficult to parse out how much of all that space is available for self-sufficiency gardens, but if even just a third of it was, it would be more than enough to feed everyone. That’s in the sheer number of all of us, although deep city-dwellers wouldn’t have access to it. Even then, it would be far more than enough to reach the goal of “only” half of the population.
Climate change disasters destroy gardens, too.
So just how resilient can gardens be? After all, they’re not immune to climate shocks. In the Helene disaster that slammed Asheville, N.C., households that were flooded would most likely have seen their gardens go underwater too. Likewise, gardens would not have been spared in the recent burned-out neighborhoods that ravaged Los Angeles. However, most—likely 95% or more—of the area of those two cities were not destroyed by their respective disasters. Hence, most gardens would have survived (though possibly battered), as would any food put up from them. Such home garden-generated backup would have provided sustenance for weeks to months, in sharp contrast to the three-day supply in grocery stores. For slower-moving shocks like drought, it’s much easier to water self-sufficiency gardens, which require only one percent as much land per capita as the industrial system. A garden food system would thus be much more nimble and better prepared to address these kinds of shocks than mega-farms.
As I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. military has only so many helicopters and MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat) they can deploy to stricken areas. How frequent will two or more $50 billion disasters have to be to render those kinds of rescue efforts impossible? Two in three months? Nope: Helene and the LA fires were just over three months apart. And how geographically close together? Well, closer than LA is to N.C. I have friends who weren’t even remotely aware of the devastation wrought by Helene. Stunning. So how much worse will it have to get? Hard to say, but I’m betting we will find out within five years, and possibly three. I would love for us to be seriously ramping up a national self-sufficiency garden food system by then.
Self-sufficiency gardens aren’t input self-sufficient.
Right. Especially in the larger context. But that’s not a problem.
A recent article in The New Yorker featured the famed backyard gardener Ruth Stout, an appealing character, for sure.2 Contrary to what I espouse, she championed the easy “no work” method that scoffs at compost and requires no digging or much of any kind of physical activity. Just throw together some moldy hay from a farmer along with other sources of organic material to a depth of eight inches, throw some seeds into it, and voilá, you have a garden.
But it’s not that easy to substantially feed yourself from a mulch-only garden. For one thing, moldy hay will likely have scads of pill bugs that (as I discovered myself) will gladly devour tender young vegetable seedlings. Plus—surprise, surprise—heavy mulch is useful as a growing medium only when enough of it has decomposed into compost, so dismissing compost out of hand is a bit disingenuous. The quick, “lazy” way may get you a garden, but an hour a day will get you a much more productive one, with the added benefits of more exercise and exposure to nature.
Like mulch and compost, greenhouses, gardening education and supplies, and (for some) done-for-you garden plots are all parts of an infrastructure build-up needed to sustain an effective garden food system. It’s just not practical for the average gardener to generate all those services on their own. Plus, the resulting businesses that will spring up to help will provide many new jobs. That’s already happening with companies offering to set you up with your own egg-laying hens. This, of course, is (again) due to the bird flu crisis, which has been hitting commercial farms with much greater devastation than backyards.
Then there’s perhaps the most valuable service of all: gardening neighborliness. An active exchange of not only vegetable favorites but also tips on best practices will greatly enrich menus as well as garden success. You could conceivably be the only one in your neighborhood to grow a self-sufficiency garden, but it’s much more satisfying and beneficial to enjoy the social sharing that can go along with it.
So at the largest scale, it’s true that gardeners will need and benefit from local support services. However, they will operate outside of—and at a tiny fraction of the cost of—the industrial food system. You won’t have to wait for long to see it happen. Stay tuned.
1Norrington, B. The Lawn Is the Largest Irrigated Crop in the USA. UCSB Geography.
2Lepore, J. 2025. The book of Ruth. The New Yorker. March 24, p 24-29.