Raised during the Great Depression, my father and his family grew a significnat portion of their own food in their (then) rural Chicago suburb.  I recently asked him if he could recall what kinds of food they grew.  Closing his eyes briefly to envision the plot of soil he once worked, he listed: “beets, potatoes, carrots, asparagus, watermelon, and fruit trees: apples, pears, and cherries - you know, typical things.  A moment later he said, “I was paid 1 penny for every 100 potato bugs I removed from the garden.”

I was blown away that my 83-year old father, whose kitchen-savvy includes (exhaustively) microwaving canned soup and scrambling eggs, was once in charge of pulling bugs off of potatoes.  At one point in his life, he was far more intimately connected to his food than I could ever hope to be as an apartment dweller in New York City.At a Tuv Ha’Aretz informational meeting in New Jersey two years ago, a woman stood up and said that Community-Supported Agriculture is the next best thing to growing one’s own food.  In her ideal world, she said, she’d have the time and space to grow everything she and her family ate.  In reality, she has a busy schedule, and a suburban lawn.  In joining a CSA, she forms a relationship with someone who does have that time and space.  Her membership financially supports her local farmer, and her farmer supports her by pulling off the potato bugs (at a much better exchange rate than 1 cent/100!), and giving her access to food that at least tastes like she grew it herself. 

Unlike the modern CSA, my father’s family’s intentions in growing their own food were neither political nor romantic.  Their backyard garden was not grown in protest of agribusiness, or in an attempt to feel more connected to the earth. 

Growing food was a part of his community’s daily life, like going to work (my father’s father was a minister, and was occasionally paid with eggs from neighboring chickens instead of money), and cooking (as legend has it, my grandmother could stretch a week’s worth of family meals out of one chicken.)  Moreover, growing and storing food was likely the difference between eating and not eating. 

My own relationship to food is significantly different than my dad’s was growing up.  Simply put, I don’t have to worry about not having food to eat.  I have the luxury of making choices about what and how I eat.  I can wax poetic about my father’s family’s garden, and grieve the fact that it, like, many small farms, is gone.  I can join a CSA and strive for the same intimacy with my food that my dad had (though without realizing it).    Equally, I can choose to ruin my kidneys and eat nothing but McDonald’s every day, like Morgan Spurlock in Supersize Me.  It makes me think that perhaps we are equally blessed and burdened by our seemingly infinite access to food.