Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth Read Free Page B

our available food growing areas. Considering that, this diet emphasizes crops that can grow the most food in the least space. The food choices in this plan are intended to meet your nutritional requirements. If you are to get all your nutrients from your garden, the one hardest to get is calories. You need to be able to fill yourself up. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, parsnips, leeks, and garlic are some of the crops that provide the most calories in the least space.
    A sustainable diet feeds you, while at the same time feeding the soil and building the ecosystem. Crops are chosen for their ability to provide both food for you and food for the soil. Grains produce carbon material for compost building in the form of stalks and straw. Some crops, such as clovers and alfalfa, are grown to supply the nitrogen component tothe compost pile. In a sustainable garden, over the course of the year cover crops grow in about 60 percent of the garden. Before you put this book down thinking that you can’t possibly turn that much of your garden over to cover crops, remember that there are 12 months in the year and often people only use half of that time, leaving their garden to the mercy of the weeds for the other half. I’ll show you how to plan those soil-building crops into your rotation.
    I concentrate my efforts on staple crops and soil-building crops. The vegetable crops most people are familiar with, such as tomatoes and cucumbers, add variety to your diet and can be worked into the sustainable garden plan. Since we’re talking eating only what grows best in your region, you need to pay particular attention to variety selection and seed saving. Certain varieties of each crop grow best in specific areas. If you save the seed of what does best in your niche area, you will have developed a strain of that crop that will surpass anything you can buy from a seed company.
    Your meals will change with the seasons and you will become more attuned to the place you are in. Adding animal products to this diet is feasible, however the space it takes to grow the food for the animals that feed you becomes part of your nutritional footprint. My vision of the food system that develops around sustainable diets doesn’t include a beef industry or a broiler industry. Instead, beef would come from the male offspring of dairy cows and from the old cows themselves. Meat from chickens would come from young roosters and old hens. We would eat less meat and prepare it in different ways. For example, rather than large pieces of fried chicken, chopped chicken and gravy would be on the menu, served over mashed potatoes or noodles. A sustainable diet can be an adventure, not a deprivation. There are so many things to try, we just have to get ourselves out of our culinary rut and do it.
    I have written this book for anyone who wants to consider a sustainable diet and learn how to grow it. For those new to gardening, just growing anything is an accomplishment and you will learn more each year. Also, your soil will keep getting better and better. Many of you will be much further along this path and just need to fine-tune what you are already doing. This is a book to help you think through the wholeprocess and decide how you can make it work for you. With this book, and others I’ll suggest, you can embark on an educational journey just as if you were taking my class, except you will be moving at your own pace. I always suggest keeping a notebook with information you’ve gathered. Do some research on areas you need to learn more about and write up your findings for your notebook. The best way to learn is to teach others, so get some friends interested and share what you’ve learned with them.
    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