By Kurt Waterstradt
Food, the glue of humanity, is a survival need, community builder, and connection to nature. It’s omnipresent in celebration and sorrow.
A family recipe is a preserved ancestry that’s celebrated as delicious, enticing aromas float from the kitchen during holiday gatherings. Let’s not forget about the ubiquitous social media post showing off an otherworldly or life-changing dish.
The late writer and chef Anthony Bourdain said, “I think food, culture, people, and landscape are all absolutely inseparable.”
Perhaps food, culture, and people feel inseparable, but are we still connected to the landscape? We know what it offers, as seen in any plastic-wrapped produce section or the foggy panes in the freezer aisle.
While we know food is a requirement to live, evidence suggests a growing disconnection from the source to the kitchen table. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, farm and ranch families comprise less than 2% of the American population. When you think about those numbers, it’s easy to wonder if the system is sustainable.
If food isn’t sustainable, what happens to its inseparable links?
Let’s rethink what sustainability really means.
When you think about agriculture, inevitably, a vision of vast farmland with crops as far as the eye can see appears, but that feels far away, even with 47,400 farms in Florida. It’s difficult to grasp that there are that many, but the disconnect is easy to understand when over 97% of Florida’s population resides in metropolitan (urban) areas.
Society needs a paradigm shift from big farms to your front yard, backyard, balcony, or living room. You don’t need acres of land or a 4 a.m. alarm clock. Whatever space you have, there’s potential to nourish yourself, your family, your landscape, and your neighbors.
Sustainable agriculture is about more than food. Growing the ingredients for your favorite dish not only fortifies your physical health but provides sustainable boosts to your mental health and community too.
Elise Pickett isn’t a veteran but has familial military roots. Her grandfathers served, and her cousin is an active-duty Navy Seabee. As a child, she spent a lot of time gardening with her family, but she never imagined those formative years with her hands in the dirt would lead to a 5,600 sq. ft. urban homestead in St. Petersburg, Florida, teeming with raised beds, fruit trees, and edible landscaping.
The Urban Harvest was founded in 2014 when Pickett realized the unhealthy nature of our food systems and that it impacts our overall health. The nutritional content of fruits and vegetables has declined over the last 50-to-70 years as agriculture shifted toward new high-yield crop varieties. The spinach your parents and grandparents ate was more nutritious than what’s in your local grocery store today.
Pickett wanted to put the nutrition back into her family’s food. She dove into sustainable agriculture and learned about everything from composting to raising chickens to microgreens and aquaponics. The progress was frustrating at times, but her urban homestead grew as she adapted and pressed forward.
Now, she harvests from her urban farm every day. No meal passes where there aren’t homegrown ingredients on the plate. There’s a contentment to knowing the food is always fresh, highly nutritious, and sustainably grown.
As a mom and business owner, to say her schedule is full is a huge understatement. You can understand the potential for stress, as there always seems to be more to do than there are waking hours in the day, but she’s cultivated an approach that is effective and therapeutic.
What’s her secret? She waters and observes her garden every morning as she sips her coffee. By spending short amounts of time with her plants every day, she’s able to identify problems and resolve them quicker, like pests. Just like learning a language, a little bit each day boosts fluency, and for a garden to flourish, it should feel like a conversation.
While her routine was designed for the sake of her plants, she’s getting numerous health benefits from a steady diet of nature and sunlight. This potent combination is known to increase serotonin and melatonin, lower depression, increase sleep quality, regulate blood pressure, and increase cognitive function.
That’s a pretty good return on the time spent drinking a morning cup of coffee.
As Pickett’s farm grew, so did her connection to the community. It’s no secret that modern American neighborhoods can be isolating places, even if you are surrounded on all sides. According to the World Health Organization, “social isolation is a growing public health issue that should be taken as seriously as more well-known issues like smoking, obesity, and sedentary lifestyles.”
It’s estimated that loneliness affects anywhere from one-third to over half of people in industrialized societies. For veterans, this can be even more difficult due to the transient nature of their careers and the challenges of settling into a permanent residence upon retirement.
As Pickett continued to expand, people would stop during their walks and strike up conversations because, as she noted, “everyone is just curious.” It’s easy to understand why with a front yard brimming with life.
Her neighbor’s young sons come over and talk to the chickens as they feed them. She’s nurtured her community’s curiosity by adding a free seed library in front of her house so people can start their own sustainable gardens.
Stanford social engagement research scholar Steven Crane, MS, says “Finding some way you can offer kindness to others in a sustainable, healthy way is your best chance at building meaningful connections, which support us in building meaningful, flourishing lives.”
Sustainability is more than how we marshal resources. It’s how we choose to interact with our landscape, people, culture, and food. It’s choosing to nurture ourselves, each other, and our landscape. Perhaps it’s as simple as putting your hands in the dirt.
Go Online to www.FireWatchMagazine.com to find The Urban Harvest’s Tips for Getting Started!
