May 23, 2007 in Food

A call to grow your own food

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SCARBOROUGH, Maine – During World War II, the government urged Americans to plant “victory gardens,” backyard plots of fruits and vegetables that were supposed to ease reliance on the war-strained public food supply.

Today, Roger Doiron is repeating that call, this time to ease the strain of industrial agriculture on the environment and help people take control of what they eat.

“In a way, I’d say I’m trying to reinvent the suburbs and put food back on the suburban landscape,” says Doiron, a freelance writer and consultant who grows vegetables, blueberries, strawberries, apples, cranberries and herbs on his third-of-an-acre lot.

Around the country, people from Maine to California are spreading the word about the benefits of gardens in what some are calling a “grass-roots gardening movement.”

Doiron’s Web site, Kitchen Gardeners International, extols the virtues of taking control of your food while reducing the distance it travels from the farm to the fork, which some estimates put at an average of 1,500 miles.

Once common to backyards, kitchen gardens have become a why-bother sort of thing for most Americans.

But now some say the pendulum may be swinging back. Between E. coli scares, global warming, the “buy local” movement, aging baby boomers with more time to spare and a desire to enjoy the freshest of fresh, a new wave of grow-your-own has begun.

A new study out of St. Louis University suggests that young children in rural areas eat more fruits and vegetables when the produce is homegrown, and that garden-fed children prefer the taste of fruits and vegetables to other foods.

During World War II, some 20 million people answered the call to plant their own gardens in the name of patriotism. This time, Doiron says, the issue is about feeding the world, which is expected to grow from 6.5 billion to 9 billion people by 2045.

“It’s all meant to be working toward the goal of sustainability, which we have to be working toward if we’re going to feed 9 billion people nutritiously in the next 40 years or so,” he said.

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