Eat Your Greens

The Surprising Power of Homegrown Leaf Crops

David Kennedy

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780865717510
• eBook ISBN: 9781550925678
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

Turn over a new leaf with these nutritional powerhouses for your kitchen garden

Our industrialized food system is failing us, and as individuals we must take more responsibility for our own health and food security. Leaf crops produce more nutrients per square foot of growing space and per day of growing season than any other crops and are especially high in vitamins and minerals commonly lacking in the North American diet. As hardy as they are versatile, these beautiful leafy vegetables range from the familiar to the exotic. Some part of this largely untapped food resource can thrive in almost any situation.

Eat Your Greens provides complete instructions for incorporating these nutritional powerhouses into any kitchen garden. This innovative guide:

• Shows how familiar garden plants such as sweet potato, okra, beans, peas, and pumpkin can be grown to provide both nourishing leaves and other calorie- and protein-rich foods
• Introduces a variety of non-traditional, readily adaptable alternatives such as chaya, moringa, toon, and wolfberry
• Explains how to improve your soil while getting plenty of vegetables by growing edible cover crops

Beginning with a comprehensive overview of modern commercial agriculture and rounded out by a selection of advanced techniques to maximize, preserve, and prepare your harvest, Eat Your Greens is an invaluable addition to the library of any gardening enthusiast.

David Kennedy is the founder and director of Leaf for Life, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the elimination of global malnutrition through the optimum use of leaf crops, and is the author of 21st Century Greens and the Leaf for Life Handbook.

PART I

Balancing Our Food System

1

Two Out of Three Cheers

The Power of the Industrial Food System

Most food in North America is supplied through a global industrialized network. Food produced and distributed through that industrial system is cheaper now than it has ever been in human history. Just 15 minutes, working at the US minimal wage, can earn the money needed to buy enough food to meet a person’s daily requirements for calories and protein. Of course, this would not be gourmet dining, and not everyone has a job, even a minimum wage one. There are numerous other problems, including high housing, medical, and transportation costs, as well as the usual spectrum of social, emotional, and educational factors that can keep a person from getting the food they need. However, the high cost of basic foods isn’t one of them.

In 2011 Americans spent less than ten percent of their disposable income on food, and nearly half of that was spent eating away from home. Sixty years earlier, food made up nearly a quarter of the entire household budget in the US. This is about the same percentage that Mexicans now spend. In many countries, such as Pakistan and Kenya, half of all income goes to buy food. Despite the increasing productivity of industrial agriculture, the appallingly unequal distribution of the world’s resources results in roughly one billion people still falling asleep hungry most nights. Few of them live in North America.

It is not simply a plentiful supply of staple foods that North Americans enjoy. Food remains cheap even as we eat our way up the food chain. As people used to say, we eat “high on the hog.” That is, we eat a lot of luxury foods with high nutritional value, especially meat, fish, milk, and eggs. These foods of animal origin require greater resources to produce than plant-based foods and, as a result, they are almost invariably more expensive. Still, North Americans generally have enough income to fully indulge their taste for animal-based foods. In fact, only the half million people living in tiny Luxembourg eat more meat than Americans.

Our food prices may fluctuate a bit from year to year, but even through droughts, freezes, floods, and wars, we have a reliable supply of nutritious food. This dependable source of nourishment affords even average citizens luxuries like pursuing higher education, diverse careers, and the arts. The constant availability and low cost of food is so central to our modern way of life that it is easy to take it for granted.

Food Systems

There are basically four interconnected parts to any food system: production, processing, distribution, and consumption.

Production

The vast bulk of our food begins as wide swaths of single crops growing in neat rows on huge farms. Growing large areas dedicated to a single variety of plant is known as monoculture or monocropping. In North America, corn and soy are by far the most dominant of our food crops — in both acreage and sales — followed by wheat. Farmers growing these monoculture crops have tried to remain profitable chiefly by increasing yields while decreasing their labor costs.

Crop yields, especially of corn and soy, have climbed steadily over the past 80 years, primarily through the increased use of soluble fertilizers, irrigation, and specially bred seeds. During this same time, herbicides and insecticides were also introduced. By reducing competition from weeds and insects, they allowed much more food to mature and reach the market. The combination of these techniques has led to per acre corn yields six time greater than what they were in 1931. Similar, if not quite as dramatic, improvements were made in the yields of other food crops.

Agricultural labor costs have been minimized by some of the same techniques that increased yields. Using concentrated fertilizers to stimulate growth and replace lost soil nutrients requires far fewer hours of work than maintaining soil fertility with animal manures and cover crops. Spraying herbicides to control weeds takes far less time and sweat than repeatedly hoeing them by hand or even cultivating them with a tractor. The labor required to control weeds has recently been even further reduced by the introduction of seed that has been genetically modified to survive specific herbicides. Nearly 90 percent of all corn and soy in the US is now grown from genetically modified (GM) seed, and most of it has been engineered for herbicide resistance.

During the same time that per acre corn yields jumped six-fold, the average farm size in the US nearly tripled — to 418 acres. Canadian farms grew, too, to an average of 778 acres. With two and a half times as much land to tend, farmers turned to bigger machinery to keep their labor costs low. Taken together, this combination of larger farms, bigger machinery, concentrated fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, irrigation, and improved seed has made the North American farmer incredibly productive. Today’s farmer can produce as much food in four hours as his counterpart in 1950 produced in a 48-hour work week. This amazing 12-fold leap in labor productivity underlies much of our modern food system.

Coinciding with the explosion in corn and soy yields came a transformation in raising livestock. Concentrated or Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) began in the 1950s as a new way to raise poultry more profitably. Large numbers of animals were fed in confined areas where their movement was very limited. Adapting the strategy of the assembly line, the CAFOs scaled up, streamlined, and mechanized the process of raising farm animals. This allowed them to speed production, create a more uniform product, and simplify processing and sales — all while sharply reducing labor costs.

The principles of factory livestock farming were soon extended to cattle and swine, and even to raising fish. The US produces roughly the same amount of pork as it did in 1950, but just eight percent as many farms are needed to match that output now that the CAFO model is dominant. Despite some consumer resistance, the bulk of our meat and eggs is now produced with this method. Because the confined animals are not able to forage or graze for any of their food, everything they eat needs to be brought to them. All of the different types of animals are fed concentrated diets comprised mainly of corn and soy. Thus the success of the CAFO model depends upon an enormous and cheap supply of those two field crops.

Processing

The mountains of corn, soy, and wheat and the enormous herds and flocks of cattle, pigs, and poultry that leave the farm are just the raw material for making our food. The food processing industry turns this torrent of raw farm produce into chicken nuggets, milk shakes, school lunches, linguine Alfredo, and virtually every other thing we eat. Even though almost all the food we eat is processed in some way, processed food has a bit of an image problem. Processing is sometimes seen as a set of marketing tricks used to turn wholesome “real” food into irresistible concoctions of starches, sugars, oils, and an unholy slew of chemical additives. And while it is true that a large and profitable segment of the industry does indeed churn out “junk food,” food processing provides some important benefits to our society. Industrial food processing makes our foods clean and convenient. Unlike many people in the world, we don’t need to carefully sort through a bag of rice or beans to pick out pebbles or moldy seeds. Industrial machinery does that for us. It also removes bones, peels, grinds, juices, filters, sifts, dries, cans, freezes, pre-cooks, weighs, and vacuum-packs our food. All of this leaves us with a very convenient supply of food. Our food is not only the cheapest in human history, it takes the least time and effort to prepare for eating.

As with agriculture, economies of scale and industrial analysis have dramatically lowered the per unit cost of almost all food processing. Specialized machines, such as 100-horsepower extruders can make uniform food products quickly (try to make Cheerios or Pop Tarts at home by hand). Because the specialized processing machinery is very expensive, huge volumes of food must be processed in one place in order to justify the initial investment in equipment.

Distribution

After this mountain of industrial food is grown and processed, it must then be distributed to the hundreds of millions of homes where it will eaten. This is obviously a daunting logistical challenge. The average bite of food eaten in the US has traveled at least 1,300 miles. Generally, the farther food travels, the greater the number of people who have role in getting it to the table. When food is imported from another country (and an increasing percentage of our food is imported), the number of customs officials, inspectors, brokers, freight consolidators, and shippers involved is impressive.

There are certainly advantages to getting the food you need from nearby, but what are the benefits of an industrialized global food distribution system? The most obvious is that you can eat things that don’t grow where you live. That may include oranges, bananas, chocolate, coffee, salmon, avocados, and a range of other distant delicacies. Secondly, foods that do grow where you live might not be growing when you want to eat them. For many people in the Northern Hemisphere, apples in May, tomatoes in November, and spinach in August are foods that fall into this category.

A third advantage of shipping foods long distances is that they can be grown by the lowest-cost provider. For instance, large, highly mechanized farms in California have climate and soil conditions that are advantageous for growing carrots. A local grower with less-than-ideal soil and weather can’t compete on price with big California operations like Bolthouse Farms, which processes six million pounds of carrots a day. The economic advantages are so significant that one third of all the produce grown in the United States comes from California’s central valley.¹

In order to ship food 1,300 miles and still make money, the cost of both the food and the transportation has to be kept very low. Industrial-scale agriculture and food processing produce the low-cost food, and inexpensive fossil fuel keeps transportation costs down. The global food distribution system weaves together ocean cargo routes with automated ports. Free trade agreements that allow multinational companies global access to the lowest-cost food providers are essential to the economics of this system. So is sophisticated technology. From the farm where it was grown or from its port of entry, most food continues its journey in trucks. Customized computer programs match up extensive national highway systems with regional warehouses and link those warehouses to the retail stores.

To the average person, the colossal distribution web that binds them to the industrial food supply is largely invisible. Only when the food arrives on the shelves of our supermarkets or on the table at a local restaurant do we become aware of its existence.

The embrace of information technology is one of the defining characteristics of the industrial food system. Nowhere is this more evident than in food distribution. Bar code readers in the check-out aisle of supermarkets not only tell customers how much to pay, they tell store managers how much of what products have sold that week and what needs to be reordered. Store discount cards increasingly track consumer data, which allows food marketers to identify and influence shopping trends. When you hit your favorite pizza place on speed dial and they answer the phone knowing your name, address, and your preference for green olives, that’s information technology distributing your food. When the pizza arrives hot at your door in 30 minutes or less, that is the industrial food system providing you convenience.

Consumption

Ultimately, the most important step in any food’s journey takes place when it is eaten. Americans each eat about 2,000 pounds of food a year. So, when someone makes a New Year’s resolution to not eat a ton of food this year, it is not hyperbole. We now each eat about 200 pounds more food per year than we ate in 1980, so it’s not surprising that the pants feel a bit tight.²

How we consume food shapes how the entire food system is organized. For Americans, conv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Balancing Our Food System
• Part II: Getting Started
• Part III: Some More Advanced Techniques
• Part IV: Looking Ahead
• Appendix 1: Seeds and Supplies
• Appendix 2: Useful Websites
• Notes
• Index
• About the Illustrator
• About the Author