Saturday, July 3, 2004

Eating close to home, from our backyard to bioregion
By Georgeanne Brennan, Special to The Chronicle

Eating close to home, from our backyard to bioregion If you have ever tasted a freshly dug potato, picked your own peas or eaten sun-ripened peaches right off the tree, you know how good something truly fresh can be. Not only is the flavor extraordinary when food is truly fresh, but so is the experience of acquiring the food. This is the kind of fresh food that has to be grown locally, in your own backyard or by a friend, market-grower or farmer in your bioregion, where the confluence of soil, water, geography, climate and sense of place come together to create an intimate relationship. It is truly different in every way than the anonymous and disconnected experience of long-distance food.

I experienced this phenomenon in a visceral way when I moved from rural Provence to Vacaville in the 1970s. In Provence my life had been directed in many ways by the daily ritual of picking vegetables and fruits from my neighbors' kitchen gardens, gathering wild mushrooms and herbs from the nearby hills and forests, and visiting the weekly open markets. I had come to take for granted that it was normal to cook locally grown food that was in season.

However, in the greater Vacaville area, many of the foods I had come to love and depend upon, such as fresh herbs, were not even for sale in the markets. The tomatoes, even in summer, had no flavor. The lettuces were limp and insipid and so were the zucchinis. Green beans were flaccid, eggplants, when I could find them, were pockmarked from being too long in the coolers, the asparagus spears tended to be tough, and even the winter squash lacked character. Fresh peas could not be found, and certainly not fava beans. Melons were pretty good, but the apricots had no flavor, the peaches were hard, and the pears grainy.

I was deeply puzzled because I could see stretching around me the vast agricultural fields of Solano and neighboring Yolo counties where thousands of acres were devoted to tomatoes, beans, cucumbers and pumpkins, among other crops. The counties in those days were also major producers of prune plums, apricots, peaches and other stone fruit in spite of the encroachment of suburbanization.

The local tomatoes, I learned, were destined for processing plants, not the fresh market, and the fields of cucumbers and beans were for seed, not for fresh consumption. There were a few local fruit stands, but to be honest, I found the vegetables to be lackluster, grown for size more than flavor and often kept overlong in coolers. A good lug box of peaches or apricots could be found, but most of the fruit went to drying yards, and there were weekends during the cherry season when a few U-Picks were open. But I wanted more than that.

With a few exceptions the fruits and vegetables of my bioregion, one of the richest growing areas on Earth, were being sent away from their source to distribution centers. From there, some were shipped back to the local supermarkets, others to towns and cities across America. They arrived much the worse for their travels, their cells depleted of moisture, their sugars turned to starch, and many still hard and unripe from having been picked too green.

In sheer desperation, my husband and I, with our children, planted a huge kitchen garden in our front yard (the back was for the children to play in). Friends sent us seeds from France and we grew everything from radishes to fava beans and cornichons, along with tomatoes, melons, cucumbers and herbs. In short, we grew everything that we possibly could.

I felt I had come home again at last. Not only did our food taste good again, but I also could reconnect with the daily ritual I had come to love in France, visiting the garden twice a day, knowing each and every lettuce leaf like an old friend.

Today, nearly 30 years later, I still have a garden, albeit in a location 14 miles away from the first, and with a different husband. The huge fields of tomatoes, seed vegetables and commercial fruit orchards still exist, although much diminished by suburbanization, but there has been a deep and, I hope, enduring change. My immediate bioregion defined in part by Putah Creek and Cache Creek boasts premier market growers such as Terra Firma, Eatwell Farm, Full Belly Farm, Good Humus and Capay Valley Organics.

These are small farmers growing a diverse array of fruits and vegetables for the local market, extending to just a few miles from their farm to the greater Bay Area. They sell their produce at farmers' markets, through Community Supported Agriculture subscriptions, through wholesalers to our local restaurants and markets. Just the other day I found "Terra Firma Organic Strawberries" prominently displayed and proudly labeled right in my own IGA local supermarket. The farm is just on the outskirts of town, about 5 miles away.

In the greater bioregion of the Bay Area, one can eat like royalty, day in and day out, on locally grown and produced food. From west Marin come oysters, mussels, grass-fed beef, cheese and milk. From the Pacific coastal waters come seasonal fish and shellfish, like wild salmon, ling cod and crab. San Francisco Bay and its estuaries give us halibut, sturgeon and black bass. Sonoma County is the home of Rocky and Rosie, the sustainable chickens, of spring lamb, of dozens of small farms producing fruits, vegetables, wild mushrooms and wines. Napa, of course, produces wine, but also fruits, vegetables and wild mushrooms. Contra Costa, Alameda, Solano, San Mateo, all of these Bay Area counties are home to some of the finest food grown or produced anywhere in the world. It always has been. The difference is that today, much of it is grown from varieties selected for flavor and for local consumption, instead of for shipping.

Today, we can buy locally produced food at farmers' markets, pick it ourselves at U-Picks or buy directly from the farms or ranches. We can subscribe to CSA for weekly deliveries, and we can still grow food right in our own backyards (or front yards). It doesn't get better than that.

What is a bioregion?
"A bioregion is literally and etymologically a 'life-place' -- a unique region definable by natural (rather than political) boundaries with a geographic, climatic, hydrological, and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and nonhuman living communities. Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, prairies, or coastal zones) and by the unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region.

"Most importantly, the bioregion is emerging as the most logical locus and scale for a sustainable, regenerative community to take root and to take place. In reaction to a globally shallow, consumer-driven, technologically saturated world where humans are alienated from nature and offered simulations of it instead, a bioregion offers an appropriate venue for the natural predisposition toward graceful human life on earth."

From "Life Place: Bioregional Thought and Practice'' by Robert L. Thayer, Jr. (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003).

Resources
For further reading about eating locally and bioregional thought:

"Coming Home to Eat'' by Gary Nabhan (W.W. Norton and Co. 2001)

"This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader'' by Joan Dye Gussow ( Chelsea Green 2002).

Georgeanne Brennan is the author of "Potager,'' "The French Kitchen Garden'' and "Great Greens,'' among others. She divides her time between her small farm in Yolo County and Provence, France, where she has a cooking school. www.georgeannebrennan.com.