Save an Iceberg, Plant a Vegetable

Yesterday, the New York Times published a new Michal Pollan piece. It's no secret that we're big fans of Pollan's stuff and this new article, "Why Bother?" is just as good as the rest. In it, he writes about the kind of hopeless feeling of doing too little in the way of being environmentally responsible. What's the point of changing a lightbulb or walking to work if some dude in China is chowing down on Big Macs while he drives his unregulated emissions car to his job at a coal mine?

Pollan's argument, essentially, is that you should feel good about making environmentally friendly choices, however small, because small changes are what catch on in society. After all, it was only a hundred and fifty years ago or so that some doctors bought into a crackpot theory about germs and started to regularly wash their hands, and we all know how that turned out. If we each turn off lights, plant a garden, or save gas, the outcomes will be positive even if they're initially tiny.

Basically, if you drink Al Gore's Kool-Aid, you're not going to hurt anything and you just might be the beginning of something big.

Here is something I've always thought about: What if everyone grew just one thing? A bed of lettuce, a tomato plant, some peas. Think about how much we'd save in resources if we put a small dent in the amount of produce that gets shipped around the country. What would happen if every single person with a porch or a plot of dirt planted cucumbers this year? So what if your cucumbers get demolished by squash bugs or eaten by nasty groundhogs? As long as one of your neighbors has a live plant they're going to have about a million and half more cucumbers than they can eat, so you can have some of theirs. American cucumber consumption in the 1990s was at about 10.3 pounds per person annually. What's that, like 20 or 30 cucumbers? You can grow that in one week in July.

Granted, a lot of the cucumbers in that figure are imported from South America or wherever in the middle of the winter, when most of the country can't produce their own fresh ones. Leaving aside for a moment the argument that no one needs fresh cucumbers in January, say each person is still responsible for coming up with half the cucumbers they eat each year—that's 1.75 billion pounds of cucumbers that aren't being trucked around. FedEx would charge $427 million to ship that from Florida to Pennsylvania, and that's with crappy 3-day ground service.

I'm not trying to bring down the cucumber industry or anything, but just think how much fertilizer, gasoline, emissions, road ware, traffic congestion, little "Cucumber 4062" stickers, and plastic produce bags we'd save if we all grew half our cucumbers. Hmm.