Failure to survive

Thanks to global shipping and modern food storage, we can pretty much have anything we want, food-wise, all year round. Unlike our foreparents, we don't have to restrict ourselves to just what's in season, or what grows near us. We can have anything from anywhere! More and more we are being encouraged to take advantage of these abundant opportunities by...growing our own food, in our own backyards.

Well, it makes sense. Growing your own food can save you money and help you eat healthier. Growing your own food reduces your dependence on huge, greedy conglomerate food producers. Growing your own food increases your chances of survival in the event of worldwide catastrophe.

If growing your own food is the way of the future, if someday we have to survive only on what we can coax out of the ground, Joe and I are doomed.

Because unfortunately there is a catch to growing your own food. You have to be able to keep things alive.

This is a problem.

According to one source I have consulted on the subject, "any reasonably intelligent person" can learn what it takes to grow food. I am not encouraged by this. Although I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person, based mainly on a dim memory of the results of an IQ test back in sixth grade ("Your daughter is reasonably intelligent, Mrs. B., but I'm afraid she'll never be able to grow her own food"), in my case intelligence does not seem to extend to keeping things alive, other than Joe. It also does not extend to doing math calculations in my head, but that is an unrelated topic ("Please encourage your daughter to pursue something other than math").

If you doubt that such a simple task as growing food is possible to mess up, just observe the cilantro plant in our kitchen. The cilantro is my first attempt at home gardening -- start small, they say, although usually "small" is considered a 50-foot vegetable garden -- and it seemed easy enough. I wasn't actually growing anything; all I had to do was keep it alive and snip off its fragrant leaves when I needed some herbs.

The cilantro did well at first. For about five hours. Then it entered a slow decline, and after two weeks has become but a former shadow of itself, despite being watered and occasionally pruned and moved to various advantageous locations. I have used it for cooking exactly once. If I don't again soon, there will be nothing left to use.

I am beginning to think that growing one's own food is some sort of societal IQ test. If so, the cilantro experiment does not bode well for my performance on other parts of the test. Maybe I should stick to math.

Further blog posts will probably not appear over the Thanksgiving holiday, as we prepare to enjoy turkey and other traditional Thanksgiving foods and to give thanks that none of these had to be grown in our backyard.