Provisions Over Profit <em>On Kate Brown’s Tiny Gardens Everywhere</em>
The breadfruit hung over the second-level parking lot at the grocery store. Its tree was in a neighboring yard, but this fruit would fall and splatter on the hot concrete if it weren’t taken. With a scaly green shell, it seemed nearly at ready ripeness, and I wanted it: This is Puerto Rico, and food is everywhere; in my daily life in San Juan, though, I usually only find mangos. A breadfruit was a welcome change, and you can do so much with it: I’ve watched it become a cheesy gratin, a creme brulee, and the shell of a passion fruit puree as a palate cleanser, all in one meal.
As I attempted to get the breadfruit off the tree without a knife, I heard a woman yell to me for my attention while getting back into her BMW SUV. “Maybe go into the supermarket to buy one,” she said. I was being shamed for not going into the grocery store and buying what was freely available right in front of me.
If how you obtained food once defined your culture, whether you were a forager or a farmer or something else entirely, what do we call ourselves in this ongoing age of the supermarket? Consumers. In the United States especially, we’ve been taught that the consolidated, large-scale, for-profit industrial food system is the most efficient and sanitary—it’s the good, right way to access food, and plucking breadfruit from a tree that grows next to the store is the wrong way.
In her latest book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, environmental historian Kate Brown takes this notion to task, making the case for alternative ways of provisioning that have historical, cultural, and ecological bases. “Prices rose as formerly self-provisioning people bought staples in shops,” she writes of 18th-century England. “Families racked up debt for rent and groceries. Competition for work was stiff, so employers lowered pay.”
Brown draws on varied geographical and demographic examples to make the case that the now-common diet based on meat, grains, and sugar—commodities grown at scale—has been developed to the detriment of communities, nutrition, and biodiversity, and that perhaps small urban gardens could feed more of us than is believed. From England, to Washington, D.C., to Paris, to Berlin, to Estonia, there are numerous examples of how biodiversity thrives in small spaces, and gardening engages people politically and empowers them economically.
Gardens and the sharing of resources they inspire are and have always been understood as a threat to state power and racist hierarchies, which is why they’ve faced destruction by elites throughout time. They also show that by eating a mostly plant-based diet with occasional chicken and pork, it’s possible to thrive without the resource-intensive meat, grain, sugar, and dairy that have become the Standard American Diet.
There’s a strong imagination problem here that Brown tackles, too, which is that gardening or foraging or eating local food is for rich white people. That has not historically been the case, though this narrative has been in the interests of the powerful to make sure the supermarket and agribusiness remain the most profitable, concentrated sources of food, even as food apartheid means that access to supermarkets and fresh food can be a privilege.
Tiny Gardens Everywhere provides a counter-narrative not just to this entrenched idea of who is served by “local” food but also to popular books of the 2000s so-called “food movement,” which didn’t provide the historical rigor as well as diversity of subject matter that Brown has brought together. Here, the notion of “prospering” is not tied to profit but to provisioning, to the ability to give away canned goods and make your own wine. That notion feels so far away in a world in which you might be yelled at for taking ripe fruit off a tree, but here, Brown brings it back to life.
