V Is for Victory -- and Vegetables

I'd like to recant what I said a few posts ago about my backyard not being the place to cut global warming. Looking back, it's now clear I missed the peas for the forest.

I still maintain that reforesting my backyard would barely dent my overall emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. I just couldn't plant enough trees. But sinking some peas—and tomatoes and carrots and zucchini—into the soil just might do some real good.

That would mean recycling a concept that's nearly a century old: planting a victory garden.

Victory gardens first took root during World War I and blossomed anew during World War II. The government promoted the homegrown vegetable patches to free up additional resources for the war effort. Having ordinary citizens grow more of the food they ate also engaged them in that effort.

By 1943, there were 20 million victory gardens under cultivation, producing an estimated 40 percent of the nation's fresh vegetables, according to the Department of Agriculture.

I have seen a flurry of recent media coverage about a revived interest in victory gardens. Nothing I have read suggests it has anything to do with the war. (Unless you’re talking about the battle of the bulge: increasingly overweight Americans eat on average just 1.7 cups of veggies a day, or less than the recommended 2.5 cups.) Instead, this time around, it's all about the environment.

That's because every bushel of veggies harvested from a backyard garden is another bushel that didn’t have to hop on a truck, train or plane to make it to your kitchen door. That means cutting out a farm-to-fork trip that, for fresh produce, averages about 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles), according to one widely quoted estimate.

Talk of "food kilometers" (or "miles," if that's your preference) is gaining currency in discussions about food and the environment. That's because the distance food travels is a proxy for its environmental impact—or is at least suggestive of the volume of greenhouse gases emitted during transit.

For instance, by the time a bunch of asparagus grown in Peru lands on a dining room table in, say, Springfield, Ill., it will have logged more food kilometers than would a bunch grown in California.

Of course, asparagus grown in a victory garden in the backyard of a home in the Illinois capital would be the real green choice. That’s because those hyper-local spears would rack up no food kilometers (and generate no related greenhouse gas emissions) on their short, post-harvest trip across the yard.

Unfortunately, relying on a Springfield (or Salem or Salt Lake City) victory garden to keep your family in vegetables is only going to work in season, unless you gear up a home-canning operation to tide over your loved ones during the winter months. But even purely seasonal gardens, multiplied by a few tens of millions, could play a part in cutting global warming.

That means victory gardens are still a good idea, even if they no longer have anything to do with war. If we'd just give peas a chance.

Andrew Bridges is a science journalist and author who has written several books for Sally Ride Science, including Earth's Precious Resources: Clean Air.