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On the Rationality of Gardening Is it rational for me to grow, in my garden, my own
vegetables and herbs? I know how a friend of mine, who is an economist,
would answer my question. I was present once when he came
in from his garden with a handful of cucumbers and
announced, "Here's this year's crop. If I count what
I paid for the seeds, and figure my labor at minimum
wage, they cost at least five bucks apiece." So
ended his gardening career. From then on, his cucumbers
came from the supermarket. My basil would not be so easily replaced, I realize.
Out here in the boonies, bought basil is dried basil, and
dried basil does not make a salad heavenly or supply the
basis for pesto. So it's grow it myself, or do without. But what about the pumpkins? In a couple of months,
farmers not five miles from where I've encaged my
swelling gourds will have roadside stands glowing orange
with their harvest. For less than four dollars, I can
have one of their pumpkins for a jackolantern and one for
our Thanksgiving pie. Is it rational to go to this
trouble so that the pumpkins we use have been grown under
our care? I'm still thinking about this as I get up to gather
wild blackberries and blueberries for a fruit salad at
dinner. They're growing in the sun like weeds in a patch
by the edge of our woods. It's mid-July and the berries
are bursting with their ripened juices. Ten minutes of
grazing yields the handful I'll need. I look with
pleasure at my yield, glistening at the bottom of the
white bowl. The phrase "from the bosom of
nature" comes to my mind. Whether the means are rational or not, it comes to me,
all depends on how one understands the ends achieved. Do
the "goods" I've gained from my labor consist
entirely of these objects? Is our consumption of these
berries in the bowl the same as if we'd bought them in
the store? If the answers are yes, then my ten minutes
spent for forty cents worth of berries was worth less
than half the new minimum wage. But I know that these
equivalences are false, and it is here that our notion of
economic rationality can lead us to act irrationally. Adam Smith founded his famous economics on the power
of the division of labor. If each of us concentrates on
doing just one thing, he showed, we'll each be far more
productive. Then we can truck, barter and trade with our
fellows, exchanging a bit of our product for more of what
they produce than we could have made for ourselves. If a
pin-maker spent his ten minutes making pins, in other
words, he would earn enough to buy more blueberries from
a blueberry grower than he could harvest on his own in
that time. All marvelously true, and that truth lies at
the foundation of the great wealth of our nation. But there are costs and benefits left out of that
calculation. The time of the pinmaker is enormously
productive, but it is conceived and --too often-- lived
purely as a means to an end. One of the sacrifices of
specialization is that the stuff of our lives --time --
is sacrificed on the rack of narrowness and repetition.
My ten minutes grazing for berries, or watering my
pumpkins, is not pure cost like the labors of the more
efficient pinmaker. It's a labor of love. For the part-time gardener, the means is part of the
end, and it enriches beyond the production of a mere
commodity that can be purchased in stores. I become
connected with the organic processes of the earth in a
way the pulling some produce off the counter could never
do. I participate in a miracle. Where the specialist's
world tends to narrow toward the size of a pinhead, with
my "inefficient" labor --with my devotion of
time-- I have purchased a larger world for my spirit to
dwell in. Tonight, when I combine the berries with yogurt and
cinnamon, the result may taste no different than if the
berries had been store-bought. But for my family and me,
it will not be the same bowlful of food. We will be
savoring also our place on the earth, the ground on which
we live. And come this Thanksgiving, when my wife, April, makes
a pie from one of the pumpkins we've grown, I'll be
celebrating not only our enjoying the blessings of living
in this prosperous country, with its mighty productivity,
but also the pleasures of watching a plant turn earth
into pumpkin and my victory over the marauding ground
hogs. |
