A Change in Direction - Lessons from the Pacific Coast

Comfortably situated here in San Diego, a city built on borrowed water in the middle of the desert, we are trying to prepare for what is ahead.
Already, our bodies are feeling the difference between where we've come from and where we are now. Our skin and lips are suddenly dry and cracking; we wake up in the night needing to drink half a bottle of water. Like lizards caught in the midday sun, we look around for shade and find none.
This is our predicament until we reach the other coast. In the meantime, Texas stretches before us: 1,000 miles of oil fields and cattle ranches, or so we're told. To get there, first we need to climb the 6,000-foot mountains just east of San Diego and a few smaller ranges in southern Arizona and New Mexico. And lord knows what kind of fried substances will be presented as "food" in this unknown territory.
Needless to say, we're a little nervous about the next couple of months.

Which we shouldn't be. Yes, cycling through the southwest looking for fresh produce after riding through California, the antioxidant capital of the world, will probably be a shocker. As a team of two, we'll be seeing a lot of each other through this unpopulated region, and we'll learn lessons on patience, navigation and logistics that will seem painfully obvious after the fact. Change is hard.
But we also know that our fears will be proved unfounded. Over the past five weeks, as we rode down the Pacific Coast, we learned from the locals of the challenges ahead that constitute cyclist legend. They became larger than life as we approached: Leggett Hill, the four-mile, 7-percent-grade climb; Big Sur, the overcrowded stretch of uninhabitable coastline between Monterey Bay and San Luis Obispo; Los Angeles - enough said. Then there were the hazards that made doubters of people who don't know us very well: rain, cold, wind, strangers. We rode through it all (okay, we hitch-hiked Leggett) and survived miraculously unharmed.
And we didn't ride it alone! As we passed through San Francisco, our friend Bryce, who toured from the East to West coast last summer, joined us for the day. He dutifully complimented our weirdly bulging legs and rode with us to Half Moon Bay, our next stop South, where we had beer and sandwiches and heard his tips on pitching tents in strangers' yards. (Here's one: If you're going to ask for permission to camp, you must also ask for permission to use the rest room.) In the Santa Ynez Valley, Rich rode with us to the next town and an excellent bicycle shop that fixed my bent rear derailleur hanger, eliminating an irritating grinding noise that had been trying my nerves for days. Both of our hosts in the LA area escorted us through hairy traffic and confusing bicycle routes, saving us time, headaches and arguments.

Best of all, we found Southern California a rich place for food, despite the vast stretches of concrete. Like the freeways that pile up like spaghetti around the cities, the factors that allow many Californians to live the locavore's dream and also prevent millions of others from accessing any kind of nutritious food. It seems like we pull out from the pile one solution - say, backyard vegetable gardens - and it comes out with a knot of obstacles - "but that's where we have barbecues", water is expensive here, nobody has the time. The temperate, warm weather is ideal for food production, but farmland in California's exclusive communities is beyond unaffordable, so farmers must cut costs elsewhere - like in wages. Anyone who's ever bent in half to pick a strawberry, dug a hole for a fencepost or moved irrigation pipes can imagine what it would be like to do that all day for eight or nine hours in the summer time. Farmworkers should be earning a wage that compensates them for doing the hardest kinds of labor, but instead they make less than the meter maid.
We can't make fresh, sustainably produced food that was grown within 100 miles available to everyone unless we have farms. We also can't have healthy communities unless people know what it takes to produce their food and are willing to pay to make it a good bargain socially and environmentally. Without the space and the skills to do it in, no one can be empowered to grow their own food, no matter how much money it will save them and how much better they'll be eating.
This is not to be down on the prospects of rebuilding our food system on a local scale. We have seen some incredibly positive things happening. The poorest and most urban parts of the state are where it's easiest to see the green vines creeping up between the cracks in the cement. In Long Beach, for example, we stopped for a day and learned about urban farms happening on private and city property and a grassroots-powered effort to become "the most bicycle-friendly city in America".

As we travel into a sparser landscape - food-wise, people-wise and water-wise - we're hoping to discover more creative approaches to re-localizing our culture. In any case, at least we won't have to worry about being overwhelmed by foodie attractions. With an extra gallon of water on the rack, a fresh supply of nuts and lentils, and some practice in asking strangers for help, we're prepared for anything,

Strawberry Fields, Forever? Chemistry and Agriculture in California

Giant thistles and tiny cabbages take over once you reach the central California coast. In the cool, humid marine zone south of San Francisco and north of Santa Barbara, fields of artichoke and Brussels sprouts stretch from the highway to the ocean. This area produces over 90% of the US crop of 'chokes and sprouts.

Artichokes are a member of the thistle family. Some people cut the ends off the leaves before steaming them, but it's not required.

Early in the morning, we watch a farm worker walk among the rows of tall, spike-leafed artichoke plants, cutting the largest 'chokes and throwing them in the giant basket strapped to his back. Farther down, we find a field with no one working and snatch a couple for ourselves.
In the Brussels sprout fields, harvesting is faster and easier thanks to mechanized harvesters. Unlike artichokes, which are perennial, Brussels sprouts are an annual crop. They're actually in the same family as broccoli and cabbages, only instead of producing one large flower like a cabbage, the Brussels sprout produces a long stalk with dozens of small flowers, which are the "sprouts".
When we first rode by a field of these, I had to put Cynthia down and hop through the mud to get close enough to figure out what the darn things were. To make mechanical harvest possible, the farmers chop all the leaves off the plants, just leaving the foot-high tower of sprouts. The harvesting machine then drives along and shaves the sprouts off the stem. The sprouts are swept to the end of the rows into giant furrows. We rode by some of these mounds, as well, and were unable to resist the invitingly broken fence next to the bike path. We scurried away when we saw an approaching tractor, the trailer hitched to the back mounded with Brussels sprouts like something out of a kid's dinnertime nightmare.
That night, arrived at Bart's house near Santa Cruz, our warm shower for the evening. We steamed the artichokes and dipped their meaty leaves in mayonnaise mixed with curry powder, Bart's recipe. The Brussels sprouts were splashed with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and orange juice, with some garlic powder and sea salt thrown on, then roasted until tender. (The next day, we visited a farmers' market, and I realized this recipe would have been a hundred times better with some local walnuts thrown in. Still, they were pretty darn good.)

Workers transplanting strawberry plants.

The next leg of our food-cycle journey took us from Santa Cruz around Monterey Bay to the little fork of land that holds such wonders as Carmel, Pebble Beach and the Monterey Bay aquarium (basically all converging into a tourist trap out of a cyclists' nightmare). Before we got there, we traveled through a small portion of California's 26,000 acres of strawberry fields.
Imagine the ocean, rolling out toward the horizon with the sun reflecting off the endless waves. Now imagine it covered in a thick sheet of plastic. This is what you see when you see a strawberry farm, only there are tiny breaks in the plastic for the plants to peek through. The plastic serves its purpose of keeping the berries off of the dirt and deterring weeds, but when the plants are pulled up after one or two seasons, the plastic gets landfilled.
Riding past miles and miles of this stuff was depressing, to say the least. We grow strawberries in Oregon, of course, and many farms use plastic. But California is growing strawberries to be shipped everywhere from Alaska to New York. Twenty-six thousand acres worth.
It might all be changing soon. Several chemicals make all of this strawberry production possible in California. They are fungicides (mainly a delicious cocktail of methyl bromide and chloropicrin, also known as tear gas) that farmers use to prevent root rot in the strawberry plants. Every year, they gas the soil with this stuff, and keep it covered for a month so as to kill any strawberry-root-loving fungus. About half of it escapes into the atmosphere, harming farmworkers and other people who breathe, before making its way up to knock holes in the ozone layer. But without the fungicide, growing strawberries at this volume isn't really feasible.
Methyl bromide cocktails are banned in all developed countries, including the US, but the California strawberry industry has a special exemption that has allowed it to "phase out" the chemicals over time. Only in this case, "phase out" apparently means "continue use as normal".
If it ever really kicks in, the ban won't be an end to strawberries (after all, organic farmers have been growing them for years without fungicides) but it does mean that yields will be down enough that the prices will have to go up, and there's only so much people are willing to pay for a tasteless California strawberry in February in Alaska. Whether those berries will disappear from the grocery store shelves depends on whether an acceptable alternative to the fungicides comes on the market, or if consumers actually make the choice to just stop buying them.



Hannah and Bart at the Aptos Farmers' Market
 

Witnessing the soil-poisoning, machinery-heavy roots of America's produce isle was sobering, but we found reason for hope at the farmers' market that Bart took us to the next morning.
We went early, because Bart warned us that all the good stuff would be gone before noon. The market is held at Cabrillo College, where the horticulture program is training the next generation of farmers, who sell hydroponic lettuce and greenhouse mushrooms next to the older generation of fruit and vegetable growers. Between the two groups, there must be a hundred ways to produce this food without spraying, plasticing, fumigating and trampling the land. It takes care, it takes effort, and it results in a higher-priced product.
As long as money is the only thing we look at when we shop for groceries, methyl bromide, plastic, and fossil-fuel-guzzling machinery will be on the farm scene in California and everywhere crops are grown on the large scale. It's up to us to make the choice.