No region of the United States has been immune from the fiasco of suburbia, but it was especially hard on the Mid-Atlantic states. Some of the very best farmland in the world lay in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware—between the great industrial cities. Before World War II, that farmland supplied most of the fresh food those cities received—in season. Farms and cities existed in a mutually reinforcing, integral relationship that was as much cultural as economic. Just the idea that there was a hinterland of plants and animals called the country as well as the idea that it was a thing distinct from the awesome man-made artifact called the city still mattered in the popular imagination. New Jersey was the Garden State, and Long Island—in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words—was a "fresh green breast of the New World." In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Amish farmers with horses still outproduced the budding agritechnocrats of the Midwest, acre for acre. Today we mourn places like these: the paved-over green fields of Parking Lot Nation.

My friends arch their eyebrows when I declare that the great convulsion of suburb building is near its end. They point out that the guys in the yellow hard hats with their grunting front-end loaders still seem to find virgin melon fields to desecrate with new, curvy cul-de-sac streets for the depressing ranks of 4,000-square-foot chipboard-and-vinyl McMansions. The extravagant orgy of destruction still seems to go on with the expectation, apparently, that the denizens of those new housing pods will get along just fine, thank you, on New Zealand lamb, peaches from North Africa, and Caesar salads grown in Mexico to fortify them for their 50-mile commutes to the office park. But I maintain that those remaining suburban housing starts represent the brain-dead twitchings of a soon-to-be-bygone way of life.

The 21st century is hard upon us, and the future is telling us loudly that America is about to change—and pretty drastically so. The cheap-oil fiesta is about over. The drive-in utopia will go with it. The key to understanding what that means to normal life is that all parts of a given system do not have to fail in order for a system as a whole to find itself in deep trouble. We’re not going to run out of petroleum overnight, but the oil markets are going to be stressed, strained, and destabilized and so will our dependency on them. Our access to oil in the Mideast may be compromised at any moment by the brutal politics of the region. The stark fact is that most of the crude oil reserves in the world are controlled by people who don’t like us. I could go on in this geopolitical vein, but the bottom line is simply this: Forget about living in a drive-in utopia much longer. That phase of American history is drawing to a close—which to me implies that many of its accessory operations may be nearing an end, too, and that includes industrial-style agriculture based on huge, petroleum-based "inputs" producing standardized, sanitized, industrialized "outputs" (crops) that are extravagantly processed and denatured at fantastic economies of scale and transported vast distances to colossal megasupermarkets serving a mass car-dependent base of "consumers." (The sheer inane technobabble of our political lexicon saps the meaning out of the word economy, which derives from the Greek oikonomikos—of or pertaining to the care of one’s particular home on this earth. The salient characteristic of suburbia is that it is composed of places obviously not worth caring about.)

We are going to have to take local farming seriously again. In the future, the remaining open land in the east will have to be valued for more than its potential as McMansion "estates." The production of food is apt to become more rather than less labor-intensive. Those changes, which I can only sketch here, may entail considerable social convulsion. There will be a battle to preserve the suburban status quo, and there will be a fight over the table scraps of economic history when the futility of that battle becomes manifest.
Meanwhile, a whole culture, specifically an agriculture, is waiting to be recovered from the dumpster of American civilization. We’ve begun to see it, I think, in the birth of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) projects—that is, local farms producing food for a local subscriber base. We belong to a CSA here in New York State. CSAs produce everything from arugula to zucchini and sell to local restaurants as well as subscription customers. For one thing, the CSA movement has challenged the common idea that the only sort of farming possible in New York State is dairying. We had, in fact, a much more diverse farming scene here before the invention of the electric milking machine and the refrigerated tank truck, and we will have such an agriculture again.

It fascinates me that American eating habits today are simultaneously better and worse now than they have ever been. Fine ingredients that couldn’t be found on our parents’ tables combined with higher culinary standards have certainly improved eating aesthetics at the higher end. But any trip to the supermarket reveals classes of poorer Americans who seem to subsist wholly on a diet of soda pop and industrially extruded, salt-laden party snacks. And the results are visible everywhere in unprecedented mass obesity and related illnesses. Since the snack industry is a phenomenon of agribusiness, mass production, and long-range transport, the future localization of agriculture might result in better diets for greater numbers of citizens—including the poor, who have been systematically preyed upon by the minions of Cheez Doodles and Pepsi-Cola. Health should be democratic, a matter of the common good.
Here, in Cooking Fresh from the Mid-Atlantic, is an excellent operating manual for this coming restoration of local farming and fresh eating. Here’s to finer tables and a better landscape! Bring on the Chincoteague oysters roasted with New Jersey baby spinach and Chester County cream. Let the soil speak and the seasons ring.

James Howard Kunstler
Saratoga Springs, New York
March 2002

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