Lettuce not fear the coming dark age
Roughing it.
Thanks to my Medium.com membership, I’ve become acquainted with a type of writing that a fellow contributor –Steve, I’ll call him — tells me is known as “doom porn” or “collapse porn.”
It’s new to me, being an old-school guy who still reads the paper manifestations of publications like The New Yorker, Tikkun, and Southern Living. But I do get why the term applies to the work of certain other Medium opinionators who’ve acquired amazingly large followings by writing permutation after permutation of the notion that the good ol’ USA is going to hell in a burning Ford F-150 and is likely going to take the rest of the world down with it.
It’s depressing, but it’s also addictive. I get these emails from Medium with links to headlines like “I’ll Tell You Exactly Why We’re All Doomed,” “How I Came to Believe That Civilization Is Unsustainable” and “Why It Feels Like We’re Headed Towards World War III,” and I just . . . have . . . to . . . click and peek.
If you, too, have difficulty resisting the masochistic allure of these Chicken Little forecasts, there is a corrective, which I will share.
I am finding solace in lettuce.
Yes, lettuce. Self-grown lettuce. Self-help lettuce.
Even though I grew up on a small farm, I have never been much of a gardener. A couple of cherry tomato plants in pots on the porch is about the extent of my adult green thumbing.
But last summer my wife and I assembled couple of wooden garden boxes in our yard. When the tomatoes and squash concluded their disappointing season, we decided to try some winter greens –specifically green leaf lettuce. We got six little plants at Lowe’s and put them in one of the boxes. I think they cost $1.95 apiece.
Talk about a gift that kept — keeps — on giving.
It’s the middle of March now, and the plants are still thriving (see illo). We haven’t purchased a head of lettuce at the grocery store in months, and I hope we never have to buy again.
Apart from the superior taste and not having to worry about salmonella or any other kind of poison, what’s great is the almost endless supply. No more opening the vegetable drawer in the fridge and discovering the large head of romaine you bought four days ago has started to dissolve into a brown goo. When you want a salad, you just clip off the lettuce leaves you need — a little from this plant, a bit from the next — and know the plants will replenish themselves.
OK, I know I speak from privilege. I live in a single-family dwelling with a bit of yard in a suburban neighborhood. I’m a man and I’m white, like Mr. Greenjeans. But just about anybody can do this, even if it’s in a bucket on the back steps or an empty lot in an urban neighborhood. Once you get it started, it takes little more upkeep than watering and maybe a plastic bag for covering on colder nights.
You’ll appreciate your leaf or romaine for more than the taste. It’s beautiful to look at, pretty as violets or tulips.
And how comforting, how heartening, it is to know that if — sorry, when — the dark age descends and we we’re all living in a Cormac McCarthy novel, you will have a steady source of roughage.
