Prototype Issue
Eating off the Vine
By Nathaniel Page
(page 1 of 4)RTLA sat down with couple/writing duo/homegrown food revolutionaries Kelly Coine and Erik Knutzen, whose how-to manual "The Urban Homesteader" due out this spring captures the best of both urban and rural living, to talk eating healthy survival techniques.
They hold down realistic employment—Kelly a writer and Erik a researcher for The Center for Land Use Interpretation which he insists is totally unrelated to his homesteading hobby—and despite their location in too-hip-for-its-own-good Silver Lake, eat homegrown food fresh off the vine (or preserved by solar dehydration, pickling, and canning) everyday.
Wastewater from their washing machine flows illegally through a series of French drains to irrigate the front yard, where a garden of herbs and cacti betrays nothing abnormal. Their backyard yields avocadoes, basil, salad greens, green onions, pomegranates, corn, and tomatoes, among other things.
Like old Kansas settlers, they bake their own artisan sourdough from a self-made starter and preserve fruit from neighborhood trees. Their chickens recently began providing fresh eggs. For over a year the couple has maintained a blog, www.homegrownrevolution.org, where they document their experiences as urban survivalists.
I went for a tour of the premises and was treated to a few of their homemade delicacies before sitting down for a chat.
RTLA: Why do you grow your own food?
Erik: Most people want me to say that we do it because we want to save the world and make the environment a better place, but that didn’t have anything to do with it. We just wanted better tasting food, a richer life, a richer experience, and so we have this land. Why waste water and resources growing a lawn when we can grow something you can eat?
Kelly: I think it started with tomatoes because they’re the hardest to grow.
Erik: Tomatoes are kinda the gateway drug because they really are bad in the stores. You can get a tomato year-round, but it tastes out of season all year-round. The only option is to grow it yourself or spend a ton of money at Whole Foods.
RTLA:What about specialization? You know, three or four farmers growing food for everyone. Do you think that’s a good thing?
Erik:People should grow their own food because it’s a distributed system of agriculture. With the mono culture of industrial farming, you have everyone growing slightly different things, increasing the amount of biodiversity. We don’t use pesticides because we’re in an isolated place, as opposed to the Central Valley that’s hundreds of square miles of mono culture crops with pest problems. You’re less likely to have those problems in the city, ironically. There are other cities in the world where people grow their own vegetables, like Shanghai.
RTLA: Cuba.
Kelly: And it’s an old model. Until the advent of the freeway system, there were small farms and home farms in every city. When did the freeway system rise?
Erik: In the 1950s.
One of the things I would look for is a community of recent immigrants. Recent immigrants understand. They grow food in their front yard too. They keep chickens. They have roosters. They understand.—Erik Knutzen
Kelly: After World War II things went wrong.
Erik: Los Angeles was actually the wealthiest agricultural county in the country until the 1950s when it started getting suburbanized. There were many farms adjacent to the city. Our oranges would come from those places rather than be shipped from Florida or the Central Valley. One of the ways to counteract that is distributed growing in the city ourselves on whatever land that’s available: your backyard, your front yard, the parkway, on your balcony, at your office. If there’s ground, squeeze some vegetables in there; some artichokes.
RTLA: I notice on your blog that you guys rip a lot on LA. Why do you live here?
Erik: [Laughs]. I grew up here. My mom lives here. I kinda take care of her. I like LA. I like the fact that there are so many people here. It’s an interesting place. Many people doing many things. So much of the available space is devoted to automobiles. I think that’s one of the biggest problems with this city. It’s a mixed bag here. I like the climate for the kinds of foods you can grow here. I like Mediterranean-style food so it makes sense to grow that kind of food here. That’s the good side. I dunno. There’s a tremendous disparity between the rich and the poor. That’s not a good thing. Most people live in the places they grew up; like 60%. So I’m still here.
RTLA: You’ve lived here your whole life?
Erik: Basically, yeah.
Kelly: The longer you stay in one place, the more rooted you become. Then you sort of hunker down and make the best of where you live. If I go to Phoenix, I come back here and kiss the ground. It ain’t New York. It ain’t Paris. If I had all the money and freedom in the world, I think I’d go somewhere else. We’re of the age that’s ready to settle down, stake a claim on a piece of land, and try to make it better.
Discussion