The Red, White, and Green

When I read “La Vida Loba” in the April issue of Elle magazine — writer Sara Corbett’s personal narrative about her trek to a remote area of New Mexico to visit the home of her friend Loba, who had long since abandoned modern civilization to live a more primal existence — the part of the article that stuck with me the most was the description of the food that Loba prepared during the visit.

And then we ate. We ate the stuffed grape leaves. We ate steaming bowls of lentil soup and a thick slice of rye bread she’d made on the skillet. We had warm cups of brewed dandelion root topped off with capfuls of Kahlúa. Every once in a while I would blurt out some bit of small talk and Loba would silence it with one uttered word—“Yum!”—meant, I realized finally, to redirect us all to the simple, undistracted pleasure of tasting our food.

It’s always been a dream of mine to be able to grow my own food and savor it as simply and wonderfully as described above. Maybe it’s a reaction to the urban existence of my entire adult life (Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, and now Los Angeles) that has found me with nary a square of green land to call my own, but I became determined to grow something edible.

With no porch or patio in our current apartment, and a lone sunny spot in our kitchen, I decided to make use of a beautiful copper planter I had found and grow an organic indoor herb garden. It’s not a crop of vegetables, but it’s a start. And at $1.99 for each seedling I purchased from the nursery, it’s a heck of a lot more economical than spending $2.99 at Whole Foods for organic basil every time I want to make tomatoes and mozzarella.

–Jennifer Grayson

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