Apocalypse Gardening

Louisiana can grow its own food.

I am not a foodie, but I like to eat.

Nor am I a gardener, per se, but I grow a pretty good kitchen garden every year that produces a not-negligible amount of a few staples my family likes to eat: snap beans; hot and sweet peppers; tomatoes; basil; garlic; rosemary; and salad greens.

Sometimes also squash or cucumbers, if my kids insist, and if the mysterious powdery rust doesn’t kill them mid-season (the cukes, not the kids).

We have a couple stunted fig trees, too. And we eat all the figs except the ones the cardinals get first.

I am tapping out this quick note as a signal to anyone worried about the apocalypse as it might be embodied by Trump tariffs and deportations and the decimation of your 401k. The recession is coming, my friends.

So come to Louisiana, where, despite the present day crazy right-wing fervor, the people know how to be poor—the sort of poor that, traditionally, did not starve.

Jambalaya, gumbo, crawfish, stuffed mirliton, smoked meats, fresh veggies, rice: all the things poor people eat worldwide, in whatever local flavors they come and by whatever local name is given. That’s the backbone of Louisiana survival cuisine.

You could do worse!

I’m no Cajun. I’m a displaced Department of Defense dependent child, raised in what was formerly the world’s most effective and efficient socialist system (the U.S. Army) and now I reside in Louisiana, which is in the near sub-tropics (same latitude as Cairo), part of the historical Caribbean, epicenter of a regional poverty so old it has achieved cultural supremacy.

Tonight’s meal was one anyone in the country could easily produce: fresh beans, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, with some dry pasta and leftover rotisserie chicken. Add a cold beer, and you could live on such a diet forever.

We might all have to. And that part, at least, won’t be so bad.