Soil (The Vegetarian Myth)

So humic acid—creature of mystery, very much alive—breaks down plant compounds and stores them inside itself. When it gets the right signals from its ecosystem it recombines and releases the needed nutrients. Through tightly coupled feedback processes information on the chemistry reserves stored in humic acid feeds back into the above ground plant communities, indicating what plants should grow in what combination in what ecosystem and what kind of chemistries they should produce to keep the soil healthy.

The soil wasn’t a thing, it was a million things, and they were alive. Their life processes—eating, excreting, tunneling, communicating, exchanging—were what made the rest of the planet livable. They broke down dead matter from plants, animals, fungi, bacteria and made the constituent elements available for more life. Steven Stoll writes that topsoil is a filter and a container, a mass of integrated micro and macro matter, and a living substance that cannot be understood by reduction. Its final form contains so many members and symbiotic relationships that it constitutes, in the words of the soil scientist Nyle Brady, the genesis of a natural body distinct from the parent materials from which the body was formed.

Feed the soil, not the plant, was the first commandment of organic growing. I had to feed the soil because it was alive.

Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium—NPK—is the Triple Goddess of gardeners, the Troika of elements that rule plant growth. What did soil and plants eat and where would I get those substances? I hadn’t learned the phrase closed-loop system, but that was what I was after. Nitrogen was the big one. There are plants that fix nitrogen. Wasn’t that enough for my garden? Couldn’t it be? I begged. But I was begging a million living creatures who had organized themselves into mutual dependence millions of years ago. They had no use for my ethical anguish. No nitrogen-fixing plant could make up for all the nutrients I was taking out. The soil wanted manure. Worse, it wanted the inconceivable: blood and bones.

There were other sources of nitrogen I could have applied. Right now, fossil fuel provides the nitrogen to grow crops the world over. Synthetic fertilizer is what created the green revolution, with its 250 percent increase in crops. Besides the fact that nothing made from fossil fuels is sustainable—we can’t grow fossil fuel and it doesn’t reproduce itself—synthetic fertilizers eventually destroy the soil.

So synthetic nitrogen was out. And that left me facing animal products. Of course, the irony is that either source of nitrogen, synthetic or organic, comes from animals. Oil and gas are what’s left of the dinosaurs. So my choices—our choices, actually—were nitrogen from dead reptiles or from living ruminants.

My garden wanted to eat animals, even if I didn’t.

So I came to another fork in my Pilgrimage Road. I could buy a box of condensed NPK, nicely balanced and all organic, or I could make friends with a dairy farmer. The box was tempting, because I could lie. No, not quite lie. I could not-know what I already knew. I could refuse the information. Because I already knew what was in that box. The list of ingredients glimmered and promised like the fruit of knowledge always does. I was Eve, and here was my apple, and what would be the cost of eating? The literal cost I had finally come up against, the bottom line of the mineral cycle? The emotional cost to my spiritual longings, my political passions, my identity? And why is it always about eating?

I took a bite. I read the label. Blood meal, bone meal, dead animals, dried and ground. I put the box down and found some manure. Friends of a friend, a barn now empty of goats but filled with manure. It turned out I knew the woman who had owned the goats and she was a decent person. Her animals would have been well cared for, indulged even. I was dating someone with a pickup truck and a strong back. The manure arrived and my garden exploded. The tomato vines swallowed their trellises, then their bed, then developed designs on the driveway. It looked like the Land That Time Forgot outside my back window. I fed three households on the produce and still, some of the lettuce bolted before we got to it.

And I was left hungry as well as nourished. This was not an anticipatory hunger, the smell of dinner at the front door, a lover’s look of longing across a crowded room. This was a hunger that gnawed with no promise of relief. I was closing the loop in my garden now, but my ethical system had broken open.