When life gives you lemons...

But, packed fresh from the tree into a priority mail flat rate box, they will travel a couple of days from Texas to Vermont, arriving in a lilt of perfume, a box of gold in the January gloom.

Two boxes — and a head-on collision between the current craze for locally sourcing all foodstuffs and the desirability of imports.

Lemons in European and American cuisine date back to the 17th century, and by the middle of the 18th century were the second most common ingredient in period cookbooks, lurking only behind salt and trailed, at some distance, by pepper. In other words, trading for foodstuffs has a long and illustrious history… in the case of the common lemon dating back three centuries.

If we didn’t have a global trade in food, we wouldn’t have lemons. Or pineapple, or — perish the thought — coffee, chocolate or tea. While a locally produced carrot may have much to recommend it, let’s face it, it is never going to replace chocolate. Not even if you bake it into a lavish cake made from locally sourced honey, eggs and butter.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of multitasking, using my lemons to make a bright lemon curd while concurrently listening to the BBC’s production “Wartime Farm.” “Wartime Farm” is what is called experimental archeology. The recreation of the lives of ordinary people using the materials, infrastructure and tools available during the period. “Wartime Farm” examines the experience of the British countryside during World War II.

There are eight eggs in lemon curd. Two months of egg rations, at one egg per week. Even thriftily using the egg whites to leaven a cake did little to dispel my twinges of guilt.

In the middle of the third episode I realized two things: what drove the revolution in domestic agriculture from small independent farmers to agribusiness, and why it may well be in our vested interest to at least partially unwind that trend through our consumptive habits.

Prior to World War II, Britain imported 70 percent of its food supplies. Grain from the United States and Canada; beef, vegetables, butter and cheese from Europe; coffee, lemons, pineapples… British farmers raised sheep, chickens, beef cattle, milk cows, pigs, grains and vegetables, but played the minor chord in the food supply. While the suppliers were global, the system narrowed down to a vulnerable chokepoint: the British food system depended on ships.

With the advent of World War II, Britain found itself cut off from these food suppliers by U-boats and facing mass starvation. The British government called upon the countryside, its farmers, and a newly minted creation called The Farm Bureau to win the war with food.

We had a Farm Bureau on this side of the pond as well. Its role was to maximize production from every square inch of arable land, and bring into production quite a few inches that weren’t considered arable. Farmers were graded on their ability to meet quotas, and farm bureaus did their part by providing education and support to help modernize farms to meet these new demands.

The war ended, the bureaucracy remained. Rather than being dismantled after World War II, these bureaucracies repurposed themselves, working diligently, no doubt with the shortages of war firmly in mind, to encourage efficiencies of scale, exploitation of technologies, the mechanization of agriculture, and a policy of cheap food.  

The food system we live with today is a legacy of 18th-century clipper ships trading in luxury goods, and the farm policies put in place during World War II.

Consequently, we are every bit as vulnerable to a crisis in food staples today as Britain was in the early days of World War II. Too many are dependent on too few — too few farms, too few food processors, even too few varieties of seeds and livestock. The system is so concentrated it lacks resilience.

Keeping a garden, or supporting local farmers, puts a healthier, more diverse, diet on your table, true. But it also has the unintended consequence of building some resilience into a frightfully unbalanced food distribution system. Which in turn is the unintended consequence of mobilizing the countryside to feed a world at war.

After a day with my box of lemons, my fingers were stinging and wrinkled from the lemon juice, I had three small jars of marmalade in my pantry, several lemony baked goods for the freezer, and a pile of pulp and zested lemon rinds ready to be discarded.

This, too, is one of the consequences of a policy of cheap food. We don’t see how much we waste because we aren’t forced to think about it.

Unless we’re listening to a BBC broadcast on food shortages.

Life gave the British countryside lemons in 1941, and they made lemonade. So I dumped the lemon leavings into a pitcher of hot water and left them to steep while I unpacked Johnny’s seed order.

Tamara Burke lives in Stowe. Her column appears monthly. Comment on this article on stowereporter.com, or email letters to news@stowereporter.com.