Comfort Food for the Eyes

John Friel

It’s August, a steaming heap of summer that one of the Caesars modestly named for himself. Here in Pennsylvania, the fields are full of ripened or ripening grain, tobacco and fodder crops. Roadside stands are full of local sweet corn in its juicy prime. And the roads are full of tourists with an uncanny knack for finding the most dangerous places to stop and watch Amish farmers bale hay.

On the ornamental side of ag/hort, gardens are laden with ornamental grasses, also in their prime. Whether tall and elegant, rounded and mounded, short and cute, dense or airy, grasses enhance and enliven the landscape. There’s a form and a size for every garden setting.

When contemplating grasses in the garden, it’s instructive to consider a larger picture, i.e., grasses in history and pre-history. Grasses are inarguably the most economically important group of plants on the planet. Grasses are grown in greater quantities and provide more food energy than any other crop category. Poaceae, the family of the true grasses (not pseudo-grasses like Carex and Sisyrinchium) includes the edible grains: Wheat, rice, barley, millet and more.

We humans eat grasses in huge quantities. If you’ve breakfasted on cereal or toast, munched a sandwich at lunch or pilaf for dinner, maybe washed down with a beverage brewed from fermented barley, then you’re a grass-eating animal. If you’re a carnivore, if you’ve chowed down on, say, a cheeseburger, lamb gyro or venison chop, then you’re a grass-eating-animal eater.

What’s that got to do with grasses in your garden or your perennial offering? More than meets the eye. Edible grains are not a digression; they’re germane to the discussion of ornamentals. The relationship between humans and grasses is hard-wired in our psyche. Man has deliberately cultivated grasses for at least 12,000 years, and presumably relied on them as wild-gathered food for millennia before that. Today, grass-derived foods supply half the calories we consume, either directly or indirectly.

But I think all those generations, long since gone below ground, instilled an ancestral memory, an ancient instinct that predisposes us to like the way grasses look. Grasses are comfort food for the eyes. A swath of Panicum, Miscanthus or Calamagrostis is a simulacrum, echoing fields of wheat swaying in summer breezes. To gaze is to graze: Those amber waves elicit the same emotions as a shed full of cordwood when winter winds wail. It’s a subliminal sense of security, a confidence that we can weather whatever comes next.

Fuel and grains segue logically to the current fad of burning corn. One can do that in several ways. Stoves and furnaces consume dried corn directly or there’s the elaborate process of converting fresh kernels to ethanol. Either way, here’s a question: should wealthy nations be burning food?

World population has eclipsed 7 billion souls, many of them hungry. And it’s been demonstrated that Panicum and Miscanthus can be burned—pelletized or converted to liquid—more efficiently than corn. As perennial grasses, they obviate several steps of the endless treadmill cycle of corn production: Plow, sow, spray/cultivate, harvest, then send Midwestern soil, phosphates and nitrogen down the Mississippi River to choke the Gulf of Mexico. Repeat.

Thanks to this pattern, it’s estimated that Iowa loses 10 tons of topsoil per acre per year, twice what the USDA generously calls “sustainable.” The resulting dead zone in the Gulf is expected to be a little larger than New Jersey this year. It sounds kind of insane, and for good reason. Perennializing the part of that acreage devoted to growing fuel could keep a lot of soil where it belongs, a step toward real sustainability, but too many people make too much money in the existing cycle. We’ll be treading that mill for years to come.

Okay, now I’m verging on digression. Soapboxes can be as tiresome as treadmills.

Whether you’re reaping, mowing, eating, drinking, deadheading or burning them, enjoy your grasses. Bring their comforting mass to your comfort-craving masses. Watch out for oblivious tourists. Keep the Gulf in your thoughts and/or prayers. Hail Caesar. GP

John Friel is marketing manager for Emerald Coast Growers and a freelance writer.