A snowy day in the neighborhood, a day of muted colors—white, brown, dark green, more white, and a gray sky. For central Maine, this snowstorm, which is predicted to give us 12 inches of snow, is, well, usual for January. (What is unusual is a January with no snowstorms.) So I have done the usual household chores. I’ve made bread and frosted cocoa squares. Soon I’ll be making a minestrone-like soup, using garbanzo beans, pinto beans, pasta, tomatoes, onions, garlic, rosemary, and parsley. Visions of supper will sustain my husband, Clif, and I as we shovel the driveway and the path out back to the woodpile. A happy day for our dog, Liam, who loves to leap and twist and bark into the thrown snow.

This morning, before starting the day’s cooking, I read Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog in the New York Times, and his January 10^th post— “Varied Menus for Sustaining a Well-Fed World”—caught my attention. In this post, Revkin quotes Nina Fedoroff, a life science professor at Pennsylvania State University. Fedoroff writes, “ [U]rbanization has rendered an ever increasing fraction of humanity unable to produce its own food—and more than that—totally unaware of what it takes….If you look back through history, a plausible case can be made that empires unravel not for political reasons, but because of disruptions in the food supply chains that feed their urban seats of power. Those food supply chains are now fast and global.”

Revkin’s post is long but well worth reading as he ponders the question: How exactly do you feed a world with 9 billion people in it? (This is the projection for 2050.)

How indeed? For some reason, my thoughts went to Ali at Henbogle. A few days ago, she responded to questions I asked her about how big her garden was and how much food she harvested in 2010. She replied, “Our yard is a bit less than 3/4 of an acre, and the vegetable garden is about 630 square feet (that does not include the blueberries or blackberries). This year, I grew about 620 lbs. of vegetables so far, I probably have 25-35 more pounds of squash and pumpkin as yet unweighed, and still have leeks in the garden.”

Impressive! Now, I’m not the first to suggest this, and I’m sure I won’t be the last, but it seems to me that gardens—even small ones—might at least be part of the answer to feeding an overpopulated world. In our country, think of all the yards just waiting to go from lawn to garden. Ali’s 630 square foot garden gave her about 700 lbs of vegetables. Multiply that by potential backyard gardens from Maine to California, and you get a lot of food.

A sustaining thought on a snowy day.