Producing Food Without The Land

After four days of battling fever and all the other icky stuff that goes with stomach virus, we’ll be glad to go home today.

Thankfully each day was saved by regular doses of Tylenol and lots of water.

There wasn’t much to excite a Farmgirl at Disney. I didn’t even see the resort or parks pushing Florida oranges, which was a little surprising.

The big exception was The Land at Epcot. We took the boat tour through the exhibit. While the take on farming was decidedly BigAg (sponsored by Nestle), it was fascinating to float through the experimental gardens, where hydroponics and aeroponics were on full display. So cool seeing tomato trees and enormous melons hanging from vines four feet off the ground.

I will say that if it’s true that much of the produce grown there is served on the resort, as claimed, I’m suspicious of the flavor. In general, the resort food was pretty bad.

I’m glad we brought much of our own food. It’d be better for the parks to outsource their food to fast-food restaurants. I would have given anything for a Taco Bell at the Mexico exhibit at Epcot or a real McDonald’s at Magic Kingdom. A nasty hot dog and fries just wasn’t at all satisfying.

But I digress. Back to The Land.

Ironically, the greenhouses are attempting to invent a system of agriculture that doesn’t actually need The Land. A prime motivation is to grow food with as little environmental impact as possible.

One of the other goals of the greenhouses is to produce food without soil and, indeed, without atmosphere, so that food can eventually be cultivated in space. No surprise then that part of the research is sponsored by NASA.

You don’t have to travel to Disney or be an astronaut to see some of the early research results. You can experience the technology with an AeroGarden, a consumer product in which you can grow herbs and veggies, sans potting soil, indoors.

Mickey-shaped pumpkin from Living with the Land greenhouses at Epcot. Photo from Wikipedia.