Monday, May 18, was a big day for Chicagoans who care about where their food comes from. More than 600 people descended on the Harold Washington Library to hear Michael Pollan preach the gospel of local, seasonal, sustainable eating. Hundreds more flocked to the grand-opening party for the new 75,000-square-foot Whole Foods at Sheffield and Kingsbury. And about 20 gardeners, foragers, artists, and activists congregated at a Little Village cottage to meet a man from LA.
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Knutzen is the author, with his wife, Kelly Coyne, of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City, a primer for urbanites who want to take a step or two off the grid. The book came out last year and covers strategies that range from the unremarkable (gardening, bread baking) to the old-school (canning and fermenting) to the fringe (gray-water plumbing). At their bungalow in LA’s Echo Park, Coyne and Knutzen do all of the above—and keep chickens too. It’s a labor-intensive lifestyle that Knutzen, an avid cyclist whose morning routine includes a daily dip into Seneca’s Letters From a Stoic, believes yields great rewards. But as they point out in the book, “Sometimes, when life gets too crazy, we don’t do anything beyond the barest maintenance, and eat a lot of pizza. Nothing wrong with that.”
Knutzen describes himself as a lifelong tinkerer. He has degree in experimental music, worked for a time as a video editor, and is currently a program coordinator for LA’s Center for Land Use Interpretation, a sort of brilliantly uncategorizable collective practicing a pokerfaced hybrid of urban planning and art making. But lately homesteading has become a full-time job. About two years ago he started a blog, homegrownevolution.com, to document his and Coyne’s experiments, and it wasn’t long before an editor from Process Media came calling. The Urban Homestead came out last year, the third in a survivalist-oriented series that also includes a guide to making it through a natural or man-made disaster and another titled Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America. Thanks to the recession, though, the market for Knutzen and Coyne’s volume has grown outside the apocalyptic counterculture. It’s currently in its third printing, and the couple is now working on a new book, targeted explicitly toward city dwellers with little access to land, for the health- and gardening-focused Rodale Press.
“I’m kind of flaky,” said Knutzen, by way of endorsing the method. “And, you know, you forget to water a tomato plant a couple of times and you’re done for. [SIPs] get rid of that dilemma.” Plus, he pointed out, pot growers swear by them.
