Growing food, earning life
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Growing food, earning life
I've been called a bleeding heart liberal many times, but that's not how I was raised and that's not what I am. My mother often said to one of her seven children (all sons) "My heart bleeds for you." She wasn't a fan of people feeling sorry for themselves, or complaining. You take what life gives, and you make what you can of it. I don't believe in feeling sorry for anyone, no matter how hard you have had it. But I do believe in helping out when I can someone doing something I think worthwhile. And helping someone else tends to help yourself too in the end. So let's talk about food - where it comes from, and how we can all enjoy providing ourselves with the most delicious and nutritious edibles Earth has to offer.
First of all, food doesn't grow at the grocery store, it's only stored there. If you want to figure out how to get a steady supply of it you have to go outside, because Nature is where it comes from.
Oh, sure, you can grow food inside in a greenhouse (or even in your own home). But it doesn't just happen, you have to work for it. We were growing collards this year and one neighbor said "You should grow collard greens, we want collard greens" - not realizing that collards were growing right there but unrecognizable to her because she's used to them at a grocery store all one size leaf bunched up together. And you have to respect all the living things - microbes, bugs, birds and other wildlife, and plants - in order to get the living things to grow that you need to eat. In other words, in the long run and big picture, humans are no more important than any of the other life forms.
Yes, that's what I said, we homo sapiens ain't no great shakes, and any honest assessment would tell you that we, with our greed and wars and dog-eat-dog business practices, are causing a massive amount of suffering in the world. And not just to other humans. Though I did farm work thirty some years ago, it's taken me all this time - gardening every chance I got - to get a deep recognition that our agricultural system not only causes a huge amount of damage to the people employed in it and eating the food produced by it, but this industrial supposedly "efficient" extraction for profit rather than for life is enormously harmful to what's left of Earth's ecosystem and, literally, tortures the creatures caught up in this web of "production". Let's get one thing straight - We don't produce anything. We're just people and just produce arrogance whenever we say, "I grew". The best anyone can truthfully say is "I co-created", whether it be food or art or a chair or whatever. You can't isolate the environment from anything you do. Your mind may say, for instance, that this is my farm or this is my money or this is my house or this is my car or this is my country, but the reality is that if you go up into space and look down on the Earth you'll see it doesn't really have any borders on it. Everything is connected.
So let's apply this to growing food. You don't know how many times I've tried to grow food and found myself frustrated by some thing or someone outside the garden area. Like everybody else, I figured walls and fences would keep out nosy neighbors and other non-human pests. But - older and a little wiser maybe now - I realize that they (we) are all part of the web of life. If you grew up in the city you (like I) probably didn't much think about where your food came from. I was in my twenties before I saw a full grown corn plant. It was huge and I thought geez, you have to grow a great big tall plant like that for months before you get just a few ears of corn from it. I was losing interest in farm work even more when I found what hard work it was climbing apple trees to pick them, and having to compete with the cows for the ones that fell to the ground when I shook the tree. But the cows contribute their manure and urine, and this former city boy had a lot to learn from those "dumb" country bumpkins.
If you want to eat meat you have to not only nurture - feed and protect - animals throughout their lifetime; you have to kill them at the end. Not so romantic. But we humans have tried to pretend we're not part of this web of life. We say we're not animals, but we are. When we die a lot of our bodies get put in metal boxes which take an awful long time to rot back into the Earth to be returned to the web of life; how silly. Well, if we really want the sustainable community we're always talking about all this has to change. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides? Nope, can't do that any more. As the environmental effects of our trying to beat Nature into submission to give us what we want kick in, we're being forced to consider making friends with our former enemies of all species. We've so tortured the logic of mass production with our gimme mindset that the planet is now literally howling for us to stop - storms, droughts, radical temperature shifts, heat waves, crop failures - all speak with one voice. We are only one part of Nature; the ecosystem as a whole is vastly more powerful than any of it's individual species. And it's time to wake up to that. Debates about how much do we need fossil fuels are nearly totally useless. Nature's going to stop us now for the most part. We're in no position any more to talk about economic development in terms of what we can build. We need to cooperate - with whatever manufacturing and building capacity we have left, understanding that environmental (and also consequent economic) troubles already in the cards are greatly diminishing that capacity - to quickly ramp up locally-grown food (including via fermentation processes) and locally-produced energy. The violent ways of growing food and producing energy - with ever more environmentally destructive agriculture and wars over non-renewable energy sources - are going to stop soon, regardless of whether we as a species decide to change. If we don't stop fighting of our own accord, the ecosystem and it's collapse will stop us.
The Hazelwood Urban Gardens is dedicated to enjoying learning together as we grow the highest quality food to share. Join us, we'll have a good time kicking into high gear a regeneration of the web of life in Hazelwood, the food web in which organic matter is returned to the Earth where it belongs instead of screwing up things the way we have been doing by putting our organic waste in the landfills (where it generates greenhouse gases and disease).
for http://hazelwoodhomepage.com
Growing food, earning life
I've been called a bleeding heart liberal many times, but that's not how I was raised and that's not what I am. My mother often said to one of her seven children (all sons) "My heart bleeds for you." She wasn't a fan of people feeling sorry for themselves, or complaining. You take what life gives, and you make what you can of it. I don't believe in feeling sorry for anyone, no matter how hard you have had it. But I do believe in helping out when I can someone doing something I think worthwhile. And helping someone else tends to help yourself too in the end. So let's talk about food - where it comes from, and how we can all enjoy providing ourselves with the most delicious and nutritious edibles Earth has to offer.
First of all, food doesn't grow at the grocery store, it's only stored there. If you want to figure out how to get a steady supply of it you have to go outside, because Nature is where it comes from.
Oh, sure, you can grow food inside in a greenhouse (or even in your own home). But it doesn't just happen, you have to work for it. We were growing collards this year and one neighbor said "You should grow collard greens, we want collard greens" - not realizing that collards were growing right there but unrecognizable to her because she's used to them at a grocery store all one size leaf bunched up together. And you have to respect all the living things - microbes, bugs, birds and other wildlife, and plants - in order to get the living things to grow that you need to eat. In other words, in the long run and big picture, humans are no more important than any of the other life forms.
Yes, that's what I said, we homo sapiens ain't no great shakes, and any honest assessment would tell you that we, with our greed and wars and dog-eat-dog business practices, are causing a massive amount of suffering in the world. And not just to other humans. Though I did farm work thirty some years ago, it's taken me all this time - gardening every chance I got - to get a deep recognition that our agricultural system not only causes a huge amount of damage to the people employed in it and eating the food produced by it, but this industrial supposedly "efficient" extraction for profit rather than for life is enormously harmful to what's left of Earth's ecosystem and, literally, tortures the creatures caught up in this web of "production". Let's get one thing straight - We don't produce anything. We're just people and just produce arrogance whenever we say, "I grew". The best anyone can truthfully say is "I co-created", whether it be food or art or a chair or whatever. You can't isolate the environment from anything you do. Your mind may say, for instance, that this is my farm or this is my money or this is my house or this is my car or this is my country, but the reality is that if you go up into space and look down on the Earth you'll see it doesn't really have any borders on it. Everything is connected.
So let's apply this to growing food. You don't know how many times I've tried to grow food and found myself frustrated by some thing or someone outside the garden area. Like everybody else, I figured walls and fences would keep out nosy neighbors and other non-human pests. But - older and a little wiser maybe now - I realize that they (we) are all part of the web of life. If you grew up in the city you (like I) probably didn't much think about where your food came from. I was in my twenties before I saw a full grown corn plant. It was huge and I thought geez, you have to grow a great big tall plant like that for months before you get just a few ears of corn from it. I was losing interest in farm work even more when I found what hard work it was climbing apple trees to pick them, and having to compete with the cows for the ones that fell to the ground when I shook the tree. But the cows contribute their manure and urine, and this former city boy had a lot to learn from those "dumb" country bumpkins.
If you want to eat meat you have to not only nurture - feed and protect - animals throughout their lifetime; you have to kill them at the end. Not so romantic. But we humans have tried to pretend we're not part of this web of life. We say we're not animals, but we are. When we die a lot of our bodies get put in metal boxes which take an awful long time to rot back into the Earth to be returned to the web of life; how silly. Well, if we really want the sustainable community we're always talking about all this has to change. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides? Nope, can't do that any more. As the environmental effects of our trying to beat Nature into submission to give us what we want kick in, we're being forced to consider making friends with our former enemies of all species. We've so tortured the logic of mass production with our gimme mindset that the planet is now literally howling for us to stop - storms, droughts, radical temperature shifts, heat waves, crop failures - all speak with one voice. We are only one part of Nature; the ecosystem as a whole is vastly more powerful than any of it's individual species. And it's time to wake up to that. Debates about how much do we need fossil fuels are nearly totally useless. Nature's going to stop us now for the most part. We're in no position any more to talk about economic development in terms of what we can build. We need to cooperate - with whatever manufacturing and building capacity we have left, understanding that environmental (and also consequent economic) troubles already in the cards are greatly diminishing that capacity - to quickly ramp up locally-grown food (including via fermentation processes) and locally-produced energy. The violent ways of growing food and producing energy - with ever more environmentally destructive agriculture and wars over non-renewable energy sources - are going to stop soon, regardless of whether we as a species decide to change. If we don't stop fighting of our own accord, the ecosystem and it's collapse will stop us.
The Hazelwood Urban Gardens is dedicated to enjoying learning together as we grow the highest quality food to share. Join us, we'll have a good time kicking into high gear a regeneration of the web of life in Hazelwood, the food web in which organic matter is returned to the Earth where it belongs instead of screwing up things the way we have been doing by putting our organic waste in the landfills (where it generates greenhouse gases and disease).
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 12:08 PM
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