Growing change
Growing change
We are in an interesting time on the planet, and for me community gardening this summer has been challenging. Events such as the drought crippling the country make me more convinced than ever we must move in a big way to grow as much of our own food locally as possible. But the financial pressures we are all under are in some ways making it harder for us to work together. The pressure's on to blame the other guy, and fight over the seemingly diminishing number of dollars available. This is an overly materialistic way of looking at things. Rather than disagree over what each of our share of the pie should be, we could be working to make a bigger pie...or making more pies. What we lack is working together to produce, and the community gardens have been a good example of this. We can grow much much much more food than we have been, if we work together and make wise urban farming decisions.
From an initial excitement in the city - when the 2008 drastic financial downturn started really making it evident that locally-grown food made literal dollars and sense sense - it has gradually come to dawn on us that growing food is not just some happy-happy game where we just all dance around and then delicious food appears. Oh, I don't mean to say it shouldn't be enjoyable. And home-grown healthy unprocessed food does taste better alongside being better for you. But there's a whole culture change that's required to get us off our unconsciously destructive ways.
Our taste buds have become jaded, so that if we don't have overdoses of that sweet and salty stuff, and human-made chemical additives to further confuse our taste buds so that we don't know when to stop eating (very profitable for some unscrupulous corporations), we think a natural food either has no taste or tastes bad.
"I don't really like tomatoes," people of all ages say. Say what!? You don't like tomatoes? Have you gone mad? There are tomatoes in everything you eat - pizza, spaghetti, chili, catsup,...I could go on and on. Oh, I see, you don't like tomatoes by themselves, and you don't like cherry tomatoes because they take too long to pick and you had a bad experience with one that didn't taste good one time, and you only like them when they're cooked and have sugar and fructose and salt and chemicals and stuff added to them. Well, I got news for you - after you eat or drink something w/sweetener in it, NOTHING will taste good. "You'll ruin your dinner" my mother used to say when we wanted some snack because she knew that.
Many know fresh produce is better tasting, but did you know that the healthier the soil the better the food grown on it tastes? Every now and then some group that doesn't care about anything other than making money (and is willing to be entirely unethical to get it) will lavishly (because it's a lot easier to make a lot of money when you don't have any morals and so they have a lot of money) fund some fake scientific study to badmouth natural farming and gardening, saying it's no more nutritious or safer than the chemical-grown stuff. But those running the priciest restaurants know there's a whole range of subtle flavors us poorer folk mostly don't have a clue about. They know to buy organic. Look at http://chefsafield.com .
Another cultural obstacle that needs to be overcome (if we are to be able to surf rather than drown in this perfect storm of environmental and financial changes ensuing) is the illusion that those things we have been traditionally eating are the only things we can or should or might enjoy eating. Not having a sense of history, for instance, you wouldn't know that at one time people were afraid to eat tomatoes. They called them "ground cherries" and thought they were poisonous. Sunchokes (aka Jerusalem artichokes) go for 6 bucks a pound in those expensive gourmet health food stores; but how many of my neighbors do you think I can get to try them for free? I ate every month of the past year from the garden on Lytle St. People are used to their food prepared and cooked, without the spices having to be dragged out of the garden, and added in. As a former junk food junkie (and with the poor health that went with it), I understand how food just becomes something you just wolf down, and it has just variations on only a couple of tastes - sweet, salty, sour, etc. We want food that you don't have to think about as you throw it down. Hurry up, work, get the money, buy the food, eat; repeat tomorrow. Advertisers like to tell us all this factory-manufactured stuff is "homemade," but at home we don't really even know how to cook any more. People look at the garden and ask me for what THEY think of as food. Even if there were such things as popsicle trees, honey, I wouldn't grow one because they're too damn sweet and that's not good for you. People don't realize what future suffering they're causing themselves. Diabetes and heart problems are going way up, even in children, in part because of what we eat. Let's get down to the dirty details. You may have to remove a bug from something you harvest from the garden, but when you buy some canned product in the store how do you know if there weren't a coupla bugs in the mix the manufacturer didn't manage to remove? You don't.
You've heard the saying it takes a whole village to raise a child. Well, I've come to the conclusion it takes a whole community to grow a garden. You have to not pollute your neighbor with chemicals. You have to respect and even welcome the wildlife that wants to share your food. After all, we're part of the web of life you know. Animals contribute their manure, and sometimes become food for us. We need the honeybees and bugs to pollinate. Rather than fight what you define as bad in a garden, step back from your warrior role and see the whole garden as a community in which all the players help each other. It's not being unrealistic to keep your eye on the bigger prize (e.g. feeding people) by encouraging more variety and quantity of life, rather than become so self-destructively obsessed with a particular crop that you're willing to use a pesticide which will ultimately come back and bite you with its poisonous effect. You have to welcome all kinds of people, being open-minded and open-hearted enough to avoid fighting because nobody wins fighting really. The same with the rest of nature. Plant a big variety and share. So many living things in a garden gradually makes the soil microbes able to create life from just the ground up minerals - the dirt - with the help of sun and rain.
We are at a time in which life has gone out of balance, and so we are dealing with unprecedented changes such as with weather and radiation from our nuclear power plants and pollution from warfare. Our decisions are important now. A new age is coming. Nature has an incredible power to heal. But let's be realistic: the genetic and medical problems coming from continuing leakage of radioactive substances from nuclear power plants has only just begun. We need to immediately stop building any more nuclear reactors, phase out those already existing as soon as possible, stop subsidizing nuclear power and fossil fuels, free up all the non-combustion energy technologies that have been quashed by status quo interests, nurture all types of plant life to consume carbon dioxide, and shut down all the wars before we extinct ourselves.
We are in an interesting time on the planet, and for me community gardening this summer has been challenging. Events such as the drought crippling the country make me more convinced than ever we must move in a big way to grow as much of our own food locally as possible. But the financial pressures we are all under are in some ways making it harder for us to work together. The pressure's on to blame the other guy, and fight over the seemingly diminishing number of dollars available. This is an overly materialistic way of looking at things. Rather than disagree over what each of our share of the pie should be, we could be working to make a bigger pie...or making more pies. What we lack is working together to produce, and the community gardens have been a good example of this. We can grow much much much more food than we have been, if we work together and make wise urban farming decisions.
From an initial excitement in the city - when the 2008 drastic financial downturn started really making it evident that locally-grown food made literal dollars and sense sense - it has gradually come to dawn on us that growing food is not just some happy-happy game where we just all dance around and then delicious food appears. Oh, I don't mean to say it shouldn't be enjoyable. And home-grown healthy unprocessed food does taste better alongside being better for you. But there's a whole culture change that's required to get us off our unconsciously destructive ways.
Our taste buds have become jaded, so that if we don't have overdoses of that sweet and salty stuff, and human-made chemical additives to further confuse our taste buds so that we don't know when to stop eating (very profitable for some unscrupulous corporations), we think a natural food either has no taste or tastes bad.
"I don't really like tomatoes," people of all ages say. Say what!? You don't like tomatoes? Have you gone mad? There are tomatoes in everything you eat - pizza, spaghetti, chili, catsup,...I could go on and on. Oh, I see, you don't like tomatoes by themselves, and you don't like cherry tomatoes because they take too long to pick and you had a bad experience with one that didn't taste good one time, and you only like them when they're cooked and have sugar and fructose and salt and chemicals and stuff added to them. Well, I got news for you - after you eat or drink something w/sweetener in it, NOTHING will taste good. "You'll ruin your dinner" my mother used to say when we wanted some snack because she knew that.
Many know fresh produce is better tasting, but did you know that the healthier the soil the better the food grown on it tastes? Every now and then some group that doesn't care about anything other than making money (and is willing to be entirely unethical to get it) will lavishly (because it's a lot easier to make a lot of money when you don't have any morals and so they have a lot of money) fund some fake scientific study to badmouth natural farming and gardening, saying it's no more nutritious or safer than the chemical-grown stuff. But those running the priciest restaurants know there's a whole range of subtle flavors us poorer folk mostly don't have a clue about. They know to buy organic. Look at http://chefsafield.com .
Another cultural obstacle that needs to be overcome (if we are to be able to surf rather than drown in this perfect storm of environmental and financial changes ensuing) is the illusion that those things we have been traditionally eating are the only things we can or should or might enjoy eating. Not having a sense of history, for instance, you wouldn't know that at one time people were afraid to eat tomatoes. They called them "ground cherries" and thought they were poisonous. Sunchokes (aka Jerusalem artichokes) go for 6 bucks a pound in those expensive gourmet health food stores; but how many of my neighbors do you think I can get to try them for free? I ate every month of the past year from the garden on Lytle St. People are used to their food prepared and cooked, without the spices having to be dragged out of the garden, and added in. As a former junk food junkie (and with the poor health that went with it), I understand how food just becomes something you just wolf down, and it has just variations on only a couple of tastes - sweet, salty, sour, etc. We want food that you don't have to think about as you throw it down. Hurry up, work, get the money, buy the food, eat; repeat tomorrow. Advertisers like to tell us all this factory-manufactured stuff is "homemade," but at home we don't really even know how to cook any more. People look at the garden and ask me for what THEY think of as food. Even if there were such things as popsicle trees, honey, I wouldn't grow one because they're too damn sweet and that's not good for you. People don't realize what future suffering they're causing themselves. Diabetes and heart problems are going way up, even in children, in part because of what we eat. Let's get down to the dirty details. You may have to remove a bug from something you harvest from the garden, but when you buy some canned product in the store how do you know if there weren't a coupla bugs in the mix the manufacturer didn't manage to remove? You don't.
You've heard the saying it takes a whole village to raise a child. Well, I've come to the conclusion it takes a whole community to grow a garden. You have to not pollute your neighbor with chemicals. You have to respect and even welcome the wildlife that wants to share your food. After all, we're part of the web of life you know. Animals contribute their manure, and sometimes become food for us. We need the honeybees and bugs to pollinate. Rather than fight what you define as bad in a garden, step back from your warrior role and see the whole garden as a community in which all the players help each other. It's not being unrealistic to keep your eye on the bigger prize (e.g. feeding people) by encouraging more variety and quantity of life, rather than become so self-destructively obsessed with a particular crop that you're willing to use a pesticide which will ultimately come back and bite you with its poisonous effect. You have to welcome all kinds of people, being open-minded and open-hearted enough to avoid fighting because nobody wins fighting really. The same with the rest of nature. Plant a big variety and share. So many living things in a garden gradually makes the soil microbes able to create life from just the ground up minerals - the dirt - with the help of sun and rain.
We are at a time in which life has gone out of balance, and so we are dealing with unprecedented changes such as with weather and radiation from our nuclear power plants and pollution from warfare. Our decisions are important now. A new age is coming. Nature has an incredible power to heal. But let's be realistic: the genetic and medical problems coming from continuing leakage of radioactive substances from nuclear power plants has only just begun. We need to immediately stop building any more nuclear reactors, phase out those already existing as soon as possible, stop subsidizing nuclear power and fossil fuels, free up all the non-combustion energy technologies that have been quashed by status quo interests, nurture all types of plant life to consume carbon dioxide, and shut down all the wars before we extinct ourselves.
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 8:50 AM
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