Links:
World Peace Diet
Radical Freedom Blog
Permaculture Design
Species Specific Diet
Sierra Club: True Cost of Food
Home Scale Food Forests
Cal-Earth Art and Architecture
Ishmael.org
Urban Farms Feeds Families
Urban Gardens
Food Not Lawns
Home Scale Permaculture
Earthlings

The Stigma Against Growing Food

What happened to the kitchen gardens of the past?

There seems to be a modern, silent conspiracy to grow only ornamental, non-edible plants in yards and business places. There is an unwritten rule that says we must keep food plants separate, compartmentalized on giant factory farms; grown out of sight and out of mind. Only in recent history has growing food been seen as a difficult, dirty, low class activity that must be shunned.

Land and food are our birth rights as earthlings and should not be owned

50 years ago everyone had herbs on the window sills and a garden out back or gathered wild grown foods close to home. We are separated from our connection to where our food comes from. In the USA most of us are used to buying our food from packages, stores, trucks and airplanes. This is not an accident. If large corporations control our very food source they control us.

Large food for profit companies even want to take away our rights to grow our own food. This is a strange state of affairs seeing as our bodies are made of food and have to eat food just about every day to stay alive. How did we come to this sad state of affairs?

Ancient cultures had more leisure and less busy work

Before our type of agriculture for profit came into being, subsistence agriculture was common. People worked fewer hours and had much more leisure than modern people. Up until 8 or ten thousand years ago the idea of mass producing anything for profit was not considered. Society was self limiting and did not grow much.

The very fabric of our society is based on compartmentalizing, and specializing so that we can produce excess wealth to horde. Although this has led to motivated humans who have discovered ways to produce more of everything this has also led to a massive increase in human population in a few hundred years to the point that we will soon make the planet unfit to live on.

How to Begin

What can we do about this sad state of our world and how can we begin to reconnect with the very essence of ourselves and our planet?

Easy! Even if you live in an urban setting you can grow food indoors, even compost indoors or make sure your community starts composting all waste. You could join or start a community garden in a corner of your yard or a vacant lot. while you wait for your herbs and sprouts to come up go to the local farmers market and begin to support people who are growing food locally.

If you own a home you may be able to retrofit it to be green and self sustaining with solar, rain catchment barrels and human generated power that can be stored for later. The ecology center is a great place to start for resources.