First was Robert Rodale's 1976 editorial about personal independence from a past issue of Organic Gardening & Farming. Click here to read the whole article. What he wrote nearly 30 years ago is just as pertinent today: that by regaining some of our independence - be it through cultivation, energy, transportation or thought - we become more self-reliant and resilient, as individuals and as a nation. (Emphasis throughout is mine).
The garden is the best place to start looking for ways to help people become more independent. A garden is both the symbol and reality of self-sufficiency — especially an organic garden, which recycles organic wastes of the yard and household, permits the production of significant amounts of food with only minimal reliance on outside resources. Any campaign to boost personal independence should start by helping people become gardeners — teaching, motivating, and making land available. p.2
Through the garden we are able to do more with our own resources, and promote our independence from one of the largest areas of (potential) corporate influence in our lives -
Here we can turn to the second article to see how promoting independence through the garden can help us to connect more directly with the food on our plate. Wendell Barry states in Pleasures of Eating:
Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea —something they do not know or imagine — until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table. p.1
By engaging directly with our food through growing it, we establish a personal relationship with the seasons, the cycles, the reality of food and feeding ourselves. We are less likely to mindlessly shovel food into our mouths if we have used a shovel to procure it.
For most it is not desirable or feasible to grow all one's own (or one's family's) food, however the simple act of growing some food - be it a pot of thyme on the windowsill or thirteen barrels of tomatoes - helps us to get in touch with the miracle of life and the complex web that sustains us. This conscious eating is in contrast to what Berry observes as a an exile of eater and eaten from biological reality.
When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food. p.2
Both authors advocate returning at least some aspects of food production to a smaller scale - ideally erasing many or most of the steps on the trajectory from farmer to eater. Consider Rodale's (27-year-old) statement:
Eating bread in America today is an act of faith in the smooth functioning of one of the most complex food-supply systems ever conceived. p.1
Contemplate, as Rodale does, the network of farmers, grain suppliers, food chemical plants, machine shops, trucking firms, advertising firms, and plastics manufacturers that are required to make one loaf of bread. As he states, "not everything is done most efficiently in big, complex ways". With complexity is more vulnerability to the slings and arrows of fate - climate change, oil prices, inflation, labor strikes, war, business failure, and so on. Compare this with the simple act of making bread at home.
Berry echos this sentiment that bigger isn't necessarily better, but from a health and ecology standpoint; "... as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases". This dependence on drugs and chemicals is all too apparent in the conventional food systems that relies on feedlots and overcrowding to achieve 'economies of scale' in the production of animals for meat, eggs, and dairy. Not to mention the chemicals needed to maintain huge monocultures of food crops for humans and livestock.
By maintaining a close connection to the food that sustains us and our local economies, we are not only asserting our independence, we are more able to connect too with the awe-some force of life at work in each mouthful. And in this way we are most able to truly be grateful for the gifts from farm and garden. Some food of thought from Mr. Berry:
Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. p.3
May your eating be filled with pleasure.
Sources
Berry, W. 1990. Wendell Berry: The Pleasure of Eating. In: What Are People For? Reprinted at http://www.organicgardening.com/living/wendell-berry-pleasure-eating?page=0,1
Rodale, R. 1976. It’s Time for a New Declaration of Independence. Organic Gardening and Farming. Reprinted at http://www.organicgardening.com/living/new-declaration-of-independence?page=0,0
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