Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
Here’s a video I found on the GRAIN website, a translated French documentary on La Gloria and the associated Smithfield Farms factory pig farm where the latest outbreak of Swine Flu occured.
It’s about 45 minutes long, and contains some disturbing images.
UN Secretary General Welcome Message for the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity from CBD on Vimeo.
Our challenge will be to make sure this applies to the food we eat, as well as the world’s ecosystems.
Here’s a group of people who take it upon themselves to go out and do, in order to promote local and sustainable foods as well as healthy eating. Cynthia, a reader of Bifurcated Carrots, sent me an email telling me about them and that she saw them at The Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello.
My last post about Amateur Foods prompted an interesting discussion in the comments, and a comment from Cynthia led me to a new blog I haven’t seen before Growing Power.
Will Allen, in his first very well written and powerful post, offered a
A Good Food Manifesto for America. In particular my attention was drawn to this:
Many astute and well-informed people beside myself, most notably Michael Pollan, in a highly persuasive treatise last fall in the New York Times, have issued these same warnings and laid out the case for reform of our national food policy. I need not go on repeating what Pollan and others have already said so well, and I do not wish merely to add my voice to a chorus.
I am writing to demand action.
It is time and past time for this nation, this government, to react to the dangers inherent in its flawed farm and food policies and to reverse course from subsidizing wealth to subsidizing health.
While I have a great deal of respect for Michael Pollan, and he has without a doubt done more to attract attention to the US and worlds food problems than anyone in the last century, he is not a doer. By far the most important people in the battle to fix the broken food system in today’s world are the people in the field like Will Allen.
This is not the first I’ve heard of Will Allen. Cynthia, a reader of this blog and someone I have been in frequent email contact with over the last few years told me about him some time ago. Having interesting information and being able to translate it into a post suitable for publishing don’t always go together, as was the case here. The same thing is true with Cynthia herself, who is very involved in the food culture of Virginia and a market gardener. The best I can offer on her is to take a look at her recent comments on the last post.
Next on my list of doers are public domain plant breeders and collectors of old varieties. Some really amazing things have been created or found in recent years by people like Tom Wagner, Alan Kapuler and Tim Peters in the US, as well as many others. In Europe people like Lieven David, Ben Gabel, Frank van Keirsbilck and others. Together with these people are all of those running small farms around the world, have a look at my links page for some of those. I’m sure there are many others I’m forgetting. These are the people who roll their sleves up and get their finger nails dirty, and they are all special in their own ways.
These are all the people creating the food systems of the future, and they are the ones we need to be talking and listening to.
For some reason this subject has come up several times recently. What I mean by amateur foods are those grown in someone’s home garden.
Many of us know what it’s like to have a glut of zucchini’s (courgettes) or when all 100 apples come ripe on your tree at the same time. You give them away or you have methods of processing and storing them. You may have neighbors or friends to give them to. Since I grow about 1000 bulbs of garlic every year, it’s always a bit of an issue to find people to eat them.
What about selling them or giving them away to other people in your community?
President Obama has the stated purpose of producing fresh vegetables for a local homeless soup kitchen. James recently posted about an initiative in his community to encourage hobby gardeners to offer their excess to others. I got an email from Maureen telling me about her new site, The Farmers Garden, set up to match people offering their home grown fruits and veggies with those looking for offerings.
I must admit, while I usually try to be positive and encouraging, I’m also not shy about dismissing impossible sounding ideas. I wasn’t very encouraging in my reaction to either of these initiatives.
The basic problem is this. Being a market farmer is a very special skill, and takes considerable effort and dedication. In most places in the world it’s difficult or impossible to run such an operation financially without government assistance. Certainly it’s all but impossible in the face of government subsidized factory farms, or cheap imported alternatives.
While market shoppers may not be as picky as some, everyone expects their food to be reasonably free of blemishes, insect damage and generally look good. Harvest gluts need to be managed with succession plantings and other season extension methods. Varieties of plants need to be selected that fit in with the general business model of a market farm, and these are usually different from what we choose to grow at home. A selection of produce needs to be offered that’s consistent with buying most of your food in a single place, and since people eat 365 days a year this sort of variety needs to be offered year round. Most of us also depend on a relationship with the person we buy our food from, in order to have some assurance of it’s quality and safety. It’s a tall order.
As much as I like the idea of communities coming together and sharing their food, and it’s certainly a great way to meet your neighbors, in my opinion what can come from a home garden is no substitute for market farmers. It doesn’t matter if a whole community offers their excess produce. It doesn’t seem like this kind of system will ever be able to provide a significant contribution to local food needs. Or can it?
Hopeless idea or food system of the future?
Does anyone have first hand knowledge of a working system like this?
