Who doesn't love food?! I love food! I love cooking and experimenting with food... mainly because I love eating food. Beyond just preparing a meal from store-bought ingredients, I love crafting food from scratch--culturing my own yogurt, hand-kneading and baking fresh breads... mmm. My next project will be homemade mozzarella. My husband will take care of the home-brew. I love the slow and patient task of nurturing food-bearing plants (well, any plant for that matter--I love plants, too) to full maturity and ripeness. Every year I plant a wider variety of vegetables in my backyard garden. I have blueberry and raspberry bushes, too, and I love to eat the fruit, unwashed, right off the bush.

All of these activities, besides ultimately being enjoyable to the palate, are enjoyable to the soul. There is something so deeply satisfying about producing one's own food for one's own consumption--all the better if one can produce enough to share with friends and family. I guess it's in my blood.

My mother's parents, the grandparents that I saw all the time and to whom I'm usually referring when I say "grandparents," were both from rural North Carolina farming families. They learned from their parents, who learned from their parents, and on and on back to who knows where and when, the ways of the land. And, to this day, they maintain a very large garden on their 1-acre lot. When I was a kid, I played in that garden. They called it weeding and they called it harvesting, but us grandkids called it playing. The best mud pies in the world were made with Maw Maw's garden soil. To keep us out of her way when she prepared dinner, my grandmother would send us kids out to pick tommy-toes fresh off the vine (that's North-Carolina-speak for cherry tomatoes).

They grew everything under the sun: tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, peppers, squash, potatoes, beans, peas, carrots, pumpkins for Halloween, and plenty more I'm forgetting about. They even had a few fruit trees, apples and peaches I believe. After harvest-time, I remember helping my grandmother with the canning of tomatoes and green beans, the freezing of corn and peach slices. She taught me how to make fruit preserves so good I stopped eating jam when I moved away from home because no store-bought jam ever compared to the stuff I grew up on.

To many it sounds like a lot of work, but I guess my grandparents did all this because it was a satisfying way of life, a way of life they'd always known and that everyone around them also practiced to some extent. Also, having grown up during the Great Depression when millions of Americans had nothing to eat, they realized that one is never entirely poor if one knows how to plant. Food is life: it is nature and it becomes us. It binds us to nature and to know how to cultivate it is to know one's place in nature.

The vast majority of mankind has always been involved somehow in the procurement of food--be it hunting, gathering, farming, or shepherding. The expansion in the 20th century of industrial agriculture has allowed a kind of divorce of most people from the land that provides their sustenance. Now, 1 in 100 people can do the farming for everyone, freeing up the other 99 people for "higher" pursuits and leisure. Isn't it ironic that many people choose gardening for their leisure-time activity?

The technologies--petroleum-based, chemical fertilizers and pesticides; energy-intensive refrigeration; energy-intensive farming equipment; long-distance transport--that allow the industrial food system to function on such a large scale are in large part responsible for the grave environmental situation we now find ourselves in. But, most people see no way out: food comes from the supermarket, end of story. Many people cannot envision where their food would come from if it weren't for corporate-controlled supermarkets stocked full of products grown, processed, and packaged by mega-corporations like Monsanto and Phillip Morris (yeah, your Kraft Dinner enriches an American cigarette-manufacturer). Funny thing, their grandparents probably would hit them over the head for such childishness--"Get off your butt and grow it yourself!--it hasn't been that long since most people knew how to get food.

The divorce between people and the land they ultimately, if unknowingly, rely on, reduces people to the status of mere consumers. In the context of an industrialized agricultural economy, the relationship between producer and consumer is anything but equitable. Mere consumers have very little say in how their food gets produced--like what chemicals, antibiotics, and growth hormones are used on food intended for human consumption--and producers have no obligations except to the bottom line and the shareholders who have an eye on it. Of course, the recent surge in the organic sector of the grocery industry is good news: people want clean, healthful food and they're buying accordingly. Also, the recent interest in local foods (a la 100-Mile Diet) is a good indication that people want to get closer to the land, if not by starting their own gardens, at least by buying from producers who are smaller in scale, more likely to use sustainable growing methods, and geographically closer to home. The rise in oil costs, and therefore transportation costs of all kinds of commercial goods including food, will take its toll on consumers in the form of rising prices on imported foods. If the prices at your local farmer's market seem high, consider that the prices you're used to paying for conventionally-grown, supermarket food have always been artificially low because they've never accounted for the full costs of conventional food production. How do you put a price tag on wildlife habitat destruction, species extinction, CO2 emissions of freight traffic, loss of farmland to urban sprawl, contamination of groundwater, etc., etc.? Consumers have never been asked to pay for these aspects of their food, mainly because corporate-control of the food system mostly kept these inconvenient truths hidden from public view and the distance between producer and consumer ensured it would be a long time before people started finding out... But, hey, it was profitable while it lasted!

Okay, enough already! What am I going to do about it? Well, complain for one. Those who know me know it's what I do best. At least airing grievances in a public forum like this gives the illusion of eliciting a response from others. If others are on board, maybe they'll want to do something, too, to free their food from corporate control. So, two: blog about it. And, three: plant, water, weed, harvest, culture, ferment, can, freeze, preserve, cook, bake, eat, and relish the satisfaction of nurturing my soul and myself! I'm no ring leader, here; I can tell that just from looking around Vancouver at how many people maintain food-producing gardens in their front yards, their backyards, in containers on porches and patios, roof-top terraces, and community gardens for those who literally have no soil to call their own. It gives me hope to see the renewal of this lost art. My grandparents would be happy--a little confused as to how we got to this point, but happy nonetheless.