You wouldn’t think of the act of gardening as some form of resistance, but yet I feel it is increasingly counter-cultural in this age of technological advances. For many of us in the ‘Western’ world, gardening is becoming an activity for the few, not the many as it once was and increasingly one could argue for the ‘rich’.
I’ve been musing on this lately and for what it’s worth, here’s why I think this is the case:-
Gardening forces us to meet with and greet imperfection at all stages, a view that is not commonly held in our capitalistic market.
In the capitalistic market, we want to cook with the best looking ingredients, no funny shaped potatoes or knobbly looking carrots. Our carrots need to be straight, very bright orange and clean. They may be bathed in chemicals to help them last longer but not filled with holes burrowed by carrot fly or dirt. Misshapen carrots are sold as ‘cheap’ as wonky carrots and even organic carrots are perfect and blemish free. Don’t get me wrong, you will find me looking for the ‘best’ ingredients too, and rejecting those that don’t look too good when I’m in the supermarket just the same as any fellow shopper.
Growing food though, has made me wonder, what is the impact of my desire for image perfection over real life imperfection? In my own experience, I’ve felt a sense of unease, of never getting it quite right. Why don’t my carrots look longer and straighter? They are often so short, stubby and even stunted. This feeling is at odds with the reality of home grown being imperfect but sweeter tasting and more healthy for us as its not been sprayed with chemicals.
Gardening as resistance, a sense of triumph over adversity.
There’s a sense of triumph as each seed breaks ground, its first true leaves springing out and a flower or tuber swells into a sweet tasting food for us. It is the taste of patience and sunshine, rain and drought and survival against all sorts of challenges. Recently, my young son handed me back a shop bought pear that I’d given him. It tasted funny, watery, wrong. Only there was nothing wrong. It was a perfect, if not pristine pear. It then dawned on me much later that he was comparing this pear flavour to the pears we’d recently harvested. Our pears had been bursting with sweetness, as the sun imparted flavor and juiciness all through the summer. Were they perfectly shaped? No, decidedly not, they were knobbly and funny shaped, but tasty? Hell yeah!
Our capitalistic market is only a reflection of what we choose and like to buy.
Having said this, I appreciate the importance of modern farming, and realise this is one of the very few ways that farmers can get food to us, via supermarkets. They are only reflecting what we say we like in how they grow food. As a result, growing your own food now is far from the norm. It’s a hobby at most, a wonderful challenge but certainly not ubiquitous as it once was or cheap to do.
Eating healthy home grown food is a privilege, no longer a right for many.
What’s the consequence for us as a society at large? For the poorest among us, it is poor health, even though ‘healthy’ foods are promoted, alongside tonnes of cheap, low quality processed foods. Others have articulated the issue much better than I can, but we all know a loved one, who is obese or has limited mobility. We know of families queuing at food banks, reliant on foods that stay in date for a long time as it’s the only thing that makes sense. Eating fresh foods, even if it is imperfect looking, is a privilege, no longer a right for every man.
So where and how can gardening be a form of resistance?
I think the resistance starts with the first seeds sown and in growing food for abundance that is shared with others. Growing food can be done in so many different ways, from the smallest of spaces to the largest of areas. It might be that growing is not for you, so you might choose to support the grower nearest you such as a collective or a nearby farmer- but the small actions ripple forth to create big waves of change. We can’t all be self-sufficient, because of limitations imposed by locality and prevailing weather conditions, but we can still try, as it is a worthy endeavour. We can do our part to resist, to say yes to healthy food for all, for our future and that of those to come after us.
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