Hedge Society

Food, take two.

(Photo: Sharks for sale at the fish market in Dubai.)

I've been thinking a lot about food lately, what with the 2008 Chinese tainted milk catastrophe, the 2008 Canadian listeriosis outbreak via Maple Leaf foods, the 2009 U.S. salmonella outbreak via Peanut Corp, and life sciences companies like Monsanto, most famous for its genetically modified seeds, its attempts to patent a pig, and its fight to control milk production. (Please, Monsanto. You are famous enough. Stop now.)

(Photo: Greengrocer in Dubai.)

Food just isn't what it used to be, and I'm feeling more tentative all the time about what's available in grocery stores. I'm starting to daydream about some land where I can run a little hobby farm and grow a huge kitchen garden - where I'll harvest all my own organic vegetables from heritage seeds instead of genetically modified ones, spend the extra dollars for organic eggs if the chickens don't lay, and weed the old-fashioned way - by hand, and not with herbicide. It looks like I'm not the only one. People are talking about growing their own fruits and vegetables or even their own wheat. Sure, it's hard work. But urban gardeners like Mary Seton Corboy claim that physical labor matters: "It is an integral part of the process, and I want to be part of the process, the beginning, the middle, and the end."

After all, if we keep going the way we are - antibiotics in our cows and chickens, mercury in our fish, hormones in our milk, and fewer nutrients in our fruits and vegetables - going back to doing things ourselves might eventually be the only way left to us. Then again, there's got to be a reason human civilization was agricultural for thousands of years. Ever wonder if industrial society with its mass production is a little 200-year blip on the scale of human history? Something we'll look at another 200 years from now and say, boy, was that ever a mistake. And a close call.

You grow, girl

In a 4-minute radio essay, Mary Seton Corboy, an urban gardener in Philadelphia, explains why she believes in physical labor:

 
"A small fortune and a whole lot of time was spent on my education, so I could choose my employment and would never have to resort to picking up a shovel or digging a ditch to make a living. But in spite of the careful planning to ensure me a clean-fingernail future, I find my job, the job I relish on most days, is digging some version of a ditch. Of course, some of these ditches are metaphorical, but others are the old-fashioned move-the-dirt-around kind. And that's alright with me. In fact, it's what I want. I enjoy the ditch-digging part of my work because it's just one component of the how and why and what I do every day. My job calls for a lot of thinking and problem-solving - the how-to of what I do - and an equally heavy dose of community interaction - the why of what I do.

In my life as an urban farmer, it's as if I try to build a well for my neighborhood to draw from, start to finish, every day. There are many people who believe I should figure out how to pay someone to design the ditch, hire someone to dig the channel, and charge the people for the water that comes from the well. And then, having emailed, faxed, Excelled and Powerpointed all day, use the money I made from the well project to hire someone in a leotard to make me push a ball around a gym, and wrap my leg around my head. That would be their idea of success, but not mine.

Simply put, we aim to be too good to do physical labor. The thing is, I want the physical labor. It is an integral part of the process, and I want to be part of the process, the beginning, the middle, and the end...Physical labor creates the elusive bond that moves my work from cerebral and calculating to meaningful and engaged." 

(Photo from WHYY's This I Believe Philadelphia)