Good a day as any to go over what is necessary to get healthy food.
This was posted 10 months ago, probably by Charlie, and it is still
true today.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/...4056569234645e
233cff

Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden Won't Save You
-- Fighting the Corporations Will

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted June 23, 2008.

The corporate agriculture industry would like nothing better than to see
us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political
dissent.

I didn't mean to lead anyone down the garden path. Adding my small voice
to those urging Americans to replace their lawns with food plants
wasn't, in itself, a bad idea. But now that food shortages and high
costs are in the headlines, too many people are getting the idea that
the solution to America's and the world's food problems is for all of us
in cities and suburbia to grow our own. It's not.

Don't get me wrong: Growing food just outside your front or back door is
an extraordinarily good idea, and if it's done without soil erosion or
toxic chemicals, I can think of no downside. Edible landscaping can look
good, and it saves money on groceries; it's a direct provocation to the
toxic lawn culture; gardening is quieter and less polluting than running
a power mower or other contraption; the harvest provides a substitute
for industrially grown produce raised and picked by underpaid,
oversprayed workers; and tending a garden takes a lot of time, time that
might otherwise be spent in a supermarket or shopping mall.

So it was in 2005 that our family volunteered our front lawn to be
converted into the first in a now-expanding chain of "Edible Estates,"
the brainchild of Los Angeles architect/artist Fritz Haeg. We already
had a backyard garden, but growing food in the front yard (which, as
Haeg himself points out, is a reincarnation of a very old idea) has been
a wholly different, equally positive experience.

Our perennials and annuals are thriving, we've gotten a lot of
publicity, and I've been talking about the project for almost three
years. Yet neither of our gardens, front or back, can stand up to the
looming agricultural crisis. Good food's most well-read advocate,
Michael Pollan, has written that growing a garden is worth doing even
though it can make only a tiny contribution to curbing carbon-dioxide
emissions. He might have added that growing food is worth it even if it
does very little to revive the nation's food system.

World cropland: the pie is mostly crust

The edible-landscaping trend is catching on across the country, and with
food prices rising, it has taking sadly predictable turns. A Boulder,
Colo. entrepreneur, for example, has tilled up his and several of his
neighbors' yards and started an erosion-prone, for-profit
vegetable-farming operation. It will supplement his income, but it won't
make a nick in the food crisis.

That's because the mainstays of home gardening -- vegetables and fruits
-- are not the foundation of the human diet or of world agriculture.
Each of those two food types occupies only about 4 percent of global
agricultural land (and a smaller percentage in this country), compared
with 75 percent of world cropland devoted to grains and oilseeds. Their
respective portions of the human diet are similar.

Suppose that half of the land on every one-acre-or-smaller
urban/suburban home lot in the entire nation were devoted to
food-growing. That would amount to a little over 5 million acres (pdf)
sown to food plants, covering most of the space on each lot that's not
already covered by the house, a deck, a patio, or a driveway. (And in
many places it couldn't be done without cutting down shade trees and
planting on unsuitably steep slopes).

That theoretical 5 million acres of potential home cropland compares
with about 7 million acres of America's commercial cropland currently in
vegetables, fruits, and nuts, and 350 to 400 million acres of total
farmland. The urban and suburban area to be brought into production
would not approach the number of healthy acres of native grasses and
other plants that are slated to be plowed up to make way for yet more
corn, wheat, soybeans, and other grains under the newly passed federal
Farm Bill.

A nationwide grow-your-own wave would send good vibes through society,
ripples that could be greatly amplified by community and apartment-block
gardening. But front- and backyard food, even if everyone grew it, would
not cover the country's produce needs, much less displace our huge
volume of fresh-food imports.

We could, instead, plant every yard to wheat, corn, or soybeans, which
would account only for a little over two percent of the US land sown to
those crops. Other policies, like dispensing with grain-fed meat and
fuel ethanol, would free up far more grain-belt land than that.

Not even a poke in the eye

I've played a part in the promotion of domestic food-growing, and I now
I seem to hear daily from people who believe that it's the best
alternative to industrial agriculture (as in, "I'll show Monsanto and
Wal-Mart that I don't need their food!"). Even though most prominent
home-lot food efforts, like the "100-Foot Diet Challenge," also try to
draw attention to bigger issues, the wider message can get lost in the
excitement. Whatever its benefits, replacing your lawn with food plants
will not give Big Agribusiness the big poke in the eye that it needs,
nor will it save the agricultural landscapes of the nation or world.


To do that, the big-commodity market must be not just modified but
overthrown. Until then, most of that two-thirds or more of the human
calorie and protein intake that comes from grains and oilseeds (directly
in most of the world or among Western vegetarians, largely via animal
products for others in this country) will continue to be served up by a
dirty, cruel, unfair, broken system.

Essential for providing vitamins, minerals, and other compounds, a
highly varied diet is important, and home gardens around the world help
provide such a diet. But with a world population now approaching seven
billion people and most good cropland already in use, only rice, wheat,
corn, beans, and other grain crops are productive and durable enough to
provide the dietary foundation of calories and protein.

Grains made up about the same portion of the ancient Greek diet as they
do of ours. We've been stuck with grains for 10,000 years, and our
dependence won't be broken any time soon.

The United States emulate Argentina and a handful of other countries by
raising cattle that are totally grass-fed instead of grain-fed and
thereby consuming less corn and soybean meal. But most of the world is
utterly dependent on grains. The desperate people we saw on the evening
news earlier this year, filling the streets in dozens of countries, were
calling for bread or rice, not cucumbers and pomegranates.

Capitalism: It doesn't go well with food

Humanity's attachment to cereals, grain legumes, and oilseeds has
acquired a much harder edge in the industrial era, but as a base for
political and economic power, the staple grains have always been
unsurpassed. Because they hold calories and nutrients in a dense package
that can be easily stored for long periods and transported, the more
fortunate members of ancient societies could accumulate surpluses. Those
surpluses are recognized by the majority of scholars as necessary to the
birth of market economies, which allowed the prosperous to exercise
control over society's have-nots. Eventually, states used control over
grains to exert political power over entire populations.

Few foods could have filled that role. Noting that before grain
agriculture came along, ancient Egyptians might have gathered a surplus
of various foods from nature, most of them highly perishable, economic
historian Robert Allen once wrote, "If all a tax collector could get
from foragers was a load of waterlilies that would wilt by next morning,
what was the point of having them?" The Pharaohs managed to exert
control over the area's population only after people started farming
wheat and barley.

The even bigger problem with grains -- which are short-lived annual
plants, grown largely in monoculture -- is that they supplanted the
diverse, perennial plant ecosystems that covered the earth before the
dawn of agriculture. We've been living with the resulting soil erosion
and water pollution ever since.

Then, when grains became fully commodified a couple of centuries ago,
things really started to go downhill. In discussing his new book Turning
Your Lawn into a Victory Garden Won't Save You: The Hidden Battle for
the World Food System, Raj Patel cited India as an example: "The social
safety nets that existed in India under feudal society had been knocked
away by the British. If people couldn't afford food, they didn't get to
eat, and if they couldn't buy food, they starved. As a result of the
imposition of markets in food, 13 million people across the world died
in the 19th century. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism.
Those are the origins of markets in food."

Indeed, if capitalism were a wine, it would be a wine that doesn't go
well with any type of food.

Most food today is produced not as an end in itself but as a by-product
of a global economy with the singular goal of turning maximum profit.
That is a dysfunctional arrangement, as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the
founder of ecological economics explained almost 40 years ago in his
book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process: "So vital is the
dependence of terrestrial life on the energy received from the sun that
the cyclic rhythm in which this energy reaches each region on the earth
has gradually built itself through natural selection into the
reproductive pattern of almost every species, vegetal or animal ... Yet
the general tenor among economists has been to deny any substantial
difference between the structures of agricultural and industrial
productive activities."

Industrial or commercial output can be increased by building more
capacity, stepping up the consumption of inputs, taking on more workers,
and pushing workers harder and for longer hours. Farming, by contrast,
is inevitably bound by the calendar -- by month-to-month variation in
the capacity of soil and sunlight to support the growth of plants. It
depends fundamentally on the productivity and the habits of non-human
biological organisms over which humans can exert control only up to a
point.

That clearly isn't the ideal pattern for efficient wealth generation, so
the past century has seen relentless efforts to mold agriculture into
the factory model as closely as possible and, where that can't be done,
to graft more easily regimented industries -- farm machinery,
fertilizers, chemicals, food processing, the restaurant industry,
packaging, advertising -- onto an agricultural rootstock. In the US, the
dollar outputs of those dependent industries are growing at two to four
times the rate of agriculture's own dollar output, putting ever-greater
demands on the soil.

With a wholesale shift toward mechanization of US agriculture, 75
percent of economic output now comes from fewer than 7 percent of farms;
furthermore, there has been a steep rise in the proportion of farms
owned by investors living in distant cities (some of them perhaps avid
urban gardeners).

Because, as Georgescu-Roegen showed, there's a fundamental difference
between the farm and the factory, the well-used term "factory farming"
represents more an aspiration than an accomplished fact. Nevertheless,
agribusiness's attempts to defy natural rhythms and achieve industrial
efficiency have been ecologically devastating. The biofuel craze,
encouraged by subsidies that continue in the new Farm Bill, compounds
the problem.

"We must cultivate our garden," and ...

To repair the broken system that supplies the bulk of the nation's diet
will require Americans to step out of the garden and into the public
arena. Beyond working to get a better Farm Bill passed five years from
now, we have to work together to break the political choke-hold that
agribusiness has on federal and state governments.

With land and wealth being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (and
with more prisoners than farmers in today's America) we have actually
reached a point at which land reform is as necessary here as it is in
any nation of Latin America or Asia. Only when we get more people back
on the land, working to feed people and not Monsanto, will the system
have a chance to work. Most home gardeners know that the root of the
problem is political, but the agricultural establishment would like
nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens
and not in political dissent.

Ironically, it's that great troublemaker Voltaire who has too often been
trotted out (and too often misquoted) as an advocate of withdrawing from
the tumult of society, into tending one's own property. Voltaire was
indeed a gardener, and he did end his most famous novel by having
Candide, after surviving so many far-flung hazards, utter those famous
words to his fellow wanderer Dr. Pangloss: "We must cultivate our
garden."

However, with the publication of Candide in 1759, Voltaire entered the
most politically active part of his life, as he "went on to a series of
confrontations with the consequences of human cruelty that, two
hundred-odd years later, remain stirring in their courage and
perseverance," in the words of Adam Gopnik.

If Voltaire could find the time for both gardening and radical political
action, then all of us can do it.
-----

You know what you need to do.
--

- Billy
"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being
is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the
moment of conception until death." - Rachel Carson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI29wVQN8Go

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072040.html

In article
,
Billy wrote:

"We must cultivate our garden."

Garden a definition wade down to the many stars.

Bill

......................

A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the
display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature.
The garden can incorporate both natural and man-made materials. The most
common form is known as a residential garden. Western gardens are almost
universally based around plants. Zoos, which display wild animals in
simulated natural habitats, were formerly called zoological
gardens.[1][2]
See traditional types of eastern gardens, such as Zen gardens, use
plants such as parsley. Xeriscape gardens use local native plants that
do not require irrigation or extensive use of other resources while
still providing the benefits of a garden environment. Gardens may
exhibit structural enhancements, sometimes called follies, including
water features such as fountains, ponds (with or without fish),
waterfalls or creeks, dry creek beds, statuary, arbors, trellises and
more.
Some gardens are for ornamental purposes only, while some gardens also
produce food crops, sometimes in separate areas, or sometimes intermixed
with the ornamental plants. Food-producing gardens are distinguished
from farms by their smaller scale, more labor-intensive methods, and
their purpose (enjoyment of a hobby rather than produce for sale).
Gardening is the activity of growing and maintaining the garden. This
work is done by an amateur or professional gardener.

************************************************** **********
*****A gardener might also work in a non-garden setting, such as a
park, a roadside embankment, or other public space.******
************************************************** **********
Landscape architecture is a related professional activity with
landscape architects tending to specialise in design for public and
corporate clients.
The term "garden" in British English refers to an enclosed area of land,
usually adjoining a building.[3] This would be referred to as a yard in
American English.

--
Garden in shade zone 5 S Jersey USA

Not all who wander are lost.
- J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)