To every season

When I was about 6 years old I wanted to grow a flower garden from seeds and I went to the garden shop to buy some with my mother. My mother explained to me that many of the seeds would only last a season and would have to be purchased again the following year. She told me that this was not a natural thing, but rather something that had been purposefully bred into the plants so that a small number of companies could profit from their sale and that now thousands of varieties of flowers no longer existed.

I was shocked. I couldn't believe that such a terrible crime had been committed and that nothing was being done about it. I thought that people should be marching in the street at such a deliberate destruction of flowers.

Well I didn't know the half of it.


Of course this same kind of cynical breeding has been going on with all of our plants - most particularly with our grains, fruits and vegetables - and now it is being done with GM technology. The most insidious example of this is, of course, the Terminator Gene, but essentially the plants that we rely on for food have been deliberately bred for easy transport, appearance and, above all, profit. In the process millions of different varieties of plants that were perfectly adapted to their specific locations and that actually tasted good and were full of nutrients have become extinct and replaced with a monoculture of plants that are poorly adapted to their local environments and require constant inputs of chemicals and pesticides to survive. When I stop and think about it carefully it makes my blood boil.

I have been aware of this issue for a while now. I wrote my Masters thesis on the right to food and water - with a particular focus on the impact of Intellectual Property and GM technology on global food sovereignty - but I haven't been actively thinking about the issue over the past year.

That was until I started reading Barbara Kingsolver's 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle'. The book is a documentation of a year in which Barbara and her family decide to live almost exclusively on food that they have grown (or raised) themselves or purchased locally from farmers that they know. Although the family decide to include meat and animal products in their diet and I cannot really relate to that decision, the book makes inspiring reading.

I am currently walking around with a burning desire to grow my own fruits and vegetables and to gain a far deeper understanding of the foods that grow well in my locality and the seasons that determine when they are at their peak, etc.

Our humble little garden is starting to bare some fruits now that Spring is so thoroughly upon us. Our little strawberry bushes are fruiting and yesterday our first tomatoes of the season arrived. We also have tons of herbs (thanks to my mother and her partner's previous gardening efforts) and some sad looking eggplant plants that may or may not come good in the next couple of months.



To be fair, we only moved in in July and small babies are not very easy to garden with, but I wish that our garden was overflowing with food.

Instead, I think that I will embark on a little self-education about fruits and vegetables and try to focus even more on eating seasonally and locally (and organically). And maybe some day in the future we will be lucky enough to be able to step partially off the grid.

How fun would that be?