Justice Gardens

I just got back from vacation. I thought I would have a better internet connection to do some writing here at Justice Gardens…I did do a lot of thinking though. I came to the conclusion that while I’m away on vacation, my garden is growing and producing food even while I’m doing nothing. We came home to weeds nearly choking out our 7 tomato plants, but we also came home to the second wave of broccoli flourets that the girls and I nibbled on while we weeded the vines and grass and rescued the spring mix. I told Jenny to come by (since she is my neighbor) and harvest some frisee for her salads while we were gone. And while Jenny isn’t part of a neglected group of people and she eats lots of fruits and veggies as often as she can, her husband started back at school and I’m sure a little pickin’ from my garden was worth the two-block walk—veggies in the bellies of her little ones without breaking open the piggy-bank or using money from the lemonade stand. We all can use a little garden picking from time to time—harvesting where we didn’t sow. Less, perhaps, for reasons of economy and grocery bills and more so because picking food from your neighbors garden while they’re on vacation seems like community…food for one’s soul is worth as much as any gastronome. The economy does matter. And there really is a food crisis coming to your own neighborhood in the next few years…not just around the globe where we hear of rice shortages and such, but a food shortage in our own back yard, not least for reasons noted on the front page of today’s NYT’s. This all matters, but with gardens growing food while we go about our day—at work, on vacation—we can mitigate the impact of the american food crisis while at the same time tilling the soil of each other’s lives that only a connection to the soil and souls of others can bring.

The more I look at what is going on in the food and justice arena of this country, the more I’m struck by the reality that people have a deep hunger for ecological solutions to the problems, not just of humanity, but the problems and difficulties and injustice in the lives of individual humans. In her book, God Talk in America,Phyllis Tickle notes that “…so intense has been our new, postmodern awareness of the interface between human spirituality and human space/context that it has been almost poetic in its power and its subtlety.” What she is saying, rather poetically herself, is that space matters. Place, matters…and it can have a subtle effect on a soul so deep, that when the context or space for a culture changes so drastically over a few generations, the implications, however subtle in their onset, are vast in their ramifications. It seems there are some other books that deal with this as well. This is topic for another post altogether —though it might better fit in another context more so than it does here. Nonetheless, there is a deep longing for a connection to the healing and washing over that the presence of good old fashion beauty can bring—the beauty of creation and the simple beauty of watching a seed become something that, with a little patience and understanding, can be sustenance, not just for the physical/material parts of our bodies, but for that thing we have often referred to as “soul” or “spirit.”

Jenny sent me a fantastic video that is saying this very thing with everything it is and does and has been doing, it seems, for a long time: The Homeless Garden Project. It seems to share a common vision and ethos as our vision for Justice Gardens.

“We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many resons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.”—Michael Pollin IN DEFENSE OF FOOD

When part of a community has food and enjoys eating, and another part of the (same) community lacks food and feels anxious about eating, something along the way has been lost in the business of the world, the diversification of income, and the separation of creation, from those that are to enjoy it.

Try this experiment.

Go into a grocery store chain. Walk the isles. The middle ones with all the boxes and cans and packages of “food” that are single-size servings and “1-minute” menu’s. Try to notice how people touch the boxes, the cans. How do they move through the isle? What expression is on their face? How much time do they spend looking at “food?” What will they do with it? They’re trying to figure it out.

Next, go to a trendy place for the upper-middle-class like Whole Foods. Stand in the large produce section. Take in the colors. Watch people. Do they linger? What are they touching? Boxes? Cans? Food. They don’t throw it into a cart. They pick it. Place into a bag. They are gentle. What will they do with it? They will eat it. Oftentimes whole.

Food is food, and boxes and cans are…well…boxes and cans…presumably boxes and cans of “food.”

Billions of dollars of scientific inquiry tell us that the nutritious content of food in a can or a box is inferior to the nutritious content of whole food like apples and beans and beets. The American food crisis is that the consumption of real food, without being coated in a box or packaged in plastic or frozen for toaster oven service—-is reserved for the trendy deeper pockets of American consumers. The injustice of the American food crisis is that it winds up being an injustice for communities, for families, and for creation. The handling gently of food can only be enjoyed by the upper crust. The vibrant colors of fresh veggies and the smell of fresh herbs can be enjoyed only by those who know what they would miss out on if they skipped the produce section. Food is more than eating. Plant a garden and give away more than just food.