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.

That’s right. Food. Beautiful food growing up from the ground. Broccoli heads starting to come forth and cabbage starting to wind tight together in the center— its big purple leaves dripping with last night’s rain. Food has never looked so good to me than when it looks at me with colors and shapes from my own backyard.

I went out this morning to clip some lettuce for my lunch today. I harvested arugula and frisee, red lettuce and buttercrunch and mixed this with some baby greens I pulled to thin out the romaine a bit. I piled it high and wanted so badly to invite someone over who has never had “spring mix” before in their lives to share it with me and my wife at our table. A quick aside: we eat on the table that my grandfather used to butcher on—don’t worry, it is clean. It has been very interesting, and telling, for me to watch my garden grow a spot inside my own soul, growing in the dirt with the rain and the sun and worm castings, while at the same time growing something too underneath my skin—a great big hospitality plant with broad leaves and I hope roots that are deeper still, though time will tell whether this great passion in me to share good food with those who don’t usually eat good food, is just a seed that springs up quickly only to later wilt in the hot sun, or it winds up being one of those things that somebody somewhere will want to talk about a generation from now like I did about canning with my grandmother.

My garden is just under 60 square feet and it will feed both my wife and I a fantastic salad for lunch today and more tomorrow. Imagine what a roof-top garden could do on the top of every flat roof in Columbus Ohio. Imagine the food we could grow if we tore down the fence between my backyard and yours and we planted a justice garden that was “30 X 50 feet or larger” (a quote from the US Government Campaign To Promote The Production, Sharing and Proper User of Food).

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.

I remember growing up going to my grandma’s house during the harvest and butchering season. We, all of us, gathered together as an extended family in Darke County Ohio to do the work of picking, canning, butchering, and packing. We also added a little hand-cranking of the old ice-cream maker and some fence mending, barn cleaning and hay-mount fort building, but alas, that has some “nostalgia” mixed in and lest I digress, I’ll hone it in a bit.

The men were in the butcher house. The women were in the kitchen and the garage which, for the time being, had been set up with long tables covered in plastic picnic style table cloths. Those under 5 feet tall we’re on hands and knees in the garden, while the littles kids were off in the corner with Crayola and butcher paper torn from a giant role that was placed at one end of the table. I was, apparently too young for the butcher house, with all the blood and cows hanging from their feet. I was too young to get my hands dirty in the grinding of meat or canning of green beans, and yet, a bit too old for coloring butcher-paper-placemats. And so I watched.

I remember that my grandmother, in her patient and soft presence, had a way of conducting the symphony of players during that weekend with an unhurried and yet directorial poise. Aunts and cousins in the kitchen with the sound of steam escaping pressure cookers and jars rattling in tune. Moms and Dads in the garage with thick slabs of meat and the sound of ripping white paper of the spool and the spinning of the tape-wheel as meat was wrapped, labeled and carried off to the freezer where later that afternoon, homemade fudge-cycles would be ready to sticky the hands of us all (a little more nostalgia).

I hated green beans. And we would have a cupboard full of them for the rest of the year. My Grandmother’s canning cupboard was 20 ft long and at least 6 ft high, and by the end of the day, it too would be full.

Together, we worked for food. We worked together, with the earth, with creation, and a tacitly understood presence of God in all of it.

I live in a very neo-hippie community, and I only know 1 person who knows how to can vegetables. A few years ago during a Saturday morning garage sale run in our community, I picked up a 1940’s canning cooker to satisfy my ever present penchant for things from that era. The women who sold it to me (for $2) told me of all the canning she had done over the years out of that cooker. She canned for more than 30 years. The pressure cooker caught my eye because I knew at a glance that it was from the 40’s and when I asked her what it was, her stare, a bit incredulous, told me that she was slightly surprised by my ignorance of something that had been a staple in her household.

My mother, I remember, had a pressure cooker—though I don’t remember canning vegetables. I’m sure she knew how to. But during the 1980’s, with microwave meals (of which we didn’t eat many) and a busying world all around, I’m sure it never even came to her mind to teach her son how to can vegetables. So, in just two generations, we have lost, at least in our family line (and I suspect in many others), the knowledge and appreciation of home grown canned veggies, yes, green beans even. My mother will likely read this and it will, without a doubt, bring up some nostalgia in her as well. She’ll wish she had taught her son how to can vegetables, less for the current need of know how, and more so for the desire to see the storied life of her own mother be passed on in some way through sound of hissing steam and wide-mouthed Mason Jars. It’s a good enough reason. Sometimes nostalgia isn’t so bad when what you long for from the past is something you need both now, and in the future.

Let’s bring back the Mason Jar. I’ll ask that one person I know to teach me how to can vegetables or invite the little old lady who sold me my pressure cooker to come for tea at harvest time.

I don’t think I could say it any better than this.

This is a photo of the cover page on an original document I found on the 1943 Victory Garden Campaign. In this fascinating document from 1943, the Department of Agriculture lays out the plan for the Victory Garden campaign. I hope to post bits and pieces with some discussion over the next month or so.

I came across an article/lecture from writer Sharon Astyk who says:

“Human beings are very nervous about changes in their food cultures. So all of this is going to have to come with educational support, with a community of people who can teach others how to cook and enjoy staple foods, and make that cooking enjoyable and exciting, rather than onerous. Communities will need be mobilized in the ways they were during World War I and II, where those who did not go to war worked together to provide compensatory services – and besides teaching others how to garden and cook and eat good food, we are likely to find that the social benefits are enormous. Because none of this can be done without neighbors talking to neighbors, bartering, sharing work and seed and ideas, and people organizing in ways we have not in a very long time.”

Justice Gardens is trying to do this very thing.

Victory Garden, 1943.

Justice Garden, 2009.

“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.

Sixty-Five years ago our country was short of food.  In the spring of 1943, nearly 20 million families sowed seeds and prayed for a good harvest.  They were answering a call from the US government that encouraged Americans to grow their own food during this time of crisis.  And they did.  Backyards, empty lots, and city rooftops were turned into “Victory Gardens” producing almost 10 million tons of food.   The economics of this venture resulted in the price of commercially produced fresh vegetables dropping substantially, enabling the government to save money on the food they spent feeding the troops, which bolstered the war effort, and ultimately saved lives on the front.

Today, we are on the brink of a global food crisis. The price of rice has nearly doubled in past four months. The price of a barrel of oil (which is used to transport food) has risen almost 400% in the past 7 years. If you have the time to read this, it’s likely that you won’t feel the food crisis very much.  A bit more coin in the gas tank, one less trip to Chipotle this week. No biggie. This is your privilege of being middle-class America.

But there are people who are feeling it.  People working for justice feel it. People crying out for justice feel it. People in your neighborhood and in the next neighborhood over feel it too.

Let’s plant gardens. On rooftops. In backyards. In windowsills. In schoolyards. In highway medians.  Form co-ops with your neighbors and invite people who can’t afford fresh veggies to harvest alongside of you. Send them home with an armful of organically grown fresh vegetables.  Flood food banks with fresh produce.

Work for justice in your own back yard.