If you've ever heard Jenks speak, perhaps at a garden conference or other event, you've heard his tirade against big box stores (think Home Depot or Lowes) trying to push a melée of garden products to hapless amateur gardeners. And even seasoned gardeners. Yard ornaments, seeds for plants like potatoes (ever grown a potato from seed?), and plants ill-suited to our climate and cultivated under heavy applications of pesticides and fertilizer. Consumer culture controls the vast majority of our lives here in the ol' USA, gardens included. Gone are the days of growing the majority of one's own food and trading seeds of favorite flowers to embellish your work yard. Much is plastic; much is fake; again, gardens included. Our food culture has followed suit and gotten to be pretty plastic as well - surely you've tasted a garden-fresh tomato and exclaimed how it trumped every store-bought tomato you'd ever tasted. So in what world do we now live where apples are sold in plastic wrap, same as crackers, and the produce section is a mere 10% of a grocery store? Our gardens have reflected this change: 95% big box store plants, chunked in the ground beside a glowing neon lawn, a clutter of cheerful yard creatures, and perhaps a tomato plant, a potted basil. Coincidence that the two, groceries and gardens, reflect each other?
No. It's not.
I call these supermarkets consumerist because they are fueled by flashy advertising, distracting packaging, and a reassuring nutritional facts panel, a sentinel box of information proclaiming the caloric content of whatever product you're inspecting. Food is reduced to a product and a calorie count. Every ounce of every food is weighed, analyzed, and - most importantly - commodified. There is a dollar amount for every ounce of product in a grocery store and the goal is to make you dispense as many dollars as possible. Food companies are very democratic as a result, giving the people exactly what they want - or seeming to. You want healthy? There is a decorative seal for that, each one roaring about how many whole grains, multi grains, fiber and protein a particular food has. You want food free of chemicals you can't pronounce? Food companies will comply, slapping on stickers informing you that your box of Cheez-Its is "natural" and accompanied by soothing tan and green colors in case there was any doubt. You want organic? Oh sure, there's a label for that as well (though if you've been keeping up with the controversy, the USDA Organic label is anything but).
My point is that food companies have opened a chasm between people and food, turning us into consumers drawn in by pretty colors and plastic rather than a friendly familiarity with a food whose origins you know.
I hate shopping. With one exception. Grocery shopping was always seductive for me. Heck, I can't see how a store with 50 different of varieties of peanut butter couldn't be a formidable tempter (I'm a peanut butter fan). Then I realized what it was about grocery stores I liked so much: the novelty and convenience of fantastical foods that I believed were healthy because - hello! - they said so. Companies can't lie.
Right?
Hm. Wrong. Foods you see in stores are made from the cheapest materials available. They are mass produced. They are results of chemical experiments with the goal of identifying the formula that hits all the right sweet spots on the consumer's tongue.
Foods you grow yourself are different. You work for those foods, you are responsible for their care and growth. You cultivate the earth, plant the seed, count the seasons, taste the dew on that tomato's skin. In no world should real food - veggies and fruits and grains and fresh meat - be sideshows to the main act of frozen lasagnas and toaster waffles. The food you want to be eating should never be blemished by a nutrition facts panel; with real food, you already know what you're eating.
Allow me to illustrate the extent of consumerism in the US by means of the difference in how one gets ingredients for cooking in Haiti versus cooking in the US. When I lived in Haiti, where I was working when I met Jenks, my fellow white Americans and I frequently were seized by deranged cravings for things like pizza - the food we'd grown on. I recommended we commence a weekly event: pizza night! We know the American routine. Get in car. Drive to Publix/Bi-Lo/Walmart/Whole Foods/Kroger/Ingles (depending on your socioeconomic status and region). Go to prepackaged aisles. Hunt for an hour for ready-to-bake dough, canned tomato sauce, pepperoni in plastic, shredded cheese packet, jarred olives, etc. Use leaves from aforementioned basil plant as well. Assemble. Bake. Done. In Haiti, and in much of the world, there are supermarkets, but they are fortresses of the rich, defended by the common man's inability to afford a single crumb of the food there. Instead, most people visit daily street markets to purchase flour from a sack resting on the highway, tomatoes caked in mud and plucked off plants just down the road (and probably bought and resold), no pepperoni, no cheese, and whatever greens were available from the market ladies' garden wares.
I started gardening when I started working at the Furman Farm. With Jenks, I've learned tenfold more. Since then, I have scorned the slanderous grocery stores, claiming to sell food that I knew was really waiting in the fields. Now, I'm obviously on a soap box for this post, but I will say that I do indeed purchase food products. But now, I buy local. I'm poor but if you make your food your priority, buying local is a small price to pay for awesome quality. My garden is the source for most of my food: squash, kale, spinach, you name it.
Put succinctly, our gardens need a revolution, and once that revolt has occurred, I think you will find yourself scorning - proudly! - the products you used to buy but now produce. Add that veggie garden, compost that organic waste, get your hands dirty and simplify your dinner plate. You're a gardener, after all, not a silly person taken in by flashy sexy labels. It's time to get your work gloves on and get dirty. Bon appetit!
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