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Life Arts    H3'ed 7/23/10

Why I Garden

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Children with young, fast-developing bodies face the greatest risk from the potential dangers of GM foods for the same reasons that they face risk from other hazards like pesticides and radiation: they are susceptible to allergies and have problems with milk, nutrition and antibiotic resistant diseases.

Nevertheless, genetically modified seeds are gaining ground in usage--and they are winning law suits in the courts because they promise crops that not only resist insects and have extremely high yields per acre, but they also produce crops with high levels of desirable nutrients and vitamins (http://www.plunkettresearch.com/Industries/FoodBeverageTobacco/FoodBever...).

So gardening became my defense against ingesting GMOs. But there's more. As the world's problems seem to be increasing with climate change, economic downturn and now the environmental catastrophe like the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I find myself overwhelmed by things that I can do nothing about. Growing food and caring for farm animals, however, are not only essential skills to learn for the post-industrial, post-peak-oil era, but they give me things that I can control in my life. Besides, I feel accomplishment after I milk nine goats, clean a barn, plant a quarter acre of potatoes, or weed a field and I never leave the farm without these satisfactions no matter how tired I feel or how dirty and sweaty I get. Of course, there is the pure delight of eating the food--a gratifying payoff for what it took to grow it.

Gardening is also fun and it has opened up new relationships for me with local farmers and a whole community of urban people who are focused on addressing sustainability and food justice issues as well as gardening. These relationships are engaging because they involve people who are actively thinking about and planning for our uncertain future.

Over this past year I have been developing a new relationship with food through the time I spend and the muscle I apply to milk a goat or grow a potato. This all requires care, practice, patience, responsibility--and a little luck from Nature. It is my great hope that more people have the opportunity to gain such insight in their own way because food is basic to everyone's needs and essential to the quality of life.

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Olga Bonfiglio is a Huffington Post contributor and author of Heroes of a Different Stripe: How One Town Responded to the War in Iraq. She has written for several magazines and newspapers on the subjects of food, social justice and religion. She (more...)
 
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