AlterNet: Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden Won't Save You -- Fighting the Corporations Will

[marmar]

Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden Won't Save You -- Fighting the Corporations Will

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted June 23, 2008.

The corporate agriculture industry would like nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political dissent.



I didn't mean to lead anyone down the garden path. Adding my small voice to those urging Americans to replace their lawns with food plants wasn't, in itself, a bad idea. But now that food shortages and high costs are in the headlines, too many people are getting the idea that the solution to America's and the world's food problems is for all of us in cities and suburbia to grow our own. It's not.

Don't get me wrong: Growing food just outside your front or back door is an extraordinarily good idea, and if it's done without soil erosion or toxic chemicals, I can think of no downside. Edible landscaping can look good, and it saves money on groceries; it's a direct provocation to the toxic lawn culture; gardening is quieter and less polluting than running a power mower or other contraption; the harvest provides a substitute for industrially grown produce raised and picked by underpaid, oversprayed workers; and tending a garden takes a lot of time, time that might otherwise be spent in a supermarket or shopping mall.

So it was in 2005 that our family volunteered our front lawn to be converted into the first in a now-expanding chain of "Edible Estates," the brainchild of Los Angeles architect/artist Fritz Haeg. We already had a backyard garden, but growing food in the front yard (which, as Haeg himself points out, is a reincarnation of a very old idea) has been a wholly different, equally positive experience.

Our perennials and annuals are thriving, we've gotten a lot of publicity, and I've been talking about the project for almost three years. Yet neither of our gardens, front or back, can stand up to the looming agricultural crisis. Good food's most well-read advocate, Michael Pollan, has written that growing a garden is worth doing even though it can make only a tiny contribution to curbing carbon-dioxide emissions. He might have added that growing food is worth it even if it does very little to revive the nation's food system.

World cropland: the pie is mostly crust

The edible-landscaping trend is catching on across the country, and with food prices rising, it has taking sadly predictable turns. A Boulder, Colo. entrepreneur, for example, has tilled up his and several of his neighbors' yards and started an erosion-prone, for-profit vegetable-farming operation. It will supplement his income, but it won't make a nick in the food crisis.

That's because the mainstays of home gardening -- vegetables and fruits -- are not the foundation of the human diet or of world agriculture. Each of those two food types occupies only about 4 percent of global agricultural land (and a smaller percentage in this country), compared with 75 percent of world cropland devoted to grains and oilseeds. Their respective portions of the human diet are similar. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/86943/

[zanne]

1. How about political dissent AND gardening?

I manage to do both. The thing I like best about the idea of growing vegetables in the front yard is the "oddity" of it. People just don't "do" that so we need a "movement" or a "trend" to give ouselves permission to do it. My advice to everyone is: Plant corn in your front lawn and volunteer for Obama!

[ejpoeta]

2. We have tried a small patch of a garden

to see how we do at it. I do NOT have a green thumb. But if we can do it, I hope to expand. The problem is that our side yard turns into Lake Emy in the spring, which hampers our putting a garden over there. So I told my husband of an idea I had on my way home from the grocery store last night.... We have tires that are no good lying around here and there. I proposed that we stack them two to three high and fill them with dirt and grow varying vegetables in them. That would keep the spot above the 2ft of water that comes in the spring, and would make use of our old tires. That may not work for everything, but would be good for certain vegetables. I would love to do corn too, but I think that would take more planning, like a raised box or something. Bob even said we could see if any of our family would like to participate and could benefit also. We'll see how that comes out.

[zanne]

3. Wow. Gardening and recycling at the same time!

That's a great idea. I never thought of using tires. (I think that alot of plants grow better in containers, anyway).