The Garden

There's another part to our little food experiment. While this actually began last year, we are continuing it this year. The garden began when some cousins gave us some plants for Easter--small tomatoes, herbs, squash, and peppers. I (Ryan) had been wanting to grow some plants for awhile, and I had tried once (probably three years ago) to grow some flowers in a pot, but that venture failed quite quickly. This time, the plants were already germinated, and to let them rot would have been too much of a waste. This is last year's garden, with pumpkins in the foreground.



This year, we have tomatoes, snowpeas, onions, and garlic, among other plants. Here is a picture of some of our herbs: chives at the top, and then from left to right, rosemary, thyme, cilantro, and basil.



There are so many benefits to gardening. A full list is probably impossible. One of them is, quaintly enough, being outside and talking to neighbors. This only happens, of course, because the garden is in the front yard in a patch of dirt next to the driveway that my parents never got around to landscaping.

In the beginning...

The Hammill family tries to make it a practice of having "family nights" on Sundays. We play games, read (usually the Bible), and talk about our week. A few weeks ago I (Ryan) got to lead the family night. I designed the curriculum, planned the game, and directed the activities.

A couple days prior, my parents and I watched "Food, Inc" the Oscar-nominated documentary about the food system in the United States. It covered feedlots (CAFOs), fast food, and corporate abuse, among other devastating topics. Letting the credits roll without changing my lifestyle felt uncomfortable.

Fast forward to Sunday night. I had four readings: a section from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Timothy Gardener's essay on modern meatpacking, Wendell Berry's "The Pleasures of Eating," and an excerpt from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together. While all the reading out loud got a bit tedious, Sinclair's description of rat feces being dumped into sausage, Gardener's expose of modern meatpackers' exploitative tactics, Wendell Berry's steps towards action, and Bonhoeffer's call for joyful meals were lost on no one.

After a racing game involving strawberries and sprinting down the narrow hall (with an injury), we sat down to discuss our next steps. The first was to subscribe to a CSA farm--community-supported agriculture. By paying a monthly fee, the consumer receives a box full of produce from the farm. Doing this is intended to move our dietary habits closer to a local farmer who isn't abusing workers, destroying the soil, and sending produce hundreds of miles away to rack up a carbon footprint. The second step was to develop a similar tie to a local meat supplier, in order to dissociate our consumption from the big meatpacking firms. The third step was for John, Christy, and me to begin cooking meals together in order to learn more about what we are eating and appreciate the work that goes into it.

The blog is the fourth step. Originally, it was going to be part of the meatpacking, in order to raise awareness about food justice. But it'd be much better to cover our entire food adventure with it.