Kitchen Gardeners International: Food Security Starts at Home

It's taken a while, but the term "food security" is finding its way into public discourse and not a moment too soon. As garden writer Barbara Damrosch eloquently points out in a recent column in the Washington Post, kitchen gardeners have an important role to play in making our food system more secure.

Here's an excerpt:

A growing food security movement views local, community-based agriculture, quite rightly, as an important means of lifting people out of poverty, and its best efforts give them the pride of growing their own sustenance. Our towns and even our cities abound in arable land waiting to be tilled, currently disguised as "lawn." I can imagine a day when the greenswards surrounding empty industrial parks become our salvation. Ironically it was Henry Ford, the godfather of motorized transport who said, "No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between man and a plot of land."

The reasons why I grow my own food have nothing to do with a sense of fear and foreboding. I make time for it because I enjoy the work and because I love the taste of what I grow. Still, it is reassuring to know that if push came to shove, my family could be fed within the closed circle of our yard. We would plant in soil enriched with compost from wastes the garden and kitchen provide. By eating food appropriate to the season, root cellaring some crops, drying and canning others, making sure we grew enough staples such as corn, potatoes and dried beans, we could be self-sufficient. We wouldn't even have to buy seeds if we grew only open-pollinated varieties rather than hybrids, so that we could save the seed from each year's crop to plant the next.

Posted by KGI on November 17, 2005 7:06 AM to Kitchen Gardeners International
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