Late in May, volunteers across Milwaukee County rolled up their sleeves, grabbed shovels and dug in the dirt.
The goal of The Great Milwaukee Victory Garden Blitz is a simple one: creating as many backyard, front yard, rooftop and patio gardens as possible. The aim of the Victory Garden Initiative is equally simple: to help facilitate people growing their own food.
The consequences of that simple act, however, are widespread, complex and profound.
Control over the food we eat is an elusive concept these days. While you can drive through the countryside and see acre after acre planted with soybeans and corn and fields dotted with cows, the fact is that food is a global enterprise and that many of us consume a diet that is, intentionally or not, international.
A single fast-food burger might contain ingredients from several continents; a bag of chips or can of beans the same.
We’re becoming aware of this; and more and more people are paying attention to the food miles involved in what they eat.
But the geography of food production is just one way we have lost control over much of what we eat.
Large corporations control much of the food supply. Megastores promising low prices have turned to overseas suppliers for the natural and organic ingredients more people are seeking. And on the farm, a misplaced trust in the efficiency of scale has pushed out small family farmers and blighted the interdependent economies of rural America. We don’t really have control over the food we eat.
On small farms across the world, farmers face numerous challenges beyond the weather as they try to subsist. Monopolies threaten the international seed market and global giants like Monsanto vigorously push GMO seeds - seeds for which they hold the patents.
Vía Campesina, an international farmers confederation, has called Monsanto an enemy of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty because of its efforts to control the supply of seeds that farmers can plant. But there are other enemies, a tag team of giant corporations fighting for ever more control over our farmland.
Building a simple four-foot by eight-foot raised vegetable garden in a backyard must seem like such a small act – it’s not as though a family’s entire food needs can be met by a few baskets of produce, after all.
But it is a start. It is a five-pound bag of carrots that doesn’t need to be flown from South America; it is a supply of sweet, tart tomatoes left to vine ripen in the warmth of the sun.
And there is more we can do. We can spend our money locally, shopping at independent businesses and stores such as Outpost which are committed to supporting local farmers.
Bite by bite, we can learn to better sustain ourselves and our neighborhoods.
Dig in.
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