Category Archives: environment

Grow and Cook Your Own Food

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grow food

(Continued from Simplicity of Wellness: Love For the Earth and its Creatures )

2. Grow things and cook your own food.

“There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.” ~Mirabel Osler

An unknown author once said that “you can bury a lot of troubles in the dirt.” I can personally testify to the truth of that.  Gardening was one of the first things I did during my recovery. As soon as I had enough strength in my legs so that I could stay on them for any length of time, I would go outside into my yard and pick a little here and cut a little there.  I would sometimes visit my old, neglected garden spot to find the strawberries and mint and chives that were still growing there.  Those were times which inspired starred passages in my gratitude journal.  It makes me think of what Nathaniel Hawthorne said about his special piece of ground:

I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

There aren’t many pursuits that are as health-giving as gardening.  The garden obliges us to spend time outside, soaking up the sun, exercising our muscles, and breathing fresh, herb scented air.  It gives a sense of purpose.  It ties us to the earth, makes us responsible for the health and beauty of our little patch.  And if we grow food, it provides us with nourishment and taste that cannot be rivaled by any of the insipid fare found at the supermarket.

Growing our own food may seem revolutionary now, but not long ago it was mundane.  The garden and farm were where all the food was, not the supermarket.

“The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.”
– Joel Salatin

Gardening is an alternative to our current food system, which is broken.  Our current system is hurtful to every living thing within its sphere of influence.  Agricultural chemicals, mono-cropping, genetic engineering, and confined animal feeding operations (or more accurately, animal concentration camps), are all examples of farming practices which do profound damage to farm animals, ecosystems, and to humans.

And farming is only the beginning of the problem.  Our system of food distribution is completely unsustainable principally because it relies on a finite resource, petroleum.  The sometimes thousands of miles that typical supermarket foods have traveled represents vast amounts of wasted fuel as well as significant levels of increased air pollution.

“The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.” – Wendell Berry 

For many of the same reasons that gardening is good for us, cooking our own food is too.  When we start with fresh, simple, natural ingredients and cook our own meals with them, we make sure that what we put in our bodies is as safe and as pure as we can make it.  This does not have to be complicated.  Even a quick, freshly prepared meal such as a plate of scrambled eggs with some orange slices on the side will be a thousand times better for us than a fast food sandwich or a bowl of Captain Crunch.

Cooking, like gardening, is also better for the health of the planet.  The process of producing fast food and processed foods creates an enormous amount of waste: food is wasted, paper is wasted, and loads of plastic and paper are dumped into landfills.

When we choose to grow food and cook it ourselves, we are choosing to show respect for ourselves and for the planet that was so lovingly prepared for us.  Although I understand this, I also understand how difficult it can be to accomplish these things.  I haven’t had a decent garden in three years because of illness.  Cooking can be a challenge if it’s something we’ve never done or if our health is bad or our schedule is busy.   But even baby steps matter.  A simple home cooked meal, a  flower bed, or a container full of herbs are significant.  Why?  First, because the simple act of producing that small amount of beauty or food makes us feel better.  And second, because baby steps sometimes lead to bigger steps.

Gardening is Good For You

Photo by SteveR

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Simplicity of Wellness: Love For the Earth and It’s Creatures

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Mountains

“These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain treasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own and make friends with matter…the mind loves it’s old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity!”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson from his essay, “Nature”

Frankly, this is not something I’ve ever struggled with. I love nature. And I know I’m not alone. What so many of us do struggle with, however, is the fact that our home and our bodies are being polluted. This is where the simplicity of wellness becomes…a little complicated. Because ideally, if everyone loved everyone and everything, the only reason left for the kind of mess that we’re in now would be simple blunders. And blunders that harm the earth and it’s creatures would be remedied quickly by people who care.

But because love is not what makes the economic world go round we have people at the heads of monolithic corporations making potentially harmful, even devastating, decisions based on the principle of unlimited growth, which is another way of saying greed (or cancer). For any action that does not make human sense, all we need do is “follow the money.”

“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
― Wendell Berry

It can be depressingly difficult to try to protect ourselves from the pollution spawned by the corruption of our economic system. Even so, love for the natural world can help us to heal because there are choices that we can make, truly doable things, that not only protect our health, but also happen to protect the health of the planet. I’m sure that many readers are already doing some or all of them.

So here are what I consider to be the top five actions we can take that protect both our health and the planet:

1. Spend time enjoying the outdoors.

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays

One day I was struggling with the pain and tension that so often plagues me, and I decided to drive to the hills. In my special place overlooking the entire valley where I live, I was finally able to exhale. Breathing the clean, sage scented air, feeling the wind on my skin, seeing the way the light played on the clouds and the land, I finally felt free. My tension drained away as if someone had pulled a plug.

We need experiences like that on a regular basis. It’s what keeps us sane, calm, grounded.

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life”

– John Muir

Wonderful experiences in nature engender affection for wild places, wild things. This, in turn impels us to think about our actions. Do they show respect for this perfection, this beauty? When we love a place, we do not want it destroyed or defaced. We feel protective, sometimes fiercely so. It becomes clear that what is so good and so necessary for our own minds and bodies is also necessary for the earth.

(Each action in the list of five will be posted separately.  Coming up next: 2. Grow and Cook Your Own Food)

Photo by Moyan Brenn

 

 

Simplicity of Wellness

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(Simplicity of Wellness will be a series of short posts that will eventually become one long article with its own page. This is my first installment. I hope you enjoy.)

dew on grass

“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it.”

– Henry David Thoreau

I have learned the key to health the hard way.  I’ve tried repeatedly, and mostly unsuccessfully to “get healthy” by all manner of contrivance. I gobbled the vitamins, herbs,and “nutriceuticals”.  I bopped along to the exercise tapes.  I bought the air purifiers, tested my water, tossed the Teflon and plastic, and bought organic. I even felt self-righteous about my efforts because I was, as I thought, doing it naturally.  But I was trying to build a house without a foundation, and for that reason I was bound to fail.

What is health?  Websters dictionary defines it as “the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit”.  The opposite of health, then, is the condition of being unsound in body, mind or spirit.  As a society we intuitively understand this, as is evidenced by our metaphors for poor health.  We “fly to pieces”, “come apart at the seams”, and “come unglued” when we are not well.  Poor health is a state of disconnection, disintegration.

What is the antidote?  In a word, love.  We cannot be healthy in the absence of love.  It will not matter how many pills we swallow, how many organic carrots we munch, or what kind of water filtration system we buy if we have not learned love.  God is love, which means that love created the universe.  It is the true foundation of everything, including us.

What does this mean in practical terms?  It means that a loving connection with the creator, with ourselves, and with other creatures is where all healing journeys begin and end.  We must begin at the beginning.

Photo by Michael Jastremski

Small Planets

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NASA_Earth_America_2010

“It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion, or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water, or impoverished soil.” – Wendell Berry

I was a hunter with her spear.  There in the distance was a the deer, ambulatory grace, caution personified.  She would become part of me, and part of my family.  All at once, I threw the spear true, and brought down my quarry.  All of her would be used, not one bit wasted, and I was thankful for her.

This is how I would play as a child.  What fascination the idea of living in a tribal society, migrating with my food supply, entirely aware of my dependence on the natural world and entirely in sync with its rhythms, held for me as a child, and still does.

Our culture is sick, and one of the most troubling symptoms of that sickness is its alienation from the natural world.  Our existence has become almost exclusively artificial. It is screened off from the sources of our health and life.  And the more artificial our existence becomes, the sicker we become.  This is proof that we are not independent of the Earth, but completely dependent upon it not just for the raw materials which we use, but for its energies, its rhythms, its sights and sounds and smells.  In short, we need to live close to earth, and we need earth intact, unpolluted.

Each human is a microcosm of our environment.  We are like small planets, reflecting almost exactly the condition of the larger planet which we inhabit.  Dump toxic waste in our waterways, and the tiny oceans of our bodies will contain that waste.  Belch filth into our air, and the filth will sully our bloodstream.  Spray neurotoxins on our food, and those toxins will pollute our cells.

I have a very deep, visceral grief connected with these things.  The home that was very carefully crafted in all its detail to be a self-sustaining, life-giving system, has itself become so compromised by the activities of humans that there is actually doubt not only about the health of the air we breath, the water we drink, and the food we eat, but about its continued ability to sustain life at all.  The very things that should give life and health, sometimes do the opposite.  Going outside for a breath of fresh air often instead results in a lungful of diesel fumes and a head that aches.  In addition to hydrating the body, drinking a cold glass of water may also dose us with chlorine, fluoride, rat poison, and prescription medication residues.  Eating a deliciously crisp and sweet apple not only provides nourishment, but also a hit of malathion.

It’s very sad that even if a person wanted to reject this culture which is so alienated from its life sources and find a place in the wilderness to set up camp, that person would still not be any safer than the deer who end up with tumors from chemical drift, the starfish that are dying of a mysterious disease all along the Pacific Coast, or the ring seals and walruses that are dying in Alaska from something that looks suspiciously like radiation poisoning.   Humans have done a pretty good job of spreading their malignant influence all over the earth.

But humans don’t have to be a plague.  God made us guardians, and I have confidence that in the future, that is exactly what we will be.

 

Photo By NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckl [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons