Here's a cool video from a man who is trying to encourage the next president to plant a kitchen garden on the White House lawn, to set a good example. More power to him! In this short video, set to Woody Guthrie's classic, he documents how he turned the lawn in front of his white house into a beautiful vegetable garden. Watch:
Learn more at the Kitchen Gardeners International website. How about it, Obama and McCain?
(H/T: Mark Bittman, who is raving about John Schwenkler's terrific American Conservative essay about conservatives and food! Yay!).
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For the record, I'm not criticizing communism or socialism in a purely ideological sense. There have been some infamously poor implementations of both ideologies, but that's another subject. It's the distinction between our current poor implementation of capitalism and socialism that's of interest. And yes, Bob doesn't like fascism. You shouldn't either.
Big Agriculture is fascist because of its sheer gargantuan size, the disproportionate influence it exerts on federal government, and the huge federal subsidies it extracts from taxpayers to exist, subsidies that guarantee that small-scale, organic farms cannot compete effectively. It's fascist because it requires massive amounts of imported fossil fuel to function, and large portions of that fossil fuel require another huge federal subsidy; a military escort out of the Persian Gulf.
And corporate meat production in particular is a complete ecological disaster.
You've read Wendell Berry,this shouldn't be news. Have some champagne and chill out.
I'm just trying to tie in (other than the use of a song) what this has to do with having a garden in your yard.
Karen, me too. I figured growing a garden in your back yard would be the least controversial act possible.
I was born in 1942. So I grew up as a child in the late forties, early fifites. I don't know how he did it, but my father (with the help of my grandfather) always had a big garden. My father worked in a stressful middle-manangement position, but still we always had a big garden each year. Potatoes, tomatos, squash, peas, peppers, beets, carrots, corn, onions, we had it all! Oh, and pumpkins, too!!!
In the spring the ploughman came to turn over the soil. Two horses and a wagon, surely an anachronism today.
So, school summer vacations meant lots of weeding, not my favorite way of spending the summer! And picking blueberries at the country farm in Massachusetts of a family friend. This meant wonderful blueberry pies in the winter. My mother canned tomatoes, but to this day I despise stewed tomatoes!!!!
Today most of the land is wooded and overgrown.
Oh, and Yes, Rod, we had chickens! Fresh eggs!
How very much I wish I could go back to those days!
Sorry about the double rant today. Not that it was a rant amiss, just that they said the same things. My computer told me I had an "unblessed text", anybody know what that is? I, of course, blamed it on CFGU, (Commie Fascist Governments United) :)
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