Hunger and Food Security |
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by Dorothy McDaniel, IHM and Joan Glisky, IHM Why garden rather than buy your veggies at a supermarket? How can something so time-consuming with so small a return do much to further sustainability? For us, gardening grounds our sustainability convictions. In the garden, sustainability becomes more than a head trip. Sustainability, we believe, is about assuring basic needs for all and about solidarity in working toward that goal. It's true - gardening in the backyard is only minimally earth-turning. Still, we learn there something of what it takes to grow a few basic foods, like tomatoes, corn, peppers, carrots, cabbage, raspberries. Beauty is also a basic human need. What irreplaceable pleasure to witness the blossomings: tulips, irises, peonies, delphiniums and daylilies. Our gardening always attracts a community of sharing - the backyard mutual admiration society among neighbors, the exchange of veggie abundance, the gifts of cuttings and rootings, the offering of a freshly-made bowl of soup to someone living alone. We still have a need for grocery stores. In fact, we prefer to support the grocers and farmers markets rather than those mega-suppliers who resist unions and sacrifice food quality to agribusiness. Growing convictions about food production, nutrition, greed-generated famine, worker rights, animal rights, and love of the good earth challenged us to be more down to earth. Finally, in 1982 we moved from an apartment to a rented home. Now, almost 25 years later and in our fourth neighborhood, we have been able to renew tired soil and share in God's creative outpouring. It will be a difficult springtime when creaking bones and reduced energy prohibit this small cooperation in life processes that begins with soil and seed, and burgeons into blossom and fruit and, yes, into fresh marinara sauce and steaming cabbage soup!
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