Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

When eating organic was totally uncool
http://www.salon.com/life/sustainable_food/index.html?story=/food/feature/2011/01/06/hmong_urban_farmers_ext2011

Before hipsters got rooftop gardens, my poor, refugee family ate that
way because we had to. And we were ashamed

To me, the organic food movement has become dizzyingly, surreally
chic. Farmers have become rock stars; the most exclusive restaurants
name-check them so much you can almost see dirt on the menu. But
before organic produce exploded into a $25 billion industry, before
city gardening became cool, I grew up in a Hmong refugee community,
living the urban organic lifestyle not because it was fashionable, but
because we were poor. I couldn't wait to leave it behind.

I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento,
Calif. -- the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores
between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for
our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and
raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in
secrecy.

Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos,
transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated
tribe of farmers into mercenaries -- a failed secret war against the
Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic
cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older
generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled
into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.

more at link