permaculture

[neshura <neshura@gmail.com>]

> I don't know if this has a place on this discussion list, but has anyone
> noticed that there is something terribly wrong going on with many of the
> young people in this country? Many of these young folks have never spent a
> night outdoors, have never had a proper nourishing fresh home-cooked organic
> meal, have never had the experience of planting or nurturing anything at
> all, or spending any time experiencing the natural world or doing any
> altruistic work as a cooperative group. I think we could make a change for
> the better in this country if young people are given all of these
> experiences before they begin the adult phase of their lives. Little wonder
> we as a people so little value the natural world - most people have had no
> experience of it beyond a film on PBS, and whose experience of dining is
> limited to denatured fast-food rubbish.
>

Apart from the "you young 'uns got it easy! In my day..." theme here,
this didn't start with my generation. My parents' generation is the
Wonder Bread generation. Which generation must a person be from, to be
able to remember when the majority of the people in -- is it the US
that you are talking about? -- grew their own food without pesticides,
cooked at home, and hiked through the mountains breathing in clean
fresh air. I grew up in the most rural of rural towns, and all the
parents still went to the store and bought food. Only the grandparents
sometimes had food gardens.

I suspect that the last time our young people took part in widespread
gardening was in the victory gardens in WWII. I'm not aware of any
other ubiquitous farming/gardening/outdoors movements
post-Depression/WWII. Women went to work in WWII and never left.

My mother-in-law did have home-grown butter beans with her Wonder
Bread; her parents were, as she called it, "dirt farmers". It wasn't
something people yearned to be, and rightfully so. It's one thing to
have the economic choice that lets people (like my parents) do their
back-to-the-land thing for a while, and another to have no choice at
all but to scrabble in the dirt for potatoes.

As an aside, going back to the land doesn't always work out the way
you expect. My parents were tomato farmers in the 70s, until a small
poodle named Alice ate their entire crop and put them out of business.

They started again on a beautiful river property called Burnshire Dam
(googleable). Not long after that, the first of a couple 100-year
floods saturated the soil with fuel that leaked from deeply buried
tanks somewhere nearby. I still get nostalgic for boiled kale with
delicate overtones of '48 diesel.

The moral of the story is, home-grown and home-cooked aren't inherent
properties that will guide you to the most healthful food.