Am I a total sucker?

“This is a revolution, not a public relations movement”

April 10, 2009 Am I a total sucker?

Sitting here, big ole atheist me on ‘good Friday’ (which always strikes me as totally disrespectful if you believe in Jesus. He really was not having a good day) drinking coffee and thinking about my folks in church right now and the symbolism that was used around Easter that I sometimes miss from Anglican services etc, and I stumbled across this story.

Michelle Obama planting a vege garden on the grounds of the White House with local primary students.

If Easter is allegedly symbolised by eggs, bunnies and baby chickens because of new and possible lives, then is it totally sucky for me to see this as a rather beautiful (and non-religious) illustration of that celebration of possible life? Here is the first black ‘First Lady’ doing this grass roots (no pun intended) community work by getting down on the ground with the Secretary of Agriculture and a whole bunch of school kids.

Mrs. Obama stressed that the garden was an easy — and inexpensive — way for families to get fruits and vegetables into their diet.

I just really love that where sometimes people talk about how poor people could/should grow veggies to save money/eat better, that here we have it happening in the White House you know? Where it’s not financially necessary, where there are no concerns about being able to afford the fruit and veggies your kids need, where there might be a way to stimulate some interest in a non preachy kind of way.

Or I could just be a total sucker?

16 comments
Posted under Uncategorized

Write a new comment 16 comments

Permalink # Deborah said

I’m rapidly becoming a Michelle Obama fan. She walks the talk.
Permalink # Linda Radfem said

Actually, maintaining a garden that will consistently produce enough edible fruit and veg for an average family, is expensive, difficult and time-consuming.
Maybe she meant to just generate some interest in eating the stuff by getting kids involved in the growing.
Or maybe the gesture is about putting all that wasted land to good use; an anti-capitalist gesture in disguise.
Permalink # Rebekka said

“maintaining a garden that will consistently produce enough edible fruit and veg for an average family, is expensive, difficult and time-consuming”

Um, not. Firstly, nothing says you have to start by trying to grow enough to cover your entire needs. Secondly, heard of permaculture? Jackie French’s book on backyard self-sufficiency is excellent, and explains how you can grow enough to be “almost self-sufficient”. It takes a few minutes a day, and a well-balanced system that doesn’t need expensive inputs like fertiliser and pesticides. If you buy the right seeds the first time, you don’t even ever need to buy them again, once you know how to save seeds.

I just don’t understand where you get the “expensive, difficult and time-consuming” idea from.
Permalink # lauredhel said

You’d be pushing it to grow much more than herbs in an urban window box or a couple of containers, so as a solution to US urban poverty/food insecurity, it’s obviously lacking. In less crowded settings, however, where people do have access to land and the time and knowledge to work it (it does take some knowledge), lots can be grown.

We haven’t really begun our vegetable gardening in earnest yet. We just plented a few small patches last year, and we grew 35 kg of tomatoes and enough leafy greens, peas, beans, corn, chillis, cauliflower, rockmelons, and pumpkins to get us through the season really only buying fruit and root vegetables. It’s not self-sufficiency – we still bought the root veg and fruit, and the garden fried once the severe heat came – but it was a few months of fresh, good food. (And there are still plenty of preserved and frozen tomatoes to eat!)

There are plenty of people who can’t realistically manage it – if you’re working 12 hour shifts and parenting, too disabled to garden, have ridiculously long commutes, simply don’t have access to ground, have poor or no housing security, don’t have food preparation facilities, and so on. Community gardening with outreach might be a _partial_ answer to some of these issues.

And, as Linda mentions, the educational/awareness aspect of gardening projects is not to be underestimated.
Permalink # Rachel said

Surely “expensive” is a relative thing? I mean, I don’t know how much gardening tools cost, but if you don’t have them, it’ll still be a one-off cost that’s above what you’d normally be spending in a week/month, as will buying the initial seeds or plants. Where do you find the money to do that? And in a similar vein, where do you fit in time to read that book? And if those few minutes each day are eating into your resting time, would you want to spend them poking around in the mud?
I don’t know about Linda, but that’s where I’d get “expensive” and “time-consuming” from!
(not having a dig at you, just pointing out that it’s not all clear-cut.)
Permalink # fuckpoliteness said

Well that’s my reservation, that there are always people telling poor people what they *should* do, how to be more *frugal*, how to give their kids *more* – I’ve been the poor person with such limited time and resources that those sorts of pressures make me want to cry. But that’s also what I like about this, it’s not a *should* statement, it’s her out there doing it, this wealthy and powerful woman, digging around in the dirt, and that with a comment that points out the benefits of a veggie garden without any heavy handed *shoulding* sets quite a lovely example…also getting kids interested, you know, not a ‘you must’ but ‘this can be satisfying’…
Permalink # Linda Radfem said

“And in a similar vein, where do you fit in time to read that book?”
Exactly, and what if you don’t read english? What if you don’t read at all??

“it’s her out there doing it, this wealthy and powerful woman, digging around in the dirt”

I also like the symbolism of it, very much. I’m not sure what the overall goal was supposed to be, I might have been reading too much into it and assuming that it’s about how to fix those pesky poor folks. I also hope it wasn’t about that, because while a communal veggie garden might have a place in a community development program, telling people they should just grown their own food, is idealistic and not at all empowering.

“Secondly, heard of permaculture?”
Um no. Heard of absolute poverty? Or having a privilege blind spot?
Permalink # Rebekka said

I wasn’t for a moment suggesting that people should be TOLD to grow their own food, I was arguing with your statement, the one statement, that growing your own food is time-consuming and expensive. Nor was I suggesting that people growing their own food is a solution to poverty.

It’s interesting that although you don’t know very much about gardening – you haven’t heard of permaculture – you’re willing to make statements about how much time and money it takes.

And Rachel, a no-dig permaculture style garden doesn’t really need tools as such. I plant things in mine using a kitchen spoon, and I’d suggest that most people in the developed world, poor or not, have some cutlery.

All this aside though, I would like to emphasise again, I was *not* suggesting growing your own food is a solution to poverty, nor was I suggesting that people living in poverty should be TOLD to grow their own food. There was one statement – it’s expensive and time-consuming – with which I disagreed.
Permalink # Meg Thornton said

Gardening *can* be time-consuming and expensive. But it doesn’t have to be. For example, yesterday I spent about half an hour planting out a lime tree (this covers digging the hole, adding water to give the poor thing a good start, backfilling and mulching both it and the existing lemon tree). The tree cost $30, the mulching compost cost $20 for a bag. Hopefully this time next year, I’ll have got at least one lime off it. Given a bag of limes when they’re in season costs about $4, the tree should have paid for itself after it’s given me about 3 dozen limes. The only care I have to give is remembering to switch on the sprinklers twice a week.

I’ll admit, I cheat. I don’t spend money on pesticides or fertilisers. I tend to use greywater (or at least the rinse water from the dishes and leftover cold tea from the teapot) to water my plants, and I’ll often forget to switch on the sprinklers, which tends to kill things very dead indeed. But the things which survive and re-grow tend to do very nicely.

I’m going to be planting out some garlic chives today, which will hopefully last at least two or three seasons. Next week, I’ll head down to the nursery and pick up a couple of packets of seeds (probably peas and carrots – it’s coming into winter, they should be able to get growing in the more shady parts of the garden) and another bag of mulching compost. Now, given the mortgage is currently in arrears, and we’re looking down the barrel of bankruptcy as well as possible eviction (should the mortgage folks be completely insane) it may well be that I’ll not get any crops from the plants I’m putting into the garden. But I get enough benefit from just going out into the sunshine for a few minutes each day and checking how things are doing to more than cover the cost – it makes me much happier, and after all, who can put a price on that?
Permalink # lauredhel said

Meg, your garden is expensive. It takes land, which costs a lot of money, which you yourself are finding out (I’m sorry about the mortgage troubles). That tree didn’t just cost you $30 for the yield of zero to one limes in the next year, it cost you the cost of the land you planted it in.

And no-dig gardens, Rebekka? You have to fill them. With lucerne hay or similar, and fertiliser like manure, and compost. These aren’t usually lying around for free in urban and suburban areas. They cost money, and typically need to be transported in private transport.

“Inexpensive” and “easy” only work if you’re looking through the limited lens of the landed and able-bodied middle-class.

I’m all for vegetable gardening. We do it ourselves. I especially think that ornamental gardens should be turned to edible gardens as much as possible, including in public and government-owned spaces, and that that is the main message I take away from the White House garden.
Permalink # Jet said

Thanks for posting this, fp. I like the symbolism, too.
Permalink # Rebekka said

“And no-dig gardens, Rebekka? You have to fill them. With lucerne hay or similar, and fertiliser like manure, and compost. These aren’t usually lying around for free in urban and suburban areas.”

Our manure and compost are free – our bunnies don’t cost us anything to feed (they eat our scraps plus scraps from the greengrocer) and produce lots of manure – plenty for our tiny courtyard – and the worm farm, made out of polystyrene boxes, didn’t cost anything to start producing compost either. I’ve never used lucerne hay – which I’ll agree is not lying around near where we live, although we could probably get used straw from the stables down the road if we asked them – our one big garden bed has had paper, bunny poo and grass clippings added to it, all free, and the soil is fabulous.

I acknowledge that not everyone has land, or can garden. I wasn’t suggesting everyone should.
Permalink # innercitygarden said

The garden at the White House was lobbied for by Kitchen Gardners International before the election. The point is to ditch some useless, wasteful lawn, and produce something valuable. That the Obamas took the idea and decided to integrate some kitchen gardening lessons for local kids, who are unlikely to have much safe outdoor space of their own, is brilliant. There are things that I would have done differently, perhaps they are things that the White House garden will develop, but it’s a heartwarming start.

There was also a good doco on the ABC recently about the food gardens in Cuba, which showed pretty well how poor people do manage to grow food in the city on the cheap. Some of it in public gardens/city farms, some in private courtyards and so on.

And yes, we’re well and truly over hearing about what poor people ‘should’ do in our house too, but we very much like hearing about the ingenious things some poor people have done to survive and thrive.
Permalink # Linda Radfem said

“I acknowledge that not everyone has land, or can garden. I wasn’t suggesting everyone should.”
Well nobody suggested that you *were* suggesting that, speaking of straw. There were a few subtle hints to check your privilege, is all, which you seem to have missed. Oh well.

Innercitygarden, thanks for throwing light on the story.

“but we very much like hearing about the ingenious things some poor people have done to survive and thrive.”

I know what you’re saying here, but really, the poor are not a novelty act that exist for our entertainment. I’m very familiar with the creative strategies that poor people come up with in order to survive. I have a hell of a lot of respect for the ingenuity of disadvantaged people, I’m proud of it in a weird personal way, but far from liking hearing about these strategies, I hate hearing about them.
Because the more ingenious and creative poor people have to be, the more knowledge they exhibit about things like picking up scrap metal and knowing how to off-load it, how to withdraw cash from an ATM at 2am on a sunday when the bank’s computers momentarily shut down, cos seriously, being poor requires a LOT of hard work and resourcefulness, the more apparent it is that our social stratafication system is inhumane and immoral and fucked up.

We shouldn’t be applauding their ingenuity, we should be actively protesting the current system which creates groups who have no choice but to be that ingenious just to survive.
Permalink # Rebekka said

Yeah, your “subtle hints” were not actually subtle. It was very obvious that you were telling me to check my privilege. Because of course only rich, white, middle class people grow food. Except that’s not actually the case. You might like to actually, perhaps, read a little bit about who actually grows food in urban areas – “They are relatively longterm city residents, moderately poor, and frequently females. They exist in all regions of the world, but face vastly different conditions and opportunities. Urban farmers are marginally better off than the absolute poor.”

Moderately poor, frequently female, all over the world. Doesn’t sound like a picture of privilege to me.

Of course it’s easy to make assumptions about a subject you actually don’t know very much about, but to then dismiss what I have to say because of my “privilege” – well, sure, I can check it, but perhaps you should check whether it’s a good idea to be making statements about subjects you actually don’t know anything about.
Permalink # kate said

Linda – I like hearing about what poor people have done to survive & thrive because until very recently I was broke, and incredibly stressed by it. It’s not a novelty act for me, it’s a ‘how to avoid sobbing in the corner’ strategy. Growing food in my tiny rented inner city garden, over-shadowed by a derelict building, meant knowing I could feed my kid fresh food, it made it easier not to cry in the supermarket, it makes it easier for me to disconect with the system that we agree is fucked. And it gives me joy, which is no small thing when you can’t afford to go out anywhere much, because I can’t deal with being angry all day.