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Yarrow | 20.02.2008 14:46 | Globalisation | Social Struggles | Workers' Movements | South Coast | World

In no way will we be able to break the hold of corporations until we all ALL growing food and performing useful trades.

I know it goes without saying, but this year you should be growing your own food. Hey, if you've got the time you should be growing food for others. If you haven't got any space, ask someone who does. You might just get what you need. Grow staples like potatoes, edible leaves, onions mushrooms and carrots. Grow carbohydrates, protein, vitamins and minerals.

You'll be surprised how easily plants grow outdoors. Trust that it can happen, mother Earth needs very little help to provide sustenance. If you are wary about certain plants, grow them indoors. Grow medicinal herbs, and learn to keep your community healthy.

There are many other things you can do. Refine clayish soil and make crockery (in many places in the UK you can use clay right out the ground. It's an untapped resource), do up unwanted clothes into things you want to wear, learn glass-blowing or woodturning. Offer your services as a repairman, or make ovens and CD racks from waste metal. Build generators from bikes and alternators, or turbines from guttering. Pick wild fruits, and make jams and chutneys. Distribute your services for free, if you can, to other helpful people (if you can).

Whatever you do will have a two-fold purpose; not only will you be enriching your local social structure, but you will be presenting an alternative culture that many people do not get to see.

Yarrow
- e-mail: yarrow@mail.com

Comments

Hide the following 10 comments

Useful?

20.02.2008 15:26

Right... cheers for that. Might be a good idea to provide some information/links to community based projects that people can get involved in rather than just a dead end. Things such as (the now defunct) permaculture plan in Rampart 2 for example

 http://www.pfaf.org/links/links.php?sec=City+Farms%2FCommunity+Gardens

 http://manchesterpermaculture.net/

 http://www.permaculture.org.uk/

DW


waste of resources

20.02.2008 16:18

everybody growing his own food. what a waste of resources ... completely unefficient. sorry but that's just onother hippie idea.

thoughts


social change

20.02.2008 17:26

think about it, the more you insulate yourself away from peoples daily struggles against capitalism the less likely we're going to truly change anything.

not lifestyle change


to Thoughts

20.02.2008 17:29

Well see where food production on massive scales has got us - ravaged, exploited land and water. Keep it small, feed your neighbour if they can't dig, share, grow, make - I agree with the first poster. Once you stop consuming crap, stop working in pointless shit jobs to feed the consumption habit, you start living for real and - yes, it's easy to fall back into labelling someone a hippy than to think for yourself - life does become better.

minty


Inefficiency!?

20.02.2008 17:44

Possibly growing your own food would lead to wastage but have you ever seen the bins outside supermarkets or wholesalers? Full of food! Now tell me which is more of a waste, growing beans in Kenya, flying them to the UK and then fucking them into landfill --OR-- growing food in your own garden, some of which you don't use but which you can compost and use in the future.

DW


No, but seriously, social change not lifestyle change

20.02.2008 21:28

I'm not saying that any of those ideas are bad in themselves, but to suggest they're enough in themselves, to say they're as important as mass movements if not more so, is just ridiculous. You can grow all the lovely vegetables you want, but it won't affect anyone else. The only way to defeat the massive corporations that are killing our planet is to get involved in MASS struggles, not to hide yourself away on your own and water your garden. Winning over other people to anti-capitalist ideas and persuading them to challenge the rule of property is what I'd consider "getting active"; cooking your own dinner doesn't quite cut it.

This is not enough


water usage in alotments ...

20.02.2008 21:41

... is massive, if you comepare the result to professional farming.

thoughts


Allotments

21.02.2008 03:24

"water usage in alotments is massive, if you compare the result to professional farming."

You mean industrial farming. Water isn't scarce in the UK. Contact with the land is healing, at least when there aren't any of the pesticides/ nerve poisons that 'professional farmers' use. Eating fresh fruit and vegetables is beneficial. Knowing how to grow food should be a basic skill imparted to infants. That is not a 'life-styler' issue. Being able to feed yourself is liberating both emotionally and socially. We've got a big country. Every unlanded person should be offered their own allotment free of charge, even if that means seizing land from the gentry.

'Professional' famring is 100% reliant on fertilser that is produced from finite, unustainable fossil fuels. Our western demand for fuel is spiralling food prices and contributing to both global warming and mass-extinction partly thanks to biofuels.

dp
- Homepage: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html


don't just fight the system. first, stop supporting it

21.02.2008 14:45

Growing your own or your community's food is extremely easy, good exercise, healthy, and community-building, provided you have access to land, however little. You may dismiss all this as a "lifestyle" issue, but how can you fight against the system if your very physical sustenance depends on it?

Thoreau said it best:

"It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too."

- Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

emigre


Mass Movements...

21.02.2008 15:24

...That buy their food from supermarkets are useless. They are supporting their own enemies, and sending money out of their community in the process. Until we can support ourselves we will forever be in thrall.

Personally, all those who don't list a name I view as a troll:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll

If you have a point to defend, feel proud of it. Or else, everyone will ignore you and you are wasting your energy defending it.

Yarrow
mail e-mail: yarrow@mail.com


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