They’re all saying it. Now Sharon’s challenging us to do it.
You all know that I am a huge believer in personal responsibility in food production. We do our best. Each year we try to do better. We learn new skills that allow us to remove ourselves just a little further from the industrial food supply.
I’ve been keeping up with Sharon’s food group. Each week there is a check-in. We do planted, harvested, preserved, stored, and prepped. It is a great way to encourage one another to keep up the good work. Now Sharon is inviting the world-at-large to participate. So come on, join the fun, and free yourself from the tyranny of the supermarket shelves.
A few quotes from some of my favorite authors/thinkers.
Carla Emery:
All spring I try to plant something every day - from late February, when the early peas and spinach and garlic can go in, on up to midsummer, when the main potato crop and the late beans and lettuce go in. Then I switch over and make it my rule to try and get something put away for the winter every single day. That lasts until the pumpkins and sunflowers and late squash and green tomatoes are in. Then comes the struggle to get the most out of the stored food - all winter long. It has to be checked regularly, and you’ll need to add to that day’s menu anything that’s on the verge of spoiling, wilting or otherwise becoming useless.
People have to choose what they are going to struggle for. Life is always a struggle, whether or not you’re struggling for anything worthwhile, so it might as well be for something worthwhile. Independence days are worth struggling for. they’re good for me, good for the country and good for growing children.
Sharon Astyk
Now there’s a Declaration of Independence for you. Or perhaps the Constitution of the United Food Sovereign People of the World. It is so desperately needed that we do declare our independence from the globalizing, totalitarian, destructive, toxic, dangerous agriculture that destroys our future and our power and pays to destroy democracy. And so, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to divorce themselves from a system that has become destructive, and thus:
We the people, in order to form a more perfect union of human and nature, establish justice and ensure food sovreignty, provide for the common nutrition, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution for the United Food Sovereign People of the World.
Wendell Berry
Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kind of farms, or where farms are, or what knowledge and skills are involved in farming. . . The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines teh connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical — in short, a victim. . . . There is, then, a politics of fod that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food isnot a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.
What can we one do?
- Participate in food production
- Prepare your own food
- Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home
- Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist
- Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production
- Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening
- Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.
Michael Pollan:
But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.
Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free.
The Balfour yard.
Here they are. Lizzy and Livy at 10 days. They are so fun to watch. They bounce all over the pasture. Frolic and play all day, except for the serious business of nursing and napping. These little bundles of energy have also discovered that they are small enough to sip through the fence for some fun in the garden, on the lumber pile by the chicken coop, and on some old hay. HM is constantly putting them back in the fence. Soon they’ll be too big to fit through the holes.
Here is Abby. Still waiting on babies, but you can see how big she is getting. Abby is 50% Shetland and 50% Finn. Her babies will be 5/8 Shetland and 3/8 Finn. If she EVER has them.
We watched 
