I dont think you should be paying for vegetables. they should just be there
A massive amount of labor is required to grow, pick and convey produce to you, and farm workers are already grossly underpaid.
too bad there isnt a perfect solution… like growing them yourself
Have you ever tried to grow a garden, any garden? A “garden” large and varied enough to feed a family (year-round! I take it, though, given your confidence, you’ve already purchased a flash freezer and walk-in cold storage unit so you won’t need to eat canned glop all winter) while working full-time, paying for a mortgage and taxes on that amount of land, not to mention for equipment and supplies, including water and electricity? I put quotes around “garden” because that’s actually more a farm. Have you ever worked on farm? Full-time, for negative money, while also working a 2nd (and 3rd) job to pay for it in addition to all your regular, non-vegetable expenditures? When I said massive amount of labor, where did you think it would go? What did those words mean to you?
whoa there. an urban garden doesn’t need industrial level equipment or labor to produce food for a family of 4, even year round. they can handle chickens and goats and even pigs. and when projects like community gardens are put together by an entire neighborhood, with the right expertise, they can quickly generate regular supplies of food. maybe not enough to gorge everyone all the time, but definitely enough to keep folks from starving.
what are you trying to convince people of exactly? that their desires to grow their own food are pointless since they can’t do it industrially perfect? or are you just pissed about the blasé attitude young people have towards work?
Hi, I’m your farming “expertise” (apparently), as someone who’s worked on an actual farm, even if not a proper “industrial” operation like where my uncle picked vegetables as a child. I suggest you try it, not as an insinuation that you’re blasé or whatever wrt work, just so you can get a feel for farming. There are tons of seasonal employment opportunities on farms of every size.
I didn’t mention industrial agricultural equipment. A flash freezer isn’t a thresher; it’s a readily available appliance, expensive though of a value impossible to overstate if you’re trying to grow your own produce for year-round consumption and not see your standard of nutrition nosedive in winter, and it’s an example of an overlooked component of securing one’s own food supply (storage). I also didn’t mention animals. Those are entirely on you.
Good luck raising goats and pigs in your urban garden, though. If you’re in or around MA/RI I can recommend a small-scale slaughterhouse, if you aren’t planning on doing that yourself, too. My advice, though, as an expert, is that would be a terrible use of space and if you tried to raise pigs on my block I’d murk you.
Needing labor, needing to do work to maintain a food garden, or even a regular decorative garden, isn’t debatable. That’s a simple fact.
So sure, I’m pointing out that it does take work, it takes labor, to supply and run a society on any scale, and that just because you don’t see it, just because it takes place beyond your narrow field of perception, that doesn’t mean people aren’t doing it, or that it doesn’t need to be done by somebody.
Your entire existence, including your charmingly glib dismissal of “work” as some old people canard, bold of you when child laborers are making your lunch, your pants, mining hazardous substances to manufacture components of your phone and computer, etc., is made possible by exploited labor that you’re choosing to ignore, to minimize, to cast aspersions on and pretend is easy-peasy and meaningless. You aren’t a member of any proletariat. You’re who gets deposed.
“Industrial perfection” is the fact that I fucking threw away six bucks worth of romaine last night after contemplating – not briefly! – if it was worth saving six bucks to flirt with e.coli
My mom and her spouse have a food garden in the suburbs; they work on it when they feel like it, and have so much food every harvest that they have to give it away as fast as possible. They’re both over 70. They have no pertinent special skills or equipment. It was just a diddle, for them, for which they started receiving so much food – beans, squash, cabbage, ‘maters, on and on, all in one tiny little plot in the burbs
Trying to convince people that it’s difficult to grow food is shitty.
One “little plot” which is exactly how big? I’m dead fucking serious rn. Do they rotate the crops? Do they fertilize in the off seasons (if there is any), do they can, pack, or otherwise store what they can’t give away? Are they still shopping for vegetables they don’t or can’t grow? Are their municipal regulations lax enough to allow this?
Because from where I’m standing none of your snark addressed any of the above noted comments.
The fortune of some people who are, pardon the presumption, no longer working full time AND who live in suburbs is not the fortune of those living IN the middle of the city. If it was, urban gardeners wouldn’t have spent the last 20+ years trying to loosen zoning laws and squat on abandoned lots.
What’s too much food for two 70 year olds is not the same as adequate food for an active family.
I think vegetables should be just kind of laying there
I think you shouldn’t have to give a proxy for resource (money) especially when lack of that negatively impacts your health and can cause death
べんきょうしなければならない 