Food Security
Everybody eats but not everybody is able to produce even a fraction of the food they use. In fact, according the 2010 U.S. census, 80 percent of the American population lives in urban environments. Worldwide that statistic is estimated to be somewhere around 50 percent. What that means is the overwhelming majority of people are reliant on industrial-scale agriculture, and supermarkets for their food supply. And it’s no secret those industries hang in a pretty tenuous balance, which means so do our lives. .
Here’s just one example: A single untimely natural disaster, or terrorist attack, could sever transportation lines between production and consumption at any time and for an indefinite duration. What would most grocery store harvesters do in a scenario like that? If history is any indication, a significant number of them would panic, and begin rioting and looting. And after that? I don't’ even want to think about that.
That’s not to mention the fact that industrial agriculture relies on petro-chemical fertilizers, GMOs, and hybrid seeds that yield produce optimized for qualities other than nutrition, like transportation durability — more unstable, unsustainable elements of our food production system. Plus food produced in that system, is really more like a food simulator. Ever wonder why grocery store tomatoes can be as crisp as apples and almost totally flavorless? How do those compare to in-season garden tomatoes? There simply is no comparison. It’s comparing apples to tomatoes. Ha!
Maybe changing the overall infrastructure of our agricultural system is a project too big and complex to bank on any time soon. Write your congressman on that issue. But that individual sense of powerlessness doesn’t mean that in the interim there is nothing to be done. Nor does it mean we necessarily need to live with the system, such as it is, right up until the day Big Brother flips the ON switch on the agribusiness revolution. I do not mean to wax alarmist here. I simply want to suggest that there is no time like the present to begin developing a few skills and experiences to help inform our thinking on emergency food, industry, and the ways we might want to see the integration of those two things change. In the same sense, some of those new skills might also make emergency situations pass a little easier. Plus there will also be some well-deserved fruits of some very worthwhile labor to enjoy in the process.
Sustainable Practices
Emergency preparedness, as a culture, is now such a broad social category that is has given rise to many faction and subcultures within it. While it’s promising to see the message becoming so widespread, and widely accepted, it is important to notice a few potential pitfalls that come with popularity. One of the most important of those pitfalls is fetishism. Bear with me on this, okay?
Many like to talk about having, the accoutrements of emergency preparedness, or at least getting them and using them for practice or some form of recreation, most often in the context of staged, emergency events. While emergencies are always marked by a triggering event, it is woefully superficial to reduce emergency preparedness to the coming and going of an event. That is not to suggest ice storms, blizzards, microbursts, tornadoes, earthquakes or brief instances of civil unrest are purely insignificant. They are not. It’s that from a certain perspective events like those can be understood as punctuating the years of our lives with counter ballast to scheduled events like holidays. If time were imagined as a wave, holidays and emergencies would map out the crests and troughs of the annual time continuum, and in a similar fashion, give us the reference points for remembering eras and average trajectories they followed toward their passing, right alongside more superficial historical elements like styles of trousers, television shows — all of which fade together into memory behind the buzz of whatever holiday or emergency comes next. The counterbalancing of continuous events keeps our collective gaze fixed along a relatively smooth narrative arc.
Even though play at it’s most basic level — across all species that engage in it — has always been some form of role playing for survival training, it’s important to insist on a distinction between prepping and recreation. Sure, certain types of recreation provide great opportunities to practice some prepping skills, it is more accurate to think of prepping as an ethos. If it has a central value, then that value must be sustainable in the face of change. Even if preppers don’t know it, that’s what they are really working toward. For some, sustainability might be too much of a political hot-button issue with certain unsavory associations, to center a lifestyle around. Outside the circus of political rhetoric, the ideal of sustainability mirrors other words like conservation, and conservatism. All good things, and I think it’s time we take that word back.
Community Spirit Replaces Community Ghosts
The the immediate aftermath of WWII, urban horticulture movements were undertaken to provide short term welfare during recession periods. It’s an idea that remains, at least on its face, a perfectly fine and noble reason to establish a community garden. That is, except for that fact that it presupposes the inevitability of recession, and job loss. Spirits were high in the post-war era, especially the spirits of nationalism, and capitalism. There may have been a lot of good things, and a lot of prosperity born from those ideas, but it was also in that spirit, that American towns and cities shifted from an emphasis on community, self-sufficiency, and sustainability, to becoming colonies of the national economy, more homogenous in the greater scope, by more alienating on the individual level. We became more alienated from our food supply and from each other, leaving our past sense of community spirit feeling pretty much like a ghost town.
Community gardens feed souls with their engaging process, and they feed bodies with their nutritious products. Some of the primary motivators behind current urban gardening projects include not just food production, and the development of survival skills, but also the rebuilding of that lost sense of community. Placing a bunch of relative strangers together on a shared plot and compelling them to work together toward a shared goal, will ultimately alter their relationship with their neighbors and the community at large. And in the end, the nurturing of community values is really just another kind of survival skill.
