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Gardening frees us of posions from corporate exploitation
ZOË WILLIAMS
williamz@mscd.edu

   Late this winter, I began scheming with my best comrades to bring us a little closer to liberation using one of the most popular hobbies in the United States. We were not planning to erase our financial debts with a rousing game of team sports on Wall Street, nor did we intend to free ourselves of socio-economic barriers by staring blankly into televisions. No, we began to plan a garden.
   When most people think of gardening, they surely do not think of revolutionary activity. I understand. Hoes, rakes, earthworms, drip irrigation and floral printed gloves did not always equate to resistance for me, either. Then, I was hit with a revelation.
   I need food to survive, yet I depend on people I do not know to plan what foods I have access to, how they are produced, how those working on the food will be treated and where in the world they are grown. So many people in the United States, myself included, could not imagine providing their own food for themselves. This forces them to be dependant upon King Soopers, Safeway, Wild Oats and other corporate giants. We cannot provide the bare means of our own survival. How is that freedom?
   The distance between us, and our body’s fuel, is not the only disturbing element of contemporary agriculture.
   Human rights, environmental destruction, massive doses of poison and creepy biotechnology are polluting the process of putting food in our mouths.
   One day, I realized the onions in my refrigerator could very well be farmed by an economic refugee from Mexico, who is undocumented and is getting paid starvation wages. My precious Fritos are most likely made from corn that is genetically modified and the fruit I eat for dessert probably required hundreds more calories of fuel to transport across national borders than it provides for my body. I was forced to recognize that the reason my veggies have no blemishes from bugs are the floods of pesticides commercial farms douse them in.
   I began looking into the fertilizers used to grow food to obese proportions.
   According to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, chemicals like arsenic, mercury and lead are prevalent in commercial fertilizers; two out of three times, at levels so high it would be illegal to dispose of them in public landfills. Let’s just say something told me that the nutritional values of my broccoli and spinach were not neutralizing the poison used to keep them pristine.
   To resolve this, my friends and I contacted Denver Urban Gardens, put down a deposit on three plots of land, accumulated tools and sat down to plan an all-organic garden. We will use composted food scraps as fertilizer, marigolds as pest repellents and rare species of plants from organic seed to ensure our garden is good for us and environmentally sustainable. Equally important, we have agreed to give our excess food to organizations that feed anyone who needs it—groups such as Food Not Bombs.
   Our current agricultural situation is a disaster waiting to happen. We have come to depend on homogeny in our produce such as yellow corn, green beans, red tomatoes and brown potatoes. Many of these plants are becoming weak and thinned out, creating the need for genetic modification to ensure that they do not become endangered.
   There are so many other plant species in existence that produce black corn, red potatoes, spotted watermelons and practically any other color of the rainbow in all your favorite veggies. For our community garden we found Seed Savers—a nonprofit organization emphasizing the importance of biodiversity—that provided us with an abundance of rare and colorful plants. Because we were not working with a profit-driven corporation, Seed Savers provided instructions on each packet to harvest seeds from our crop for next summer. I cannot wait to see what our Moon and Stars watermelons, Oaxacan Green Dent Corn and Cherokee Purple tomatoes bring us in the years to come.
   Besides the fear of imminent doom from a brutalized environment, I have realized just how important gardening is for us as individuals. I know nothing more therapeutic than hacking soil, nurturing sprouts and playing in the dirt.
   Plus, I feel closer to the people I love and adore, from my parents who taught me how to garden, my friends who will join me this summer and all of the others we hope to feed.
   We are a generation that relies on fast food, plastic-packaged meals and all-night grocery stores, and we are taking ourselves back to the basics of providing food that is good for us and our earth at a fraction of the cost of any supermarket. It also gives us the personal satisfaction of independence from corporate exploitation.
There are few freedoms better than the liberation you can taste.

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