A Real Green Revolution
Never underestimate the power of gardening
“…I have developed a capacity for not worrying when worry will only take the pleasure out of gardening…worry is inclined to lead you into a hopeless frame of mind where you feel that you’re never going to cope.” Christopher Lloyd
There are a lot of bad ideas and dangerous processes in the ascendent in the western world right now:
Fake pandemics and the accompanying ‘pandemic industrial complex’
the climate hoax and the web of incentives and organisations that seek to embed it in politics and society
the insistence that pretty normal, middle-of-the-road people who hold traditional views that were considered mainstream even five or ten years ago are in fact ‘fascists’, and a ‘threat to democracy’
the notion that people who believe they should be able to affect their nation’s social and political trajectory through the ballot box are ‘extremists’ and a ‘threat to democracy’;
the belief that people who want to destroy the innocence of childhood by teaching young children about gender ideology and the graphic details of sex acts are upstanding and compassionate citizens, and anybody who wants to protect children from these graphic and confusing lessons are evil bigots.
Add to these…
a supranational organisation that wants to take over the health regulations of every nation on earth
banking fragility and collapse
the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies that can be tracked and programmed by your government
the eradication of cash
the eradication of privacy
the eradication of any useful definition or protection of free speech
destruction of the farming industry and any remaining prospect of nutritious, natural food
Did I miss anything? Probably. Our governing ‘elite’ are making the world look pretty bleak to us. By design. The misery and helplessness these radical changes in moral, social, and political structures engender in us, the ordinary population, are a feature not a bug.
Each of these problems can be addressed through actions, campaigning, and political engagement. The task is vast and difficult, but not insurmountable, providing enough people are able to break through their apathy, or despair, and take steps. We all know what those steps are: write to your political representative; use cash; protest, peacefully, against ULEZ, 15 minute cities, facial recognition cameras, or whatever piece of the dystopian puzzle threatens you most nearly.
It is even possible to convince yourself not to be overwhelmed. Pick one issue, and focus on it. There are other people out there, thousands perhaps tens of thousands in each country, who are working, each on their chosen issue, to try to bring a halt to this careering societal destruction.
These courageous individuals are probably not even outnumbered by the activist elite, and the members of the organisations they fund and direct. Of course the ordinary people fighting against the nightmare vision of the technocrats are generally not in positions of power, nor possessed of a fraction of the fortunes of these billionaire crazies.
The governing class has taken to some unnerving practices over recent years. Signing laws and mandates into effect without even the semblance of consultation. Refusing to engage in political debate by simply walking out of parliament. These events are chilling when they occur. The veil slips. The disregard for ordinary people and the democratic process becomes blatant. Another layer of fear is added with the realisation that these politicians no longer care if it becomes obvious that there is no longer a democratic process. They believe they are so secure in their position ruling over us that pretence is unnecessary. That perhaps is the most alarming element of this governing class high-handedness.
So we write the emails, join the groups, contribute to the fundraiser. Yet still, still, there is doubt and uncertainty. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, but there is also something fragmentary about this approach. It nags at us. This is unsatisfactory. Of course we cannot do everything ourselves. We acknowledge there are many others in the fight with us, all doing their small part that contributes to a large, and powerful, whole, but still there is something else, a unifying theory of everything that can explain and unravel what is going on. It is hovering there, just beyond our grasp and understanding.
It is gardening.
Yes. I am offering that the solution to all our problems is gardening. No, I’m not mad. I feel that gardening is an entirely rational response to chaos. I have a volume by Robin Lane Fox, Oxford don and gardener. In the past I have read the collected gardening columns of Vita Sackville-West and The Adventurous Gardener by Christopher Lloyd. I have brushed against philosophies of gardening, yet I do not offer some highfalutin philosophical reason. My explanation is almost entirely practical. I have been an inconsistent and largely unsuccessful vegetable grower in years gone by. Still, bear with me.
My train of thought goes thus: the world in which we live wants us sick and stressed, therefore, first and foremost, we must keep ourselves physically healthy and, to as great an extent as possible, mentally and emotionally calm and optimistic. Many commentators have observed that during the ‘pandemic’ we would have fared best if we had taken vitamin D supplements, and taken long walks in the fresh air. But our physical health requires so much more than this.
I have been reading a remarkable book called What Your Food Ate. The authors seem trustworthy, in the mould of the old leftie-liberals of the knit-your-own-yogurt variety, rather than the new liberal-progressives of synthetic ‘meat’, trans-humanism and brain chips. I admit I have not dug into their backgrounds or cross-referenced them with the personnel of the WEF or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as is necessary nowadays before considering anybody trustworthy! However, working on a ‘know them by their fruits’ principle they are not suggesting that 30% of all farms be compulsorily purchased in order to reduce ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions, but rather that we should improve the nutritional value of the food we eat by changing farming methods, thereby increasing human health without the need for pharmaceutical interventions. Seems sound to me.
The story of the reduced nutritional value of our food is a familiar one. A proven and successful way of doing something, growing crops and raising meat, was disrupted by individuals and groups who realised there was a profit to be made by breaking apart the tried and tested methods and inserting their products into the resultant fissures.
After World War II and the pressure to provide more food at home, as imports were disrupted, industrial agriculture took off with the ‘green revolution’. Far from ‘green’ in the sense we would know it, this intensive farming was based on chemical fertilisers to boost yields and try to overcome the problem of intensively tilled and damaged soil that was depleted of nutrients and in some areas washing or blowing away. Deprived of the support of the microorganisms that usually live in a healthy soil, crops became weak and were prone to pest damage and being over-run by weeds. In response pesticide and herbicide use increased, further adding to the profits of the agricultural industry.
Farmers were largely not to blame for the detrimental effects on environmental and human health. Agriculture has long been subject to the interference of government and industry. Farmers increasingly price-squeezed by supermarkets, and required to spend money complying with regulation, could not be expected to favour methods that might result in lower yields when the margin of profit on those yields was so small. In addition busy farmers were subjected to indoctrination by so-called agronomists and the representatives of the various seed and chemical companies (often one and the same entity, making huge profits from all aspects of the farming industry).
In addition to the farming industry the pharmaceutical industry also got in on the action. Until 2019 DuPont had an agriculture chemical and GM seed business as well as a pharmaceutical arm. Bayer, a pharmaceutical company, purchased Monsanto, an agricultural chemical company, in 2018. The pharmaceutical industry and the agricultural chemical and seed industry, can be seen as two hands washing each other. It does not hurt the pharmaceutical arm of the company that the poor nutritional value of chemically fertilised crops, covered in pesticide and herbicide, may cause chronic illnesses that are then treated by pharmaceutical companies.
Reducing excessive inflammation is a major tool and goal of modern medicine. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs…pull in global sales amounting to more than $10 billion annually. But there is another way to modulate inflammation - how we grow the crops and raise the animals that become part of the human diet. Just don’t expect pharmaceutical companies to embrace the idea.
What Your Food Ate, Montgomery and Biklé (Norton, NY: 2022), p. 306
So this is the background: a farming industry that has been manipulated by huge agricultural chemical interests to produce nutritionally depleted food for the human population. A lot of issues we are grappling with intersect here: the attempt to destroy small businesses because they pose a threat to the dominance of huge, monopolistic companies; the removal of assets, such as land, from the hands of ordinary citizens in order to make it harder for them to resist the strictures of the state; the destruction of human health and well-being so as to provide a willing market for medicines and create a demoralised population unable to stand up for itself.
The industrial interference in farming extends even to the intensive ‘nutritionally balanced’ foods that are manufactured by the huge agricultural companies from endless acres of intensively grown soy, grain, and corn, which is then turned into a fattening junk-food on which to raise animals, rather than roaming on pasture. The animals on these diets require more antibiotics, and live shorter, less healthy, and presumably less happy lives.
So, why is gardening the answer? Surely the solution lies in farming? To a very great extent that is true. The no-till, ‘regenerative’ method of farming seems like a plausible solution. In this approach soil health is prioritised. It is the soil that is being husbanded as much as the crops and animals. This results in far higher levels of micro-nutrients in crops, and a far closer to perfect balance of Omega-6 and Omega-3 in animals. All of which contribute to human health.
However such an ideal solution requires an ambitious unpicking and re-ordering of the farming sector in many nations. Not impossible. The Dutch farmers have shown us how farming practices may be changed quite radically in short times (although they have been punished, rather than rewarded for their efforts). But such large-scale plans are always subject to being hi-jacked again by what should be peripheral concerns, such as CO2 emissions. The greatest obstacle is the way in which farmers are able to bring their crops, meat, or milk to the market, that is primarily through the huge supermarket chains that use their power to push prices down to the lowest possible level, making anything but high-intensity farming feel, to many farmers, unprofitable and deeply risky. Then there are the governments and farming organisations caught up in the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, distracted by carbon sequestration schemes and other white elephants instead of being focussed on supporting farmers to nurture the best soil possible.
Regenerative farming is an expanding movement, but seems to be simultaneously becoming the target of commercial interests once again, trying to sell special microorganism mixes to be added to soil, or minimal-till equipment, and again side-tracked by the carbon issue. The focus seems to be on biodiversity (clearly not a bad thing), and carbon sequestration, rather than on the nutritional value of the food.
Clearly it is worthwhile to support regenerative farming, perhaps through finding a local farmer from whom you can buy pasture-raised meat and milk, and organic vegetables. This serves the very important purpose of enabling farmers who are attempting to break the stranglehold of the supermarkets to remain profitable and to keep doing what they are doing and providing their local communities with real food that has not been processed in a factory or produced on some endless Roundup soaked ‘farm’.
However it does not address the issue of the nutritional paucity of the food we eat. If you have a local farm shop providing a wide variety or organically raised vegetables, some of which may be heritage varieties that are often lower-yield but higher nutrition, that you can visit once or twice a week then the next part does not apply, but for many of us the main way we will be able to introduce highly nutritious food into our diet is if we grow it ourselves.
Vegetables and fruit that travel from an organic garden with healthy soil to kitchen in a matter of minutes are the most nutritious food of all. We can choose to grow as wide a range of vegetables as we like, thereby introducing variety into our diet and all the small amounts of the vast array of micronutrients our bodies need. We may have our eyes opened to what it feels like to be properly nourished and in health, after just four or five weeks eating our own crops. Of course we can supplement these with vegetables bought from the local farmer if we are able.
Then there are additional benefits to growing our own food. If we are not applying chemicals, gardening is a healthy outdoor activity. It does us mental and physical good to be outside in the fresh air listening to birds and the rustling of leaves, feeling the breeze on our faces, soaking our eyes in the known-to-be-therapeutic green of the leaves and vegetation around us. We are no-dig gardeners and so there will be no sore backs or aching limbs at the end of a day’s work. There is also anticipation and excitement, a way of looking forward to the future instead of being afraid of it, in the anticipation of seeds sprouting, and plants fruiting, and the prospect of a tasty, healthy meal.
Then there is the community benefit. If your garden is visible to neighbours, if it is a small plot in a town or city, all to the good. We don’t all need to move to a smallholding to grow our own produce. A relatively small space in the garden of a terraced house, provided it is in sunshine, can yield a harvest all summer, and others may take an interest. They may lean over the garden fence and talk about your endeavours. You might take neighbours a box of tomatoes or strawberries if you have a glut. If you have raised too many plants of a particular vegetable for your plot, you can give them to neighbours. There are not many people who will shun a tomato plant that will provide for a summer of salads. Chilli plants can be kept on a sunny windowsill and do not even need to be planted out if there is neither space or inclination, yet they are full of potent beta-carotene and pro-Vitamin A which promote a healthy respiratory tract.
That is the benefit of vegetable gardening on your own patch in your community. Then there are the benefits of gardens to the wider community. The authors of What Your Food Ate describe many studies of the practical and health benefits of gardening in certain situations.
A study of middle school students found that those who engage in gardening at school increased their preference for vegetables in general, consumed a greater variety of them, and were more likely to try unfamiliar ones.
What Your Food Ate p. 352
To any parent concerned about their child’s eating habits and nutrition that is welcome news. Now they just have to persuade their school to start a vegetable garden.
Such an endeavour would be criticised as expensive in money, time, and resources, but could be so worthwhile. Perhaps funds allocated to incredibly expensive numberplate recognition cameras to facilitate ULEZ might better benefit city-dwellers’ health by being redirected to establishing school vegetable gardens on school grounds, and nearby allotments. Students would learn how to grow healthy food that they can take home to eat with their families. The air in our cities is less polluted than at any time in history, but if air-pollution is a worry then micronutrients that improve respiratory health may mitigate any negative health impacts and gardening is so much more fun than sitting in traffic and paying for the privilege.
The book contains other examples of the health benefits of carefully raised food that are both inspiring and frustrating.
One pioneering study in Philadelphia found that home delivery of three healthy meals a day for six months reduced health care costs by almost a third for a cohort of chronically ill Medicaid patients.
…a local Pennsylvania hospital partnered with the Rodale Institute and started a five-acre organic farm on the hospital grounds to supply food for the patients.
What Your Food Ate pp. 346-7
Whatever happened to those studies? Did they become actual projects that were then continued? They should have done. The book is American and the studies were conducted in America, but what happened to Jamie Oliver’s healthy food campaign in the UK? The Soil Association has some encouraging aims: “make clear that public health is a public good and can be a purpose of future farm support. Healthy food security from nutritious crop diversity, livestock systems free from routine antibiotic reliance…”. Sounds good. This quotation is from their food security campaign, which mentions providing healthy food for schools but says little beyond that. There is no clear mention of encouraging gardening in schools, or campaigning for the government to find money for such an endeavour.
One council’s Flagship Food endeavour claims “57 schools have increased their food-growing activities with pupils”. There is no information as to what this means. It could be a pot of cress growing on a windowsill. There are 116 primary and secondary schools in that council’s area. Three edible playgrounds were built across four schools, that’s 3.5% of all the schools. It doesn’t sound like a gardening revolution.
Little progress seems to have been made on increasing the healthiness of hospital food since 2020. It hardly needs saying that an NHS in crisis is not an organisation in a position to devote energy to scoping out sites for organic gardens, but if the government could just get a grip on the NHS it could have time, money, and resources for an endeavour that probably in five years would begin to pay back money spent in shorter hospital stays.
The fact is, observing that healthy food results in healthy people is not new. Even the focus on regenerative farming, and organic gardening, as a means to produce more nutritious food, and healthier people, is nothing novel. What seems to be the problem is getting people in positions of power to understand this is important and act upon that understanding in a meaningful way. A Prime Minister can make himself look good by pledging a couple of hundred million pounds to a celebrity chef’s school meal campaign, but that money disappears fast and people have to be determined, visionary, and hold that politician to account if they don’t want a worthwhile idea to fizzle out in a year or two with no lasting impact.
A healthier school meals campaign, a school gardening campaign, a healthy hospital meals campaign are just isolated events that provide a few gratifying headlines to a politician or two but are too weak and unsupported to achieve anything of large or lasting significance.
That is where individual gardeners can come into this. Firstly if we spend time in our healing gardens and eat nutritious food we will feel energised and empowered for the battle ahead.
Secondly we can encourage people around us to venture into the world of vegetable gardening. If they enjoy it they will in their turn encourage others. A movement, a gentle, restorative, non-strident movement will begin to gather momentum.
There have always been two, three or more keen gardeners in a community here or there who have looked at a local school and thought ‘those kids could really do with a vegetable garden’ and have set about making it happen. There may even be a few hundred schools in the UK with thriving organic vegetable gardens that provide the children with a regular healthy harvest, but I doubt it.
I feel confident in stating there is not one hospital in the UK with a vegetable garden that supplies the hospital kitchen. An internet search revealed one hospital with a vegetable garden that closed in 2014 (the hospital and presumably the garden too). Not encouraging. A sustainable health care centre that offers a green spaces project for the NHS has several references to “sustainability” and “delivering a net zero NHS” yet there seems to be little current work on actual vegetable gardens. The focus is on trees, a fern garden, bee corridors, all worthy but not really getting down to the nuts-and-bolts of providing micronutrient rich vegetables to the hospital kitchens. The organisation does acknowledge the great opportunity the 48 promised new hospitals offers in terms of incorporating ‘green space’ into the hospital campus. One hospital is said to be the most ambitious and will incorporate a ‘sky farm’ for growing fruits and vegetables but “[n]o planning application has yet been submitted”. Oh.
What is the problem? These projects for school vegetable gardens, hospital vegetable gardens, community gardens, are all extremely worthwhile and would benefit an enormous amount of people so why do they struggle to get off the ground and why are there so few of them? Perhaps because at the moment they are mostly window-dressing for governments, politicians, and organisations that want to seem as if they are doing something worthwhile for communities, the citizens of their countries, but whose real interests lie in other directions. We can guess the directions.
A grassroots movement to bring growing organic vegetables to all areas of a community: schools, hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centres, mental health facilities, and so on, would be far more successful and enduring. Such a movement would not be frivolous, something to look down on, trivial. That movement would bring physical health and mental well-being to the community. It could teach people that they didn’t need to give their money and sacrifice their health to the huge processed food companies. It would transform the way in which people understand healthy food and the value of the health of their own bodies. It would reduce reliance on medical care and pharmaceutical medicines as people lived more healthily had fewer coughs and colds, and fewer chronic inflammatory diseases such as arthritis.
In short a seemingly humble past-time, often seen as boring, old-fashioned, and ‘square’ could have a profound effect on our societies. It could be, not just a ‘green’ revolution, but an actual revolution.
“…I do believe that, numerous as the world’s band of gardeners is, there should be more of us. Not just routine but mad keen gardeners” Christopher Lloyd
One of the best things I've read for a long time! A grass roots movement to develop vegetable growing projects in schools and hospitals is a brilliant idea and the beneficial impacts would be amazing...