Hardly any food that is offered within all our capital cities is grown locally. We now have three generations of city dwellers that are totally unable to grow their own food. Twenty-five years ago the poor or the unemployed would simply buy some seeds and support themselves. Today the poor and destitute beg in the streets seemingly powerless to sow a few vegies. Most of our children believe that food is confined to the shelves of a supermarket rather than the soil beyond the family back door. If you walk around a botanic garden you’ll be forgiven for presuming all food comes in plastic bags. You will not find an apple, pear, lemon, fig, strawberry or raspberry growing there. When Stephanie Alexander started her schools program Diggers was asked to provide the lectures on growing food for the schools because presumably no-one at Melbourne’s foremost horticultural institution, Burnley College, knew how to grow food!
“Humans are the only animal that are divorced from its food supply and still survives” which explains why most Australians have yet to embrace the disasterous implications of climate change on our future food supply.
It is now a well known fact that 30% of our CO2 emissions are caused by our switch over the last 50 years from growing our own food to buying it from the supermarkets. Out of season listings of winter strawberries from Perth or even summer tomatoes shipped all the way from Bowen to Melbourne are an obvious explanation of food miles. But buying glasshouse tomatoes that use twenty times as much energy to produce as the food value they provide is the ultimate absurdity.
Is it any wonder that our most popular garden makeover TV programs exclude anything edible too? In fact there is hardly a landscaper in the country that designs gardens for clients that even includes such brilliantly ornamental edibles such as figs, persimmons or pears! None of our councils plant edibles along our freeways, amongst our carparks or shopping centres. When Jamie Durie and others do their TV programs all we see is paving and flax – no shade, no food and as sustainable as a coal fired power station.
To add insult to injury, about 30 years ago I rang the editor of the then best selling garden magazine about a campaign in spring, and believe it or not he wanted to know when that was!
Cynics and climate change deniers will say that growing food at home is pre-historic and inefficient. But we know better!
It takes just ten square metres of space to grow all the vegies for a year for one person in about the same space your car occupies. If you added a citrus or avocado tree and an apple that’s another thirty square metres.
The average modern block size is 500 square metres so only 10% of the space is used for growing fruit and vegies. The roof area of the average house can collect enough water for growing all the fruit and vegetables for three people for a full year. By recycling our scraps, lawn clippings and prunings we can also provide the organic matter and nutrients for all that food so we don’t need to buy compost or fertilizers.
In Havanna, Cuba, 60% of the food they eat is grown within the city of which 80% is organically grown. Negative people are full of despair – if we want to save us from us, isn’t it more like saving us from them?
Spread the word about how important “growing your own” is to solving climate change. We can’t wait for the ecologically apathetic to get the picture.