Why You Should Grow Your Own Food
- You don’t need lots of space to grow your own food.
When I talk to people about growing their own food, they often ask why they would. I mean it’s a great question. You can walk into nearly any supermarket and get whatever you want whenever you want.
The time spent growing their own food would be a waste. If you were to look at it on it’s face value, this is absolutely true, but it’s not that simple…is anything?
Convenience certainly is not the reason. I can’t give that answer to people. Here are the main reasons that I usually give. Mind you, none of them are based on scientific studies or long drawn out reports.
These answers are simple and here they are:
We are humans.
It might seem like an overly simplified answer, but it is. Look back at history and you will see that growing food is what people did. Societies and civilizations were built around fertile land and access to water.
What has become normal to us in modern times like Sitting around and staring at a computer monitor or television is not normal. These are things that we just started doing in the past 80 years or so.
How far does our food travel?
1,500 miles and that’s the average distance our food travels from farm to plate. That’s from one coast of the US to the middle of the country.
What happens is produce is harvested early on when it’s unripe and usually sprayed with chemicals to ripen them while being shipped and to give them a longer shelf life.
Most of the time, by the time the produce hits the supermarket, it’s already 3-4 weeks old.
Let’s not forget about the cost of oil to transport the produce. Overall, it’s not a very sustainable practice.
Chemicals and sprays
As mentioned earlier, the produce is sprayed in transit to either ripen the food or to preserve it.
Chemicals, toxins, synthetics and sprays are often used to treat the produce while it’s growing too. It’s used to feed the plant, keep off pests and to hurry along the growing process.
I don’t need a study to tell me that I don’t want my food to be sprayed with chemicals that I’m going to then put into my body.
These are just a few of the reasons why you should start to grow your own food. There are many others, but these are simple and to the point.
By no means do I expect everyone to start growing all of their own food and becoming self-sufficient. What is realistic is the fact that you can start to grow some of your own food. Even one potted herb will make a difference.
When are you going to start growing your own food?
Through his blog UrbanOrganicGardener.com and social media, Mike Lieberman shares his expertise on urban gardening, green living and real food. He inspires others to start growing their own food and believes that growing just one herb or vegetable will make a difference. It will help to cut back the intensive resources that go into the production and transport of food to our plates. It will also help us to re-establish our connection with food that we’ve lost over the past few years. We are humans. We grow food. Connect with Mike on his his blog, Twitter or Facebook.
