Power Heels

"I have a subversive plot. It is so subversive, in fact, that it has the potential to radically alter the balance of power, not only in our own country, but in our world."

Soft spoken, diminutive and amiable evil genius, Roger Doiron beams as he says these words, to titters from the audience at his TedTalk "My Subversive (Garden) Plot".. He raises his eyebrows with a mild expression of amusement and flashes a picture of Dr. Evil. "I know I sound a little like [him] right now but trust me, we have very little in common. His plots are all about destruction. Mine...is about creation." And the picture changes to a patch of grass; and then the same patch of grass covered in huge heads of cabbage, corn stalks, bean vines, and squashes. "I'd like to suggest that gardening IS a subversive activity."

"Mild mannered? I got the president to plow up the White House lawn and plant a garden, bitches. Judge me not for my short sleeved button down. Imma subvert the hell out of this piece."

Food, he urges, is energy, and in that energy is a form of power. When we encourage people to grow their own food, they begin to take that power for themselves.

Well, sure. On a basic level, I now have the power to go out to the yard and get my own lettuce. In a few months I'll have blueberries and I'll have the power to go eat those too, and I'll have the power not to go to the grocery store for those things. I suppose I make my own bread, too, so I have the power not to buy that at the grocery store. For that matter, I have the power not to pay the prices Target and Vons charge me for those items. I can return the power to my pocketbook.

When I grow my own food take infinitely more care with how it's prepared. Does the meal highlight those tomatoes that took me months to grow and I've been checking every day to see if they're ripe enough? We finally had enough green beans for the first meal of the summer--I'm not going to risk drowning them in butter or boiling them to a mush, but make sure they're perfectly, deliciously prepared. I have the power to eat well.

The blueberries and tomatoes I grow in my garden are much more packed with flavor than anything I can buy in the grocery store, too. I didn't realize blueberries could have flavors as wildly varied as grapes and as bright, complex, or subtle until I had the blueberries from my backyard last year. These blueberries are completely unlike anything from the big box store, those flavorless imitations bred for transportability and not for taste. Strawberries from the Farmer's Market are better than the ones at the grocery store, but the ones in a simple pot in my backyard are even better than that, warmed with the sun, sweet and amazing and delicately melting in my mouth. The mammoth monstrosities from the grocery store are more suited for staunchly holding up after being dipped into a half inch layer of chocolate--those strawberries have more in common with a spoon than an actual strawberry. If I grow my own food, I have the power to have strawberries that taste like summer; to eat blueberries that burst on the tongue with such complexity, such freshness, boiling them and putting them into a pie would just be sinful; to eat tomatoes that perfume the yard with the ambrosial scent of their leaves and taste like a bite of Italy itself, warm and juicy and delicious. I have the power to say no, I want better.

"I am not grotesque, I just have curves, you bastards!"

Box stores pitch "ugly" fruits and vegetables daily, relying on a handful of varieties that have been bred for bright color, transportability and uniformity of size, but are utterly lacking in vitamins, minerals and flavor. The apples we picked in Julian this fall had rough brown patches on their skins. They were lumpy and ill-formed, and all sizes, and not very pretty. I have never, NEVER eaten an apple so delicious, or drunk juice so sweet; in fact, the lumpiest, ugliest apples were the tastiest. When I grow my own food I have the power to say no, I will eat everything, no matter whether the food I touch is imperfect--and more than that. When box stores discard ton after ton of visually imperfect produce, they waste: calories that could be used to feed the hungry; the resources of soil minerals and water that went into the production of that produce; and worst of all, the labor of those farmers. Every pound of produce that they turn down as unsaleable is a pound of produce the farmer won't get paid for, a pound of labor that ends up being thrown away for free, a dollar closer to having to fire workers or lose the farm. It's a dollar more that certainly gets passed on to us when we're paying $10 a pound for cherries; $4 a pint of blueberries; $7 for strawberries that taste like nothing. When I grow my own food, I have the power to say no. I will not contribute to the death of the farmers that feed us; I will not support a broken system that leaves me paying more for inferior produce.

Monsanto has made a lot of decisions for the country, and would like to get its hands on the power to make those decisions for other countries. The farming of wheat, soy, and canola--the staples for almost everything we eat, hidden in every processed food in some way--has in large part been reduced to just a handful of strains manufactured and patented by Monsanto. Their brutal legal practices of crushing competition from local competing organic farmers by suing them should any cross-breeding occur through pollination from neighboring farms have gradually made it all but impossible to farm organic canola in Canada, and now Monsanto threatens to gain a monopoly on the other seeds that supply the bulk of our calories in the United States. If the wind blows the seeds into your organic farm, if a bird, a bee, or a butterfly carries those seeds to your organic wheat, or canola, or soy, and you save what you think are your own seeds from your own plants, growing on your own land, if those seeds happen to have been fertilized with Monsanto seeds you are committing patent infringement and technically stealing the genetic patent to those seeds. Farmers who buy Monsanto
 seeds (the only seeds available except to certified organic farmers) are forced to sign contracts stating they will not save or reuse any seeds from their crops; as they creepingly take over the market in non-organic farming (spreading slowly but surely into produce like apples), the use of their biggest seed-partner, Roundup, becomes more and more a staple of farming practice, with plants being doused in the stuff since the seeds are bred to resist the herbicide, and weeds evolving to be more and more resistant. What's the point? Monsanto's farming practices slowly but surely reduce the diversity of viable strains of the staples we rely most on. As Barbara Kingsolver says in Animal, Vegetable Miracle, Ireland once relied upon a single strain of potato--until the blight changed history and truncated entire family trees. Without a diversity of seeds we are at the mercy of the Monsanto scientists to keep up with the ever changing weed population with ever stronger versions of Roundup and more and more modifications to keep anticipating plant disease. What happens when one slips by them?

When we grow our own food we remove ourselves from the commodities market. We become a provider and no longer a consumer. We are not at the mercy of the people who expect us to be obese, lazy, and apathetic. We can choose health, choose flavor, choose better. We can choose an ugly apple that tastes like heaven; we can choose to get wrecked on hard cider we made ourselves; we can choose to compost our waste right back into our own land instead of contributing to our landfills. we can choose to live, sustainably. We can choose power.

Where else do you find Power Heels, but in a Subversive Garden Plot?