… Even the White House has been caught up in acknowledging the long and damaging decline of home-grown food. In March, the first lady, Michelle Obama, became the first occupant of the White House since the Depression to have a working vegetable garden, the last being Eleanor Roosevelt.
Note the symmetry between economic hardship and backyard food.
The Obama plot is producing vegetables on the South Lawn, a site chosen for its visibility to outside visitors. Michelle Obama wants to educate her daughters and the general public about the need for healthy, local, seasonal food at a time when obesity has become America’s No.1 health problem. She expects every member of the family to participate in the necessary weeding, including the President, although out of deference to the Commander-in-Chief, she is not growing beetroot because he doesn’t like it.
There has even been talk of a chicken coop, which would be a wonderful symbol because every chicken in a backyard is at least one less bird subjected to the grotesque cruelty of factory farming, which we pretend is not the real cost behind every cheap chicken breast, wing and pale egg.
The hidden costs of our food system are high. There is the obvious cost in health as our diets have an abundance of bulk and taste but an increasing paucity of nutritional value. The energy cost is extremely high, with a mass-distribution system built on transportation, packaging, refrigeration, storage and preservation. The moral cost is also high as food animals, especially chickens, live out their lives in an abject state of constriction.
The solution is partly within our grasp. One of Australia’s sustainability visionaries, Michael Mobbs, whose famous inner-city house is completely self-sufficient in energy and water, has developed the embryo of a system of urban street gardens – communal food production in the spare space on our footpaths.
His street, Myrtle Street, Chippendale, has multiple but unobtrusive fruit and vegetable patches, and communal composting bins. If you didn’t know, you might not even realise it. You’d just think the street was unusually bushy. His scheme has had no problems from City of Sydney council, quite the contrary. ”The council has taken what we’ve done in Myrtle Street and made it draft policy for the whole council area,” he says. ”That’s a real win.
