Buying at a Farmers Market Is a Radical Political Act

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

My wife Laurie spent many years as a congressional staffer on Capitol Hill. She likes to remind me of a simple fact:

Everything is political.

In other words, everything you do or don’t do influences politics, defined as “the activities, actions, and policies that are used to gain and hold power in a government or organization.”

Even pursuits you may consider to be entirely private — your choice of sexual partner, your style of child rearing, or whether you grow lettuce in your backyard — help to determine who has power, and how much, if any, he or she wields over you.

Another way to put this is that each seemingly private act is a “vote” for or against an authority, but I dislike the analogy.

Many Americans have come to understand that classic, poll-booth “voting” is usually a choice between Deep State shills.

The way you choose to eat, love, and raise your kids can and should be far more radical and more transformative than typical voting.

So… because our daily, “mundane” choices are collectively where our real power lies, which ones should we make?

By definition, no one should command anyone else on this question. But if you seek inspiration, an excellent place to find it is in the blog of political commentator James Kunstler. This week, he wrote:

We need to step way back on every kind of giantism currently afflicting us: giant agri-biz, giant commerce (Wal-Mart, etc.), giant banking, giant war-making, and giant government — this last item being so larded with incompetence on top of institutional entropy that it is literally a menace to American society.

The trend on future resources and capital availability is manifestly downward, and the obvious conclusion is the need to make this economy smaller and finer. The finer part of the deal means many more distributed tasks among the population, especially in farming and commerce operations that must be done at a local level.

This means more Americans working on smaller farms and more Americans working in reconstructed Main Street business, both wholesale and retail. This would also necessarily lead to a shift out of the suburban clusterf**k and the rebuilding of ten thousand forsaken American towns and smaller cities.

My friends, if you are looking for a vision — a worthy goal on which to hang your hat or your life — then in my view, you could do far worse than to pursue some version of this ideal.

Personally, to the maximum extent possible, I feed the small, the local, the decentralized, the intimate.

How? I begin, always, by literally feeding myself and my family with what my neighbors, my friends, my fellow townsmen, and my own backyard garden grow.

Produce grown by McClendon’s Select Organic Farm in Peoria, Arizona. What we don’t grow we get from McClendon’s and another local favorite, Blue Sky Organics. It all tastes as good as it looks.

As for our backyard… it’s hot here (116 degrees F today), but the fruits are thriving.

Red flame grapes, the same kind sold in the supermarket. When grown without hormones, they don’t ripen uniformly. That’s an advantage for the backyard grower, because it extends the harvest.

The brown turkey figs, not yet brown, need another couple of weeks.

Such foods constitute virtually all of what we eat at home. And when we go out, we incline toward restaurants that buy local, organic food as well.

Each time you and I do so, we pull money — which is economic energy — away from pesticide-drenched, GMO-dependent, taxpayer-subsidized, ecosystem-scarring, wealth-concentrating industrial agriculture and put it toward sustainable, pesticide-free, wealth-dispersing, small-scale agriculture.

From that act, everything that depends on the hegemony of the old, top-down system starts to wither. Everything on which the new, bottom-up system depends starts to flower.

And by the way, this is not a hopeless, quixotic act against invincible forces. Just the opposite. The number of American farmers markets listed by the USDA increased from 3,706 in 2004 to the current total of over 8,000.

I’ll guess the number these days is even higher than that, because maybe — just maybe — the organizers of a few thousand farmers markets haven’t bothered to notify the increasingly irrelevant USDA.

Bottom Line

There are few win-wins in life, but one of them is to get every possible morsel of food that you can get from:

• Your own land, balcony container, or window box (for sprouts and herbs)
• A pick-your-own vendor
• A farmers market, roadside stand, or community supported agriculture (CSA) program

Getting nourishment from these places is one of those rare, glorious acts that simultaneously feeds many good things and starves many bad things in a country that desperately needs both to happen.

If this makes sense to you, type the name of your town into the search engine at www.localharvest.org and a list of nearby sources will pop up.

Then, in the name of politics, health, and planetary sustainability… go!

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions