P L E N T Y SUMMER 2019 Plenty Summer 2019-joomag copy | Page 8

O
ne doesn’t
have to be a
historian or
economist to
understand
how quickly
our society
has shifted in
the last two generations. Some
of us can still remember a time
when people weren’t dependent
on factory farms thousands of
miles away for food, nor on chain
stores for cheap clothing made
overseas by impoverished work-
ers. Many people grew their own
food and made their clothing, or at
least obtained them from a known
source; and until well into the
20th century, many Americans did
all of this without electrical power
in their homes.
It has been less than a cen-
tury since Americans were largely
self-sufficient producers of many
of their daily needs and moder-
GARDEN PHOTOS COURTESTY OF LADY FARMER
8
PLENTY I SUMMER GROWING 2019
ate consumers of the rest. In the
“waste not, want not” days of our
grandparents or great-grandpar-
ents, responsible use of resources
was not only enforced through
rationing—especially during
WWII—but also seen as a citizen’s
patriotic duty.
Fast forward to the present,
when practically everything we
use is bought from a store—or
through Amazon—and is exces-
sively packaged, taped, safety
sealed, shrink-wrapped, encased
in plastic, tamper-proofed, and on
and on. Think about this as you
move through your day and look
at the products, containers, tools,
and implements you use. Where
did they come from, how did they
get into your hands, how much
waste was created before you even
owned them? Consider the fact
that most of these things are used
up or broken in a relatively short
period of time, after which their
packaging, containers and car-
casses are mindlessly tossed into
the trash, the place our society
assumes is the endpoint of our
concern.
We have evolved from a more
circular mindset in our consumer
behavior—one that is conscious of
limited resources and encourages
conservation—to a linear economy
in which we are addicted to the
desire for cheap, mass-produced
goods that have only one direction
to go: from production, to use, to
disposal in a landfill.
Our food supply, too, has long
left the realm of self-production
and now has much more connec-
tion to a factory or a lab than the
land. It has been sprayed, machi-
nated, wrapped, frozen, fortified,
processed, sealed, flown around
the globe, clam-shelled and
shelved until we, full collabora-
tors in this paradigm, happily pull
it from the supermarket shelves in