I love being out in the garden, listening to birds, working the soil, and connecting with nature. I'm totally grateful, and perhaps (in the developed world) we need to be a LOT more mindful of what it means to produce food, grow flowers, and give back when we can.
I have a freezer full of bounty from our garden over the last growing season, but it's not enough to sustain us for the rest of the year. That's where farmers come in.
Those bags of lovely 'Green Giant' Yellow Gold Rush potatoes (from somewhere in the Northwest?), the fresh shitake mushrooms (from the mountains where my favorite local grocery chain is based), the fire-roasted canned tomatoes from Muir Glen, the rice from Lundberg Farms and Texmati; these aren't the work of 'small' farmers, to be sure, but farm-based companies that produce quality products.
I've been re-reading Barbara Kingsolver's amazing book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and been quite impressed (awed, actually) at how much she and her family could depend on their local food shed, in addition to ALL that they grew on their Appalachian farm of 25 acres or so.
In recent years, I've been trying to focus my buying efforts towards local and sustainably-produced foods, paying attention towards source and production. It's an exercise in both awareness and being grateful!
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