Is Gardening a Subversive Act?

(Note: The illustration is from a product available on my RedBubble store.  Find it here.)

Well, it's summer once again, and the news is full of human interest stories about people being penalized for growing food on their own property. There's the standard array of home owners' associations mandating that people remove front yard gardens and neighborhoods adopting policies that gardens, along with clothes lines, depress the property values. My favorite this year, which I unfortunately did not save the link to, involved a municipality that declared that the right to grow food was something to be bestowed by the government, and, since the government had not explicitly conferred this right, the area homeowners could not garden.

Gardening, in some places, has become a subversive act. And this is the kind of subversion I can get behind.

Think of it this way. Every time you plant something you can eat, you remove a little of your dependence on corporations that produce and distribute foodstuffs. Every tomato you pick from your garden is a little less reliance on a corporate entity to provide your dinner. It also is a little step toward independence in the form of better health. That tomato, grown your way (organically, if you so desire), brings you the kind of nutrition that might help ward off diseases and disorders, freeing you from reliance on healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

This is not to say that gardening is a fix for "everything that ails ya." Most of us would notice if the food trucks didn't come to our local grocer, and most of us will need to take advantage of medical care, even if we eat nothing but homegrown organic produce and do yoga every day.

But, every bit of your own food you grow is one step toward greater independence and less reliance on the impersonal structures that seem to govern our lives. That's the kind of subversive behavior I encourage.