Don’t get me wrong, having a vegetable garden is still a great thing and far better than buying the monoculture produce shipped from halfway around the world at the store, even if your garden is just for your own family. I don’t want to knock that. But to break our reliance on extractivist agriculture as a society requires more than just people with the resources to do it building private homesteads on their private property. Communities providing for each other through the commons is a foundational element of a solarpunk society.
How do we encourage this shift in thinking and doing? What would it take to break down the expectations of private property and that something you’ve grown is just for you, and create community mindsets where something you’ve grown can feed people who need it?
Where I live, there are a lot of (mostly retired, suburban, well-off) people with gardens, especially in the summer, but most of them are not involved in FNB or anything like it. It’s also not common to emphasize native species. We have a wonderful public market, but most of the people even with veggie gardens don’t sell there and only buy there on occasion. The way I’ve been trying to encourage the public market over grocery stores more has mostly been talking about how great the produce is, how many different things they have, and how convenient it is that the bus runs there. It’s still a market, but at least it’s small, local growers, and a local org recovers what doesn’t get sold for our FNB branch to use (and composts what isn’t good, for the local community garden to use) instead of throwing it away. But the only way I can think of to get the idea out there that people should share what they grow is to flat-out say, “you should share what you grow”, which doesn’t seem like it would win many people over.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot actually. I think one possibility is to build networks of people to help grow and distribute this food communally. In my area there are a lot of fruit trees but much of it goes unharvested, is wasted, and can even be a nuisance since it attracts rats. This is a problem to the extent that most public land managers won’t allow fruit trees to be planted. So the solution is to get some friends together and pick the fruit. Then it can be distributed to the community. I heard there is someone in my city doing this already but in a different neighborhood—I may reach out to them to see how they got the ball rolling.
I think that would be an easy way to start but the idea could be expanded to include foraged foods and gardens that people don’t have time to maintain. I think it’s important for people to first see the benefits of what you’re doing before going too far outside of what is considered normal. Once you have that reputation as helpers, you can push for more radical ideas like communal gardens, food forests, etc.