Kitchen Gardens and Keeping it Local

I do enjoy pottering in my vege garden. A more peaceful and tranquil hobby than this I can't imagine. A little worm tea, lots of water, some gentle weed pulling. Excitement as the leaves flourish, and eventually we're cutting spinach, basil and rocket, enjoying the mini tomatoes, and laughing at the bizarre carrots and sad little potatoes that result.

My destiny is not a regular table at the local farmers market, selling the fruits of my hobby.   Much to the relief of the local greengrocer - his livelihood is in no danger from my fresh produce!

We harvest 6 or 7 pea pods at a time, and never more than one courgette – as organic and low carbon footprint as we are, we barely supplement, let alone replace, shop bought vegetables.

Sadly for the kitchen gardener, aesthetics rule, and shoppers are rather demanding as to the colour, shape and appearance of fruit and vegetables. Designer fresh produce for visual perfection - but how does this affect the quality and wholesomeness of the food? And since when did appearance trump nutrition? 

Enough, I fear, to put the kibosh on expanding kitchen gardens to supply the broader community, preventing the sharing of an oversupply and turning that into a little income earner for some households. 

National purchasing and distribution, developed by large chain retailers, has created a bizarre situation where produce grown locally is transported thousands of kilometres away, handled, chilled, placed back on trucks and shipped back to its starting point, some weeks later. 

Fresh, I think not.  And as for the carbon footprint, wear and tear on the roads etc... 

Further proof of the ridiculousness of this procedure is the ongoing trucking strike.  As it starts to bite and affect our daily lives, we can’t get cash out of the ATM’s, petrol is running low at some service stations, and weirdly enough, it is the FRESH produce at local supermarkets that seems to be worse affected, rather than the dry goods and other groceries on the shelves.

I’m so happy to see that our fresh produce, in ordinary times, is replenished regularly.  But doesn’t it strike you as peculiar that a supermarket placed in a geographical breadbasket, as they are here, is running out of tomatoes, avocado’s, lemons, fresh chicken and meat, to mention just a few of the locally grown / raised items? 

It is therefore fascinating to read Capitec Bank advising its customers to draw cash at the supermarkets, as the bank can’t refill their ATM’s, and the supermarkets can’t get their surplus cash collected, due to the strike.

It would be marvellous if the people who can alter current distribution and purchasing patterns could use this situation to rethink and replan their supplies and distribution.  Instead of the habitual moaning and increasing prices after a strike; the difficulties opened up new opportunities to do things differently, and better.

Evolution is an ongoing process, and perhaps the time has come for centralised distribution and enormous transport costs (both to the earth and the economy) to evolve to an alternative, healthier way of doing things.