Food for thought for food

I cooked my meal and sat down to eat. The first mouthful almost overwhelmed me- a complex rush of thought and emotion that literally brought tears to my eyes. I had to pause, place my hands together and give heartfelt thanks, all the way up and all the way down, for what lay before me on my plate.

I had gone into the garden and harvested broad and runner beans, Swiss chard, kale (ragged Jack), an onion, tomatoes and courgette from the poly-tunnel and a few of this year's spuds, already lifted and stored. I prepared the vegetables, stringing the runners, podding the broad beans, tearing up chard and kale, cutting courgette into chunks, halving the toms and steamed the lot over boiling spuds. When done I stuck them on a plate with a smoked mackerel, the only shop bought item.

Sounds simple and it was, yet it overwhelmed me. Here's why.

The tastes and textures were fantastically varied; earthy, soft, crunchy, moist, dry, light, rich, sweet, bitter; a delight to my physical experience of the world. The action of gardening itself, which I see as including harvesting, among many other things, is a simple physical exercise that, done well, becomes a discipline along the lines of T'ai Chi. In fact, many of the moves and postures of the martial arts arose from gardening and farming.

My emotional response was a rich combination of pure joy at the simple beauty of the action, a great sadness that this simplicity is invisible to so many of the dwellers in the modern age. A huge frustration at the ignorance that sees food growing as somehow mundane and lowly, not suited to intellectual life, rather than one of the most profound actions we can make in the transformation of life into an integrated, sustainable future.

Intellectually, I knew this food to be the best possible food that I could eat; the fact that it had been grown, harvested and prepared by my own hand means my body absorbs more of the nutrients and trace elements than if I had merely bought it in a shop (a fact that I have long felt to be true that has recently been demonstrated scientifically).

As I podded the beans I was aware that the time taken to prepare the vegetables (about fifteen minutes) would be seen as "long" by many- "much quicker to just whack something into the microwave". Yet it was far less than the time I would have expended to go down town shopping, especially if I also included the time taken to earn the money if I had had to pay cash for the food.

The energy required was minimal; no food miles, no chemical fertilisers or pesticides with their high energy costs, no large scale ploughing with the exposure of humus to burn in the presence of oxygen releasing yet more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Some of the seeds I had bought but others, such as the bean family I has saved from last years crop. The food that I harvested was made up of seeds and leaves; the plants are still there, still laden.

I was reminded of Thomas Hardy's "Jude The Obscure", where at one point Jude says, in despair at his failure to achieve the changes he so desires, something like "it will probably require two or three generations to carry out what we have sought to achieve in one". The novel is, after all, a tragedy, as is life for many who suffer as a consequence of the modern, mechanised gardening of the world.

To realise that in the sustainable societies and environments of the future, the production of food will fall not to farmers but to gardeners, is a revelation of considerable power. According to Masanobu Fukuoka, the Japanese natural farmer (check out "The Road Back To Nature"), the cultivation of healthy, wholesome food is one of the two essential requirements of a sane society, the other being the nurture and cultivation of young people. Without these any society is on the way out. It is pertinent to consider that culture and cultivation are words that arise from the same root.

So I gave thanks for my food, all the way up and all the way down; to the thriving micro-organisms of healthy, fertile soil whose complex and dynamic interactions are still not fully understood by science, to the plants as solar powered matter transformers, to the genius loci of my garden (who occasionally let the hens in through the side gate when I am not looking), to the functional deities of the land (like the Celtic god of farming, Amaethon), to the supreme being who presides over all, to my atheistic self as the physical gardener and to the undivided whole of the universe in all time, space, energy and consciousness. Then I ate and enjoyed my meal.

And I look forward to the time when the Gardeners shall inherit the earth.