There are few things as sweet as the simple pleasures awaiting you at home after a long day of work. For me, that entails kicking off my heels, changing into breezy shorts, and then going out to the balcony to be greeted by this lovely sight:
It's my garden! Well, it's a few lettuce leaves and parsley but any growing greenery counts as a garden in my book. When there are a pile of things left on my to-do list, gently brushing this fragile crop with my fingertips tickles me with joy. It's fascinating to see the mere combination of dirt, water, and seeds yielding into something substantial to fork into my mouth. I'm usually more concerned with the consumption of food, but the production of it, I'm beginning to find, is equally interesting. Where is our food coming from? Who or what dictates the availability of healthy, fresh food to different neighborhoods and schools?
These were precisely the questions that 2 adorable ten year olds named Sadie and Safiyah asked themselves as they embarked on a documentary titled, "What's on your plate?". Together they visited and researched what teens are eating in New York and I took 3 students with me to see it at the Hammer Museum.
Do I think that watching this documentary will change the way these students eat? Most likely not. As a matter of fact, right after seeing this together, we all went to Diddy Riese for fatty ice cream sandwiches. But in the current times where the new generation has a lower life expectancy than the current generation due to the high rate of obesity, I know that only kids have the power of bringing about a change. Maybe one day they'll reach for the organic apple instead of the cheaper one. Maybe they'll start going to the farmer's market, and encourage those around them to do the same. Maybe they'll start demanding healthier school lunches and do the same for their children. Just maybe.
(Meanwhile...these will be the end of me)
fun! andrew and i planted once... i think last year. everything died or did not grow and that was the end of that.
ReplyDeleteWhen my grandmother was here, she'd ask me to help her with her garden on the weekends. At first, I did it begrudgingly - I could be doing other things instead of flipping dirt and lugging buckets of water around!
ReplyDeleteBut soon after, I came to admire the resilience of plants: if you pick all of it up by the roots, you can literally move it to any other place - anywhere in the world! - and just give it some soil, tend to it everyday, and slowly but surely, it will re-root itself, and continue growing. Incredible.
P.S. I'm still researching how to grow my own apple tree...but it's cool you have your own lettuce and parsley!
-- Johnson