21st Century Homesteading: Why Grow Your Own Food?

(Page 5 of 6)

February/March 2007
By Harvey Ussery 
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True food choice. By growing food at home, Ellen and I no longer have to accept the options dictated by the industrial food market. We can eat real, traditional foods rather than imitations of them. We avoid the disguised addition of genetically modified ingredients, food flavorings, preservatives, pesticide residues, ultra-refined starches and sugars, etc. We avoid beef, pork and chicken raised and slaughtered under filthy and often inhumane conditions.

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Valuing food. Perhaps the biggest surprise for most people who try to opt out of the industrial food system is that their food may not always cost less! Of course, your backyard tomatoes will certainly cost a lot less than the supermarket version, as long as you don’t spend too much on garden supplies. And we find that the lamb and kid we buy on the hoof and pay an abattoir to butcher and process is cheaper than the commercial equivalent, doubtless because of the number of “middle men” who have been cut out of the loop.

But people who think I raise my own chickens as a way to save money are amazed when I tell them my dressed poultry and eggs cost more — much more — than what they buy in the supermarket. I buy certified organic ingredients to make my feeds, and there is no way I can compete with the poultry industry giants.

When it comes to food costs, it is good to remember the old adage: You get what you pay for. I propose that we also remember this: One dollar, one vote. Every dollar we plunk down for food is first and foremost a vote in favor of the way that food was produced.

Secure food. In the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was real hunger in the cities. Many people in the country were devastated financially, but at least they had enough to eat, either because they were used to producing a lot of their own food, or because they had neighbors who could, and with whom they could barter. Now, almost a century later, a serious economic collapse would find vastly more people in cities and suburbs — even many of those still living in rural areas — lacking in the skills and accumulated wisdom necessary to raise their own food.

Sources of food under one’s own control or that of close neighbors would be far more secure in a time of rapid economic change than those in the supermarket. Furthermore, those who have climbed the necessary learning curves and acquired food-production skills will be far better prepared, in terms both of seeing to their own family’s needs, and of being of service to others. The time to prepare for an uncertain future is now, and we can make no more useful preparation than learning how to produce more of our own food.

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