I dont think you should be paying for vegetables. they should just be there
A massive amount of labor is required to grow, pick and convey produce to you, and farm workers are already grossly underpaid.
too bad there isnt a perfect solution… like growing them yourself
Have you ever tried to grow a garden, any garden? A “garden” large and varied enough to feed a family (year-round! I take it, though, given your confidence, you’ve already purchased a flash freezer and walk-in cold storage unit so you won’t need to eat canned glop all winter) while working full-time, paying for a mortgage and taxes on that amount of land, not to mention for equipment and supplies, including water and electricity? I put quotes around “garden” because that’s actually more a farm. Have you ever worked on farm? Full-time, for negative money, while also working a 2nd (and 3rd) job to pay for it in addition to all your regular, non-vegetable expenditures? When I said massive amount of labor, where did you think it would go? What did those words mean to you?
whoa there. an urban garden doesn’t need industrial level equipment or labor to produce food for a family of 4, even year round. they can handle chickens and goats and even pigs. and when projects like community gardens are put together by an entire neighborhood, with the right expertise, they can quickly generate regular supplies of food. maybe not enough to gorge everyone all the time, but definitely enough to keep folks from starving.
what are you trying to convince people of exactly? that their desires to grow their own food are pointless since they can’t do it industrially perfect? or are you just pissed about the blasé attitude young people have towards work?
Hi, I’m your farming “expertise” (apparently), as someone who’s worked on an actual farm, even if not a proper “industrial” operation like where my uncle picked vegetables as a child. I suggest you try it, not as an insinuation that you’re blasé or whatever wrt work, just so you can get a feel for farming. There are tons of seasonal employment opportunities on farms of every size.
I didn’t mention industrial agricultural equipment. A flash freezer isn’t a thresher; it’s a readily available appliance, expensive though of a value impossible to overstate if you’re trying to grow your own produce for year-round consumption and not see your standard of nutrition nosedive in winter, and it’s an example of an overlooked component of securing one’s own food supply (storage). I also didn’t mention animals. Those are entirely on you.
Good luck raising goats and pigs in your urban garden, though. If you’re in or around MA/RI I can recommend a small-scale slaughterhouse, if you aren’t planning on doing that yourself, too. My advice, though, as an expert, is that would be a terrible use of space and if you tried to raise pigs on my block I’d murk you.
Needing labor, needing to do work to maintain a food garden, or even a regular decorative garden, isn’t debatable. That’s a simple fact.
So sure, I’m pointing out that it does take work, it takes labor, to supply and run a society on any scale, and that just because you don’t see it, just because it takes place beyond your narrow field of perception, that doesn’t mean people aren’t doing it, or that it doesn’t need to be done by somebody.
Your entire existence, including your charmingly glib dismissal of “work” as some old people canard, bold of you when child laborers are making your lunch, your pants, mining hazardous substances to manufacture components of your phone and computer, etc., is made possible by exploited labor that you’re choosing to ignore, to minimize, to cast aspersions on and pretend is easy-peasy and meaningless. You aren’t a member of any proletariat. You’re who gets deposed.
i love how everyone is arguing the nuances within this construct, like, food should be fucking free? yes? “but what about the labor.” oh my gd! what about the labor! maybe we should work on developing the technology for quick, easy resource renewal that cuts out the necessity of labor! if only everyone wasnt too fucking busy masturbating over tHe LiBerAlZ
Surprise creating that technology & maintaining requires…labor. All of this requires labor. I know folks love the idea of the Jetson’s city soaring above the clouds, but you should be asking about the people who couldn’t afford to live in the clouds. What happened to them? Our tech heavy future is being designed by people who love the idea of Skynet, not of utopia.
As someone who has raised pigs, I feel like the line “if you try to raise pigs on my block I will murk you” is not getting enough love. Not nearly enough love. Pigs are Satan incarnate and nothing will ever taste as good as that one sow and her babies who would NOT stay in the fucking fence.
Good luck with that “quick easy resource renewal” for food that eliminates labor. People keep telling me robotic farming is the way of the future. Those people a) have no souls and b) have never met livestock or indeed weather. What if instead we made sure that everyone had safe working conditions and a living wage?
The system we have now is not inevitable and not unchangeable. We could have a system where you go down to the store and get food without giving anyone any money, and farm workers were not the ones paying the price. As a farmer, I would LOVE this world. I could stop worrying about profit and start worrying about doing things the best possible way for every single organism on my farm, from soil microbes to cows.
A better world is possible, y’all.
I mean, why don’t these perfect world ideas ever include barter and universal basic incomes? Or an understanding of what food supplies entail? I’m really curious. Because whenever I see these things pop up no one seems to understand things like foxes or coyotes or disease. All the romaine in America is currently unsafe, so maybe we need a system that recognizes where food is farmed, how it is transported and stored and that values that labor.
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