PLENTY Magazine SUMMER 2019 Plenty Summer 2019-joomag (1) | Page 8

O ne doesn’t have to be a historian or economist to understand how quickly our society has shifted in the last two generations. Some of us can still remember a time when people weren’t dependent on factory farms thousands of miles away for food, nor on chain stores for cheap clothing made overseas by impoverished work- ers. Many people grew their own food and made their clothing, or at least obtained them from a known source; and until well into the 20th century, many Americans did all of this without electrical power in their homes. It has been less than a cen- tury since Americans were largely self-sufficient producers of many of their daily needs and moder- GARDEN PHOTOS COURTESTY OF LADY FARMER 8 PLENTY I SUMMER GROWING 2019 ate consumers of the rest. In the “waste not, want not” days of our grandparents or great-grandpar- ents, responsible use of resources was not only enforced through rationing—especially during WWII—but also seen as a citizen’s patriotic duty. Fast forward to the present, when practically everything we use is bought from a store—or through Amazon—and is exces- sively packaged, taped, safety sealed, shrink-wrapped, encased in plastic, tamper-proofed, and on and on. Think about this as you move through your day and look at the products, containers, tools, and implements you use. Where did they come from, how did they get into your hands, how much waste was created before you even owned them? Consider the fact that most of these things are used up or broken in a relatively short period of time, after which their packaging, containers and car- casses are mindlessly tossed into the trash, the place our society assumes is the endpoint of our concern. We have evolved from a more circular mindset in our consumer behavior—one that is conscious of limited resources and encourages conservation—to a linear economy in which we are addicted to the desire for cheap, mass-produced goods that have only one direction to go: from production, to use, to disposal in a landfill. Our food supply, too, has long left the realm of self-production and now has much more connec- tion to a factory or a lab than the land. It has been sprayed, machi- nated, wrapped, frozen, fortified, processed, sealed, flown around the globe, clam-shelled and shelved until we, full collabora- tors in this paradigm, happily pull it from the supermarket shelves in