Local Food Advocates Are Today’s Hippies

Local Food Advocates Are Today's Hippies

http://www.cattlenetwork.com/Local-Food-Advocates-Are-Today-s-Hippies/2010-07-09/Article_Latest_News.aspx?oid=1150558&fid=CN-LATEST_NEWS_

07/09/2010
by Richard Keller

I'm old enough to have been a hippie and Vietnam war protester,
although I didn't quite fall into either group. Today we have another
hippie-attitude generation focusing on organic/natural food. The
staunchest locally grown food advocates are today's new hippies.

Put those old hippies together with the new generation that believes
food is only pure enough to eat if it was grown without pesticides or
commercial fertilizers, and we have a market share that grocery
chains and the Department of Agriculture has decided to accommodate.

There are so few in the nation that actually get their hands dirty
growing crops, livestock and food. Most of these new natural food
advocates haven't decided to join a commune and live off their labor
of the land, which seemed to occur more in the first hippie era. In
general, these new activists expect high-quality "natural"
foods­meats, vegetables, fruits and everything else­to be available
year round within a few minutes of where they live in cities.

A recent newspaper article I read pointed out how a few
agronomy-experienced individuals in California have developed
businesses that plant and tend gardens for the too-busy consumers who
want to eat produce from their own backyard. These upper-class
individuals have their organic garden without the true experience of
trying to save the fruits and vegetables from pests and without
getting their hands dirty. This philosophy tends to lean toward
having the lowly servants feed their masters.

Another interesting article , this one about "crop mobs" in the
Minneapolis, Minn., area and across the nation, explained how
natural-food advocates want to be involved with natural food
production and get their hands dirty by volunteering to be "farm
hands" for a day. These people volunteer to help local natural foods
producer plant seeds and nursery plants, hoe weeds, pick the produce
or even tend livestock on some operations. This "work" is often done
as a party with a large group of people volunteering on a specific
day when quite a bit of "farm work" needs done.

There are many city dwellers who are doing some type of communal
gardens, rooftop gardens, patio gardens, etc., who weren't growing
any of their food a few years ago. Now, it's a way to impress your
friends and be hip.

I contend that only those with the greenest of thumbs will continue
this for years to come. I base this on my own experience with growing
flowers, shrubs and some garden plants that I kill each year because
I do something wrong, that seemed right at the time, like
overwatering during 95-degree heat.

But my parents, who were farmers before retiring, grow a huge garden
year after year with bountiful harvests (some years better than
others) but using pesticides as appropriate and necessary. Myself, I
just don't seem to have the green thumb.

I'm positive that many of these new generation hippies will soon
realize growing natural/organic food is no picnic.

They will continue to demand natural food; but they will stop
breaking their backs raising it. These new hippies will still brag
about eating natural and more healthy than the peons of the world.
And they will also continue to protest and litigate to save the
hungry of the world from eating unhealthy "frankenfood." Hippies
always were good at protesting to protect mankind.

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