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Opening Bell


This post expired on July 25, 2023.

Dear Conway Locally Grown Community,

“I believe that the community-in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures-is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.” – Wendell Berry

“the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man [is] one great subject.” – Sir Albert Howard

When we consider the term ‘health,’ we immediately think of the physical condition of our individual bodies, and the desire to maintain or improve our physical condition is often what moves us to spend the extra time, effort, and money to acquire the highest standard of nourishment we possibly can. However, our relationship with our food – what we eat, who produces it, how it’s produced – affects far more than just our individual health because our relationship with food connects us, in varying levels of tangibility, to the broader community of soil, plants, animals, and other people.

Too often we think of food solely in terms of taste and nutrition, a mere fuel for the body that comes in many flavors, but it is so much more. An organic heirloom tomato is not just a nutritious fruit, it is the product of millennia of human interactions with the natural world. The countless human efforts that make our food possible largely define our collective relationship to the natural world and the health of our communities. Sadly, most human relationships with the natural world could be labeled as abusive, and most communities could be considered unhealthy as a whole.

So if we look at food and health from the perspectives of two of our wisest agrarian philosophers (see Berry and Howard quotes above), we should see that our health as individuals is inescapably linked to the health of our food system, and of course, the natural world that sustains it. That is why, in the interest of true, community-wide health, local food organizations like Conway Locally Grown are a good idea.

From Cedar Rock Ridge:
I grow vegetables organically, which means I don’t use any chemical fertilizers or pesticides, ever. I inspect every one of my plants every morning. This includes over 80 pepper plants, several tomato plants, and various others. One morning last week I was inspecting my pepper plants when I discovered a swarm of blister beetles. They had eaten all the leaves off of one pepper plant and were going crazy on several others. I called my friend who is a Master Gardener and he told me to throw Sevin Dust on everything to stop them. My neighbor said the same thing. I could have done what they suggested and been rid of these pests in 10 minutes, which sounds like a good idea since it was 95 degrees and sunny without a cloud in sight…but that’s not what I’m committed to. My plants produce food for people so there’s no way I’m going to use harmful chemicals on something we eat. I spent the next several hours in the hot sun handpicking hundreds of scurrying blister beetles and dropping them in a plastic cup with a half inch of water and gasoline. I crawled around on my hands and knees in the garden looking for every last one of these leaf-eating bugs because it doesn’t eliminate the problem if you leave any to reproduce. Carissa was also involved in the hunt. Confident I had gotten them all, I enjoyed a cold beer in the garden. On my evening inspection, I found only 5 more, which suffered the same fate as the others. The next morning I found one sole survivor, who only held that title for about 5 seconds. No other blister beetles were found since then, and the defoliated pepper plant is growing new leaves and will make a full recovery. Gardening organically takes a little more work and time, but the results make it worthwhile.

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Have a wonderful week,
Gabe Levin