Rule 62 – Plant a vegetable garden if you have the space, a window box if you don’t.

Pollan asks: “What does growing some of your own food have to do with repairing your relationship to food and eating? Everything. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for your sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it.” Such fast food values, says Pollan, include the ideas “that food should be fast, cheap, and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel rather than a form of communication with other people, and also with other species – with nature.”

“On a more practical level,” he goes on to explain, “you will eat what your garden yields, which will be the freshest, most nutritious produce obtainable; you will get exercise growing it (and get outdoors and away from screens); you will save money (according to the National Gardening Association, a seventy-dollar investment in a vegetable garden will yield six hundred dollars’ worth of food); and you will be that much more likely to follow the next, all-important rule (See Rule 63 – Cook.)” (135-6).

The tips are courtesy of Michael Pollan’s book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Happy, Healthy Eating!