By: Meg Muckenhoupt
Good morning, everyone. I am speaking to you as a representative of the Lexington Interfaith Garden.
The Interfaith Garden is a 40×40 garden plot in Carla Fortmann’s back yard. It was started last fall and is maintained by volunteers from a dozen different faith communities, the garden will supply produce to the Lexington Food Pantry and other local hunger relief organizations. We’ve already sent some spring
onions and asparagus over to the Food Pantry, and we expect to send much more.
Isn’t that wonderful? I know if I were sitting in the pews right now, I’d ask myself, “Why bother?”
I mean, what’s the point? You can buy onions for 75 cents a pound at Market Basket, asparagus goes for $1.99 a pound in season. If all you professionals work for an hour and net $35, you could buy $175 pounds of potatoes for the Food Pantry. Heck, if Carla just sells her garden at going Lexington real estate prices – let’s see, the Busa land sold for half a million dollars and acre – she’d net about $18,000, after legal fees. That would sure help the
65 families who visit the Food Pantry every week nowadays.
So what’s the point? I’ll tell you.
The Lexington Interfaith Garden is reaching some of the people who need it most: you.
We are creatures; we are animals. We eat food– that is, the roots, seeds, stems, and fruits of plants, or the very flesh of animals. Sometimes we eat blue-green algae and fungus too. We are life, and we eat life.
Yet when was the last time you touched food when it was still alive? Our current system of growing and distributing food consists of growing crops that can thrive on petroleum-based fertilizers in states and countries so far away that you will never see the soil they grow in. This system is unsustainable without enormous quantities of oil.
So why bother with this little tiny garden? Because it’s a start.
It’s a start at reconnecting with our food, the life we eat, and sharing that food with people who need it. It’s a start at reclaiming who we are as living beings in a world filled with living beings, instead of pretending that we are just dots on a screen inside a building made of plastic and stone. It is a way to remember that we are part of that interconnected web, which extends from worms and soil bacteria to lettuce, to the rabbits that nibble that lettuce (darn them!), to our neighbors who do not have enough money to both pay rent and buy food, and to God.
I want this garden to grow. I want it to find a larger plot of land – maybe at the Busa farm? – and make more food, and bring more people out into the sunshine to touch the earth, and each other.