What is it about gardening
It's a great hobby but it doesn't solve food insecurity
This week seems to designed to test my patience across all the sectors of my areas of expertise, interest, and personal life. I’ve written already about the consultation fatigue in the disability sector, and my personal experience with MOE and speech-language. This week also included a local hui regarding food insecurity, with a newly released report on key findings for the region I live in. The report authors gave a thoughtful presentation and identified five key indicators for monitoring levels of food insecurity:
An interesting finding from this report is that sole parents with dependent children are the demographic most at risk of food insecurity. This aligns with what we already know about poverty, homelessness, and disability:
The demographic most likely to experience homelessness are sole Māori mothers with dependent children (from The People’s Project data analysis on homelessness).
Poverty is not evenly experienced; the CCS Disability Action State of wellbeing and equality for disabled people, their families, and whānau report from 2019 noted that disabled children and their carers are significantly more likely to live in poverty (and thus to experience food insecurity).
Households with disabled children are between 1.4 and 1.6 times more likely to be below all three poverty thresholds than households with non-disabled children.
1 in 5 disabled children lived in material hardship, twice the rate of non-disabled children (From Statistics New Zealand published data).
Poverty and food insecurity are deeply intertwined in Aotearoa New Zealand. Layered into this is ethnicity and disability; experiences of food insecurity are not evenly distributed across the nation. Rather they are most likely to occur within already marginalised and excluded populations.
Back to the hui. It was incredibly disheartening to hear people suggest community gardens, home gardens, and food-related educational programmes. Not for themselves, of course, but for ‘others’ out there, who, if they could just get themselves to a community garden, if they could just learn about seed saving, if they could just eke out an existence from the soil, would benefit from the plentiful produce and food insecurity would be a thing of the past.
As the lady next to me muttered, sotto voice, you cannot grow a cow in your backyard. We laughed darkly and hatched ridiculous plans to allocate every household a cow and five chickens, no matter the practicalities (apartment living, outdoor space, ability to pasteurise milk, vegan diet, able bodies). All joking aside, it was clear that the disconnect between those living secure lives and those grimly eking it out remains as large as ever.
If you are a sole parent, you are providing caregiving duties; there is often no one else at home to provide childcare. Either you squeeze everything into the paid childcare hours you have, or you do it with kids in tow. It’s exhausting either way.
If your child uses a wheelchair or needs a fenced space to prevent running away, or if they can’t see or hear that well, or if they have anxiety or they struggle with impulse control, or have any one of a myriad of challenges, it can be really difficult to go places. It’s not just the organising required to leave the home, or the settling of children after an outing, it’s working out if the toilets are accessible, if the space is suitable, if the people will be friendly. Is your child having a good day, will they cope, how tired will they get?
On top of all that planning work, there’s the microaggressions that are so familiar to parents. The hot takes, the passive-aggressive comments, the sotto voice remarks. These are all too often gendered and textured with racism and ableism.
The idea that our most vulnerable citizens, our families who are most in need of support, the people who are already stretched beyond capacity should spend extra hours each week in subsistence farming to stave off starvation is, quite frankly, horrendous.
Is this who we have become now, a society that expects our poorest to physically labour in order to access sufficient food to eat?
Seven years ago I was fresh off completing my PhD on the lived experiences of food insecurity and full of enthusiasm to make a difference.
When sharing my work, I invariably heard variations on “just put in a garden”. There was a genuinely held belief that people living with poverty had easy access to arable land, and had the time, energy, and know-how to garden, and had excess money to purchase tools, compost, seeds and so on.
It was a quick lesson in the divide between those adults with nostalgic memories of halcyon childhood days and those eking out a grim existence with extremely limited, punitive state support. In response I co-wrote a piece for The Spinoff that still stands true today (Side note - The Spinoff are in need of help to stay viable - do read their open letter and help out if you can). It is somewhat disheartening that those with means are still wedded to this idea.
It is well past time we moved beyond Victorian-era notions of punishment and poorhouses. We can do better than forced labour in gardens for food. We can also do better than soup kitchens and queuing in the street for food parcels.
I guess the question we are left with is, will we?
As a keen gardener, I am well aware of how much money it takes to garden individually -- and why I only started gardening seriously when I had job security and my own house. But I also love the mara kai way of collective gardening that Tina Ngata presented yesterday at the Economy for Public Good conference: one plant for harvest for the grower, one plant for Papatūānuku and one plant for giving away harvest. She talked about the tightly interconnected communities around traditional mara kai in Te Tai Rawhiti, and how people mourned its loss as a way of providing for whānau in need collectively.
Similarly, in our research with Cultivate Christchurch, young people living in poverty with disabilities such as ADHD, diabetes, long term mental health issues and chronic illness found gardening with others meaningful and in some cases, transformative. They were paid to be there by MSD, however, and not just in vegetables, so that is different from suggesting people volunteer at a community garden.
Gardening shouldn't be a solution to food insecurity and people shouldn't be made to feel like they have to garden, especially as overwhelmed individuals. But gardening collectively can also be empowering, gives a vision for a different food system and a different vision of ourselves as producers not only consumers.
I think these solutions (home & community gardens) are a 'head nod' to a different way of having food, without having the language to explain what that might look like. They all take food out of the traditional transaction economy, and imagine other ways of sharing it.
Your point about the cows and chickens is a good one. Food security is so much more than fruit and vegetables, and sometimes we get stuck in this place.
Perhaps an answer could be pooling resources (energy, food, time, space) as communities to feed ourselves in a mana-centered way?