Growing to Live, or to Make a Killing?

 

Last Batch of Kimchi 2022

The end of the growing season has come to Polk County in Northwestern Wisconsin.  The leaves are beginning to lose their green colors allowing the hidden reds and yellows to be revealed to the eyes of the beholders.  Temperatures are beginning to drop; daylight is reduced and darkness blankets the land for longer and longer periods.  Soon the first freezing temperatures will occur, and the plants in my garden stop growing and eventually die. 

This is a busy time of year for me, a time to harvest the last of my garden grown goodies, along with some feral fungi, and figure out how to process and preserve them all so I will have enough to eat until the growing season returns next spring.  Yesterday I cleaned out most of my remaining vegetables and chopped up the findings to brew a batch of kimchi.  I cut up collards greens, Swiss chard, kale, beet greens, carrot tops, green onions; and shredded up a few pounds of carrots, yellow and red beats, and rutabagas; added salt and pepper, mixed and mashed it all together, and packed the semi-liquid mixture in a glass jug to let it all ferment for a few weeks.  I should end up with about a gallon and a half of tart and tangy vegetables to help keep me going for the first months of the coming winter. 

For the past four years, I have had the luxury of being able to try and grow yard food, so I could live without working.  Prior to that, I spent my life working at jobs I didn’t really like, to make money, so I could buy corporate food, to eat, to stay alive.  Of course, it wasn’t just food I bought with the money, essentially everything I needed had to be bought and paid for with the money I made working.  My experiments in growing food to feed myself, are of course all made possible by my previous working for money way of life, which also gained me access to some monthly pension funds to help me pay for food supplements, seeds, a house to live in, land to grow food on, and everything else I need to stay alive. 

I think it would be great if some day I could really live the life of luxury – and figure out how to completely abandon my dependence on money to buy goods and services I need from the parasitic institutions that have an essential monopoly on the life-giving things we need to survive.  Perhaps then I could experience what thriving might be like.  But in the meantime, I try to be grateful as best I can for at least being able to minimize my need for money for food by growing food to live on.  It makes me feel at least a little less dependent on the money takers, who prey on the money makers, to make a killing in the markets, we all depend on to stay alive. 

The mania for an economic system controlled by hierarchies that depend on infinite growth cannot last forever, at least that is what I tell myself in these times, while I eat my home grown and preserved foods.  It helps me sleep a little bit better at night, but it doesn’t stop me from worrying about the whole messed up system that dominates our lives.  As the seasons revolve, the realities about making a killing, will come to life.