Interview with N

With America's food habits laying heavily on our minds, people have started going back to basics with choosing what they eat.  I spoke with N who spent the previous summer installing personal gardens into homes for a local landscaping company.  Organic plants in tote, he and his co-workers set out to build raised bed gardens, install plants and teach people how to grown their own food.  The focus for these personal gardens was for people to obtain the experience of growing, caring for and harvesting their own food. N emphasizes this saying, "They [the raised bed gardens] were duel purpose.  They could be flower gardens but they were mostly intended to be personal farming gardens to help people get into growing their own food rather than purchasing it".  Regardless of how much or how little they knew these people were interested in the experience of growing their own food; having weather patterns affect what they ate, as well as finding what grows best in this region.  With this came the inevitable community that often develops around food.  People were swapping around vegetables with friends, giving away their over abundance of crops they couldn't eat themselves and trading ideas and recipes for what to do with their freshly harvested food.  I have this notion that the majority of the people able to access and buy local food are from the middle and upper classes but N quickly corrected me by saying, "we also installed beds at schools and low income neighborhoods trying to help kids rather teach their parents about proper eating and food nutrition".  It all comes back to educating people and trying to get people to get back to their roots with eating.