Friends Garden

We all need FOOD which makes its production and distribution central to civilization and humanity's entire network of moral issues.  Consider this observation from AN Whitehead's Process and Reality:

"Another characteristic of a living society is that it requires FOOD [which in turn requires] the destruction of elaborate [also living] societies derived from the environment. The [living] societies which are destroyed are the food. This food is destroyed by dissolving [the living societies which compose] it into somewhat simpler social elements. [In this way] the food is robbed of something. Thus, all societies require interplay with their environment; and in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery. The living society [consuming the food] may, or may not, be a higher type of organism than the food which it disintegrates. But whether or no it be for the general good, [food and thus] life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification."

It is then, perhaps, not mere coincidence that the first humans and their original sins arose in a garden filled with — among other things — food.  And that, in time, the growth of population and the need for more food drove mankind from the garden to wider-spreading practices of agriculture [including division of labor] adding further, serious environmental and moral complications to human life on earth — from the ancient tragedy of the commons and the free rider problem to modern capitalism with its CAFOs and massive inequality in income and wealth distribution.

Today we face not only the consequences of centuries of past under-understood agricultural practices but the under-understood technological prospect of detaching food production from the ground altogether and relocating it into laboratories.

Even our politics has become saturated with food issues ... MAHA is all the rage as organized American angry housewives concerned about the family's health and well-being attempt to reform our entire agricultural, food, medical, pharmaceutical and insurance practices using mainly their power as consumers without a shot being fired. A return to gardens for food could not be more relevant to everyday life and the liberal arts.