Grow (None of) Your Own | Is this the “new normal”?

With the recent spikes in cost of living and problems in food supply chains seen across many nations, one might be inclined to turn to growing your own food as a means of self-sufficiency and keeping costs down. It certainly wouldn’t have been out-of-place for our political leaders to encourage such schemes; I could imagine a “Dig for Victory” style campaign with wartime-esque messaging being something particularly appealing to our leaders as a means of improving public popularity (which the two UK Prime Ministerial candidates and the opposition leader sorely need). Such a policy should surely be welcomed regarding climate change too, as growing-your-own will inevitably result in far less emissions from transport. There are even health arguments too, as evidenced by the effect of pesticides on the human body, far less of which would be needed if more food was home-grown.

On the contrary, we have seen the opposite; a hosepipe ban has been put in place across parts of England as a response to low river levels and climate change. Even farmers have been restricted from watering their own crops. This would be bad enough by itself for people wanting to grow their own vegetables, yet deliberately restricting access to water is set to become long-term government policy in the UK and EU. Talk of ‘growing your own’ in such times is absent, only buying someone else’s food (or better yet, insects and people) is in the media instead.

Shockingly, this is not the end of measures across the world that seem intent on discouraging both homeowners and independent farmers from growing their own food. The State of Victoria in Australia now has the power to seize livestock and home-grown food at will from private citizens if they are deemed “contaminated”. Then take the UN’s Agenda 2030 which, amongst many other things, seeks top-down control on access to seeds. Then we have Bill Gates buying up agricultural land with the kind of money that could easily outcompete independent growers or people hoping to get started. 

The media labels backyard chickens (not caged ones) as ‘dangerous’, promote the idea of hobby farms harbouring disease and free range chickens somehow increasing the risk of future pandemics. They will kill chickens testing positive for bird flu via PCR, even though PCR is not an adequate diagnostic tool. Then there is claims that ‘forever chemicals’ that cannot be broken down by biological processes have contaminated every water supply, and that they’re shutting down people’s efforts to grow food. Even the act of gardening itself, once promoted as a benefit to health, is now the subject of fearmongering.