OBC Food Blog Day 62: Plant a vegetable garden if you have the space, a window box if you don't

What does growing some of your food have to do with repairing your relationship to food and eating?  Everything.  To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for your sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be fast, cheap and easy; that food is a product of industry, not nature; that food is fuel rather than a form  of communion with other people, and also as a species-with nature.  On a more practical level, you will eat what your garden yields, which will be the freshest, most nutritious produce obtainable; you will get exercise growing it (and get outdoors and away from screens); you will save money (according to the National Gardening Association, a seventy-dollar investment in a vegetable garden will yield six hundred dollars worth of food); and you will be that much more likely to follow the next, all-important rule.