I live in Beijing; my neighborhood is a concrete jungle and there are no plots to muse a community garden anywhere in sight. I’m really starting to want my own garden, right about now. I regret how much I took my parents’ garden for granted. What a brat I was! Thanks mom and dad for my first 100% organic and slow food.

My mom made zucchini bread, cherry plum jam, picked garlic, canned tomatoes, canned peaches, strawberry jam, fresh squeezed orange juice, lemonade and more… all from our garden. She exchanged these goodies with gems from other neighbors, fruits and vegetables from their gardens, and jam and cookies from the old ladies on the block.

Wednesdays in the summertime, jazz concerts were held in Victory Park. My mom would fill up brown sacks with ripe peaches and nectarines while my siblings and I loaded them into our red wagon to sell to the picnickers. Some of the fruits were so ripe, they’d arrive bruised nearly breaking through the paper sacks but people still bought them relishing their sweetness.

My father and a few other men on the street built their own furniture or fixed things when broken. A lot of the furniture in my home is made by my dad. If my dad was out of town working, I knew I could go to any of the neighbors and ask their help to fix anything. We really had a great sense of community there for a while.

I had four chickens; Julie, Helena, Henny Penny, and Daisy. As a kid, I ate organic eggs! That is at least until the neighbors complained about city ordinances, claiming my chickens woke them up each morning. They were hens, not roosters. When the chickens had to go, I sobbed as I ate my organic Daisy. That was the first time I’d ever seen so many hard boiled eggs at different sizes. These were the eggs that had not yet been laid.

There were a lot of things to dislike about the 80′s, but there was for a moment a life lived in story books and now advocated in articles. Today we call it Slow Food; when I was little, food was as fast as reaching for it in my own backyard.

Here’s the article that inspired my need to declare a return to life homegrown:

Does It Really Matter Whether Your Food Was Produced Locally?
AlterNet / By Stan Cox
Counting food miles can lead to wrong turns: Instead of worrying about how far our food has traveled we should look at the way it’s produced and hauled.