Ignorance is Bliss

I was over at a friend’s house on Montclair studying for an exam this Thursday when I decided that I wanted to show her our community garden. We left our books and scattered papers and ventured toward Carlton. She asked the typical questions of what did we plant, how do you plant a vegetable, what does it look like, and then to my surprise she was shocked that a pepper does not grow underground. I don’t think she was being ignorant of where her food comes from before it ends up on the clean, safe shelves of a grocery store. I really just think that it never genuinely crossed her mind to discover, where her many veggies that she consumes come from. So as I showed her our plants and how we planted them and why they are so spaced out and how we have to get wire racks for when the tomato plants start growing. She stood there slightly amazed that something she could one day consume could be planted right in her own backyard. Coming from California, I am used to having a garden in our backyard and also a variety of cherry, plume, persimmon and apricot trees. So out of this whole experience of showing my friend the garden, I guess I was slightly taken aback that sometimes I can be ignorant of the fact that we all live such comfortable lives in that, what we eat is packaged nicely in the comforts of our local grocery stores. Never do we as Americans have to plant our food in our own backyards in order to eat, or do we have to scavenge for our own food. Which sometimes I believe leads us to never questioning where our food comes from or how it is grown or an even better question the types of pesticides that are sprayed on our food.