What We See and What We Know (Or, Why We Need to Question Overabundance)
By: New Dream
Tags: Farming, Consumerism, Wealth, Audre Lorde, Abundance

In some ways, Longwood Gardens is not so different than your local supermarket. In both cases, an abundance has been produced that is very different from what we would find in nature. Both the supermarket and the gardens are highly ordered and predetermined-not by nature-but by modern constructions of power and conceptions of the good. When we go to the supermarket, we ought to be aware that the prices are so low because the modern food system’s costs to the environment and human health have mostly been externalized by powerful corporations and agricultural lobbies. But these realities are conveniently hidden away behind countless images, labels, and advertisements, so that all you have to do is admire the colors, believe what they tell you, and spend your money.

The museumification of our lives is something I am trying to resist, but it’s a powerful force. Sometimes it makes me feel like a gasping projectile—a mere molecule funneled through hidden networks of political piping. If you look around the supermarket and ask, “how was this all made possible?” you might feel like a bug trapped in a web. I believe that we’re more limited than our culture of individualism would have us believe. We need to belong, and the more we distance ourselves from the earth and from our neighbors, the more we must accept the widening gap between what we see, and what we really know.

Here’s a tragic irony: Even though Pierre du Pont took great pride in his ability to control and conduct the flow of water with his fountains, the company he left behind, DuPont chemical company, still polluted our waterways with toxic PFOA and PFAS chemicals that we still can’t figure out how to clean up. As a result, our drinking water-and our very blood-have been forever polluted. And now I wonder if, on our trip to Longwood Gardens, my mother and I weren’t misted with some of DuPont’s chemicals when we walked beneath those fountains.

Our bodies ought to be treated as sacred, but we can’t protect our bodies when we place ourselves in systems that distance us from the decisions being made. I don’t want to be a gasping projectile—I want to latch down into the earth, and I want to live an embodied life.

In her essay, “ Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde makes the distinction between living an erotic life and a sensory life, and I think that this distinction is often a matter of proximity. It’s about knowing more about a garden than what it looks like, and more about our food than what can be printed on a label. Audre’s erotic asks us to consider how we live in work and leisure. It helps me to ask: “How do we grow our food, and how do we share it with others? How does it all smell, what does it look like on our bodies, and how do we let it nourish our communities?”

Toward the end of our visit to the Gardens, I remember walking through a pretty greenhouse full of ornamental chard, cabbages, and beets. The signs told us not to touch. But I don’t think I can look at chard and not imagine the hours I spent cracking its stem at the roots, gathering its leaves together and measuring its bulk against the size of my hand, slipping a knife across its ends and bundling it with a rubber band. In Pierre’s garden, I suppose that kind of work isn’t necessary. But, really-a room of vegetables to only ever be looked at?? I ignored the signs and reached my hands out anyway.

Kate Parker grew up in Round Hill, Virginia, and spent most of her childhood working in the dirt or romping through fields and riversides with friends. She has spent many of her summers farming with Potomac Vegetable Farms, and she likes to paint portraits of friends and write music whenever she can. She is currently finishing up school at the University of Virginia and hopes to use her degree in Political Philosophy, Policy, and Law to advocate for rural communities and sustainable farming practices.