Grow your own and fight back

I have to remind myself constantly that growing my own food is not going to result in the overthrow of global capital's dictatorship.

I have to remind myself, on my rare trips to a supermarket, that my efforts will not undermine their increasing stranglehold on the food supply or that of the mass poisoners known as the "food industry."

I saw a film not long ago about US musician Kurt Cobain.

I knew, I just knew, that, if only he had planted some vegetables, he would be alive today and still making music.

I had to tell myself that No, Cobain was a very talented but deeply disturbed young man whose life was never going to be saved by a cold frame.

Messianic attitudes to growing your own food get the activity a bad name.

Morning Star readers are generally hard-headed folk who know that the only way we are ever going to change the world is by organising and fighting back, in our workplaces, our neighbourhoods, in what little political space is left to us.

You know, I know, that the idyll of self-sufficiency is no answer to the crushing might of a system which is bent on controlling our food supply so that it can control every other aspect of our lives. And yet.

It just feels so subversive to eat an entire meal and know that not a single ingredient has generated a morsel of profit for big capital, its supermarkets, its poisonous agriculture or its equally poisonous food-processing industry.

Industrial agriculture is destroying the planet.

Its dependence on pesticides and fertilisers is killing rivers, lakes and oceans and contributing to mass extinctions.

Its global organisation is wasting enormous amounts of fossil fuel and hastening climate change.

The powerful lobby that ensures the continuation of subsidies, which mean that meat and other animal products are available for less than the real cost of production, is undermining any attempt to bring about real improvement.

Food is rocketing in price not through some natural development but because of corporate control of decision-making.

Biofuels may be the most striking symptom of the disease, but the disease itself is corporate capitalism.

Growing your own food won't do anything to change that, if you see it in isolation.

Seen as part of a movement to take back control of our own lives, however, it can provide a key to understanding how the world works and then, as the man said, changing it.

Our culture increasingly encourages us to be passive consumers. Growing your own makes you a producer.

You may be a producer when you go to work, though, presuming that you live in Britain, this is increasingly unlikely.

And, even if you are producing something, you may never get to see, still less use, the finished product.

Producing your own food is the most direct, non-alienated form of labour imaginable.

Plant a seed. Nurture it until it becomes a mature plant, hoeing the soil around it and pulling up weeds. Harvest the plant or its leaves or its fruits. Cook or otherwise prepare the results. Eat it, feed it to your loved ones and friends, put the waste into the compost bin.

You will then see the corporate version of life for what it is - a shallow imitation of the real thing, just as a corporate hamburger is a shallow imitation of food, watching the Champions League on the telly a shallow imitation of real football, parliamentary politics a shallow imitation of democracy, pornography a shallow imitation of sex between friends or lovers.

Growing your own food reconnects you with reality.

It enables you to see the fact that strawberries can be bought to eat on Christmas Day, that little tiny vegetables are flown to Britain from Kenya, that fresh asparagus can be had that was grown in south America not as what these things present themselves as being, benefits of the wonders of globalisation, but as what they really are, obscenely wasteful and utterly stupid.

Of course, not everyone has the space or time to grow a large proportion of their own food.

But, if you have a lot of mouths to feed, no land and work long hours, I still think that you would gain something from growing your own.

I'm self-employed, live in the countryside, my kids are grown up and I'm not poor. But, when none of these things was true, I still grew things.

Green, yellow and red peppers, tomatoes, aubergines and most herbs grow wonderfully on windowsills in Britain.

You can buy sprouting seeds from a health food shop and grow them in your bathroom, getting a tasty and protein-rich salad vegetable for a few pence in a few days.

If you don't have a garden, you can also grow a lot of food plants in boxes or pots outdoors.

If you do have a garden but don't grow food, you should really consider starting.

If you've got a lawn, which is a kind of home-made desert, tear it up, flog the mower on e-bay and use the proceeds to buy seeds.

Growing your own food takes as much or as little time as you like, depending on how much stuff you want or have space for and what you choose to grow.

As I began by saying, it isn't the way to save us from the terrible system which is leading us to destruction.

It won't narrow widening inequalities, right glaring injustices or put meaning back into words like "democracy" or "rights."

But it just might give you heart for the fight.