Back in September, I wrote about the man in Georgia who is faced with legal action and massive fines for growing his own vegetables.
This morning, a Daily Mail report appears on the Food Freedom website about a Michigan woman who has been charged with a misdemeanor and faces as much as 3 months of jail time for growing vegetables in her front yard — because the city code requires front yards to be ‘suitable,’ and apparently that means they should grow only grass.
We are a nation that prides itself on rugged individualism. We like to boast of our Constitution and Bill of Rights that protect and even encourage independence of spirit, freedom of expression, and self-reliance. At the same times, laws and codes exist to punish those who don’t wear the uniform of the masses.
In Michigan we have a woman who is taking sensible steps to provide healthy food for her family by growing it herself. In the process, she and her family exhibit the traits that we like to think of as ‘all-American’ — self-sufficiency, hard work, and appreciation for the land and its bounty.
The city wants her to hide her fresh produce behind a house or a fence; they are uncomfortable with the explicit nature of agriculture, offended by the sight of genuine food displayed for anyone to see. The City Planner wants a uniform appearance to front yards — nice and grassy, with no hint of real life spilling out.
I wonder if this same city is offended by our nation’s health crisis and by the shocking number of grossly obese children and adults who live on processed substances instead of real food.
Deborah - thank you so much for blogging about this. I had no idea! Keep up the great work. Love reading your blog.
It’s one of those Stranger Than Fiction things, isn’t it? Who on earth could have imagined that a person would be fined and threatened with jail time just for growing vegetables? Certain herbs, perhaps. But carrots and tomatoes???
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Voice your objections to this city’s policies as I have.
Send you message to:
City Manager Rick Fox: Oak Park, MI.
rfox@ci.oak-park.mi.us
K5SET? You’re a Ham?
Are you kidding? That’s outrageous.
Of course, if things ever get really bad-like starvation time-those same city officials will be confiscating any produce that they can find for the good of the public. Then she can tell them to go eat grass. Read: One Second After. In this book, people are turning over their yards to grow whatever they can.
I’m not sure the average person recognizes that food grows from the ground. In our world, it comes from the supermarket and from McDonald’s, doesn’t it? I’m also not sure what bothers me more about this story — that ANYONE would complain about a person growing their own food or that they would complain about a front yard that doesn’t look exactly like every other yard on the street.