Gardening as a journey - Pt 1, The destination

Eatable gardening can be thought of as a journey. Most journeys, as opposed to simply wandering about, begin with a determination of the destination. For many years when I thought about gardening I pretty much mentally considered it starting by preparing the soil, with the destination being the harvest. However, while gardening is really cyclical, with a new iteration each year, now I consider the destination not the harvest, but the plate.

A quick side note which will become important a bit later. Why do we eat? It sounds like such a simple question with a simple knee-jerk answer... "because I'm hungry dummy". But are we hungry merely for filler or something else? Besides being generally hungry, have you ever had a specific craving? Of course you have, we all have. Those who are really in tune with their bodies, can tell what they need to eat, or drink based on very subtle cravings. Many of us are not so dialed into our bodies, and only really notice a craving when the body is SCREAMING for something, (often sugar), or in some cases other non-nutritive substances. In these extreme cases, it may be more the symptom of an addiction, than a nutritional need.

My point is, that we do not eat merely to fill a space, a void, rather we are providing the materials to build and sustain an energy hungry superorganism, much like a city or society, which needs to build and repair infrastructure, fuel these activities and "commerce", deal with byproducts of the superorganism's activities and more. Thus, we eat for fuel/energy, building materials/nutrients, and other needs.

Now, back to the plate as part of the eatable garden. The entire point of all the effort and patience, is not the harvest, as that is but one more step, but to put a collection of items onto a plate or into a bowl, which then ends up in a person's digestive system, with an appropriate amount of nutrients and calories, to directly feed our cells, or to feed the flora and fauna within our digestive system, which make this nutrition available to us.

We also understand that it is hard to do any kind of construction, if at the very same time, there is deconstruction occurring. Imagine trying to build a house, assembling and erecting walls, running plumbing and wiring, mudding the sheetrock... while at the same time, there are others running around bashing sledgehammers into the work we did yesterday, picking up boxes of nails, coils of wire etc and either just leaving everything a mess, or actively tossing what should be building materials into the roll away dumpster? This is what essentially is happening, when we consume items which may have good ingredients, but also are chock full of residual poisons (herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, preservatives and so on). We are trying to build and repair, faster than the ongoing damage and degradation. Thus, we eat, to live. We eat for health and nutrition, not just to get full.