Nothing quite beats the taste of home-grown produce. Apart from cultivating them, my favourite hobby is cooking with fruit or veg I’ve grown. And there are crops out there that are so good to eat, freshly picked, that they seldom make it into the kitchen at all.
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I’m not alone: one in three adults in the UK grow at least some of their own food. During lockdown, sales of vegetable seeds out-stripped that of flowers for the first time since the Second World War, and around 120,000 people are now waiting for one of the UK’s 300,000 allotments. There are so many ways in which gardening is beneficial for our health, but harvesting fresh fruit and veg is a very special bonus.
You are what you eat
Growing our own helps us regain control of the cultivation process. In sole charge of our own plots, we can leave aside all pesticides, recycle garden waste to use as a mulch and a fertiliser, rotate our crops to protect the soil, and enjoy locally grown and organically produced food. Although there’s little evidence of organic food’s health benefits per se, we do know that exposure to pesticides and insecticides causes skin and respiratory problems in the short term, and in the longer term, nervous system and hormone problems, and can be carcinogenic.
We also know that if you grow your own, you’re more likely to eat more healthily. Cooking any recipe from scratch with home-grown ingredients is both liberating and better for us, while eating ready-meals and ultra-processed foods has been linked to more than 30 different health problems, including heart disease, hypertension, obesity and a variety of cancers. A University of Sheffield study showed that while the UK falls short of eating the recommended five-a-day portions of fruit and veg (the national average is 3.7 portions), the rate is higher (6.7) among gardeners growing their own.
More people than ever want to grow their own, for a variety of reasons, says Dr Richard Claxton, and this one thing can improve our health and help the planet
And it’s not just the quantity – the quality can be so much better too. Once picked, the content of nutrients in our crops falls off dramatically. This is especially true for vitamins and antioxidants such as anthocyanins and lycopene. A week after harvesting, even if refrigerated immediately, fresh produce has been shown to have lost 50 per cent of its vitamin C content. Antioxidants prevent cell-damage by mopping up unstable molecules called free-radicals, which trigger diseases such as diabetes and cancer, and accelerate ageing.
Freshness tastes better, but ripeness at the point of picking is also important, and can be maximised in your own plot’s harvests. Lycopene has been shown to protect against many chronic diseases and cancers. The lycopene concentration in crops escalates with their ripeness, and – like vitamin levels – falls after picking. So there’s a significant health benefit when you’ve grown your own, picked it at its peak ripeness, and eaten it on the same day.
A world of choice
The cultivars we grow can also make a difference. So much of what sits on our supermarket shelves has been selected for maximum yields, shelf-life and pest-resistance, instead of flavour or nutrition. Heirloom varieties are different: tomato cultivars such as ‘Brandywine’ and ‘Cherokee Purple’ have been shown to be more nutritious, with higher concentrations of vitamins and antioxidants, as well as flavour.
Moreover, as both a gardener and a dad I can attest that the importance of the yum-factor is not to be underestimated when encouraging children to try new things from the garden – especially things that may not look quite as perfect as those from the supermarket. Teaching them about healthier eating is crucial both to protect them and their planet.
So the impact of fresh, home-grown produce on our own health is undeniable – but what about the wider benefits from an ecological perspective? A Chatham House report in 2019 identified food production as the single biggest driver behind biodiversity loss, and agriculture itself the biggest threat to 86 per cent of species at risk of extinction. Land clearance and pesticide use are two of the main factors behind this, and the report calls for a shift towards more plant-rich diets, more land being set aside for nature, and a change in farming methods to be more nature-friendly and biodiversity-supportive.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that in 2019 up to 37 per cent of all global emissions stemmed from food production. An EDGAR-Food report unpacks this, and the heavy cost of feeding eight billion people is laid bare. Agriculture is responsible for 71 per cent of these emissions, the remainder is from transport, retail, packaging and waste treatment.
Call to arms
In her latest book, Landlines, Raynor Winn witnesses an industrial silage harvest in action and summarises the situation with grim alacrity: ‘I wonder where all the life that these fields supported has gone. Has it even survived the day? But this is the choice we make every time we shop… this vast area of land stripped of insect life in minutes is the true cost of cheap food. No matter how many wild flower seeds we sow in our gardens, it’s an equation that can’t be balanced.’
A salutary statement. But one that should be heard as a call to arms – or to the toolshed. A trug-full of home-grown produce, produced packaging-free in a garden or allotment that’s alive with wildlife and biodiversity, providing a household with the elemental raw materials for a healthier diet and lifestyle, is the way we can grow our own good health, at the same time as rescuing the health of our planet.