My Big Fat Greek Garden

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Sunday, July 04, 2010

This is an excerpt from our book, Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner, Greener, Safer Home

Melina Kanakaredes: Growing up in Akron, Ohio, right in front of a state park, I definitely had an appreciation for nature – playing outside until dark, the streetlights signaling it was time to come in, was one of the formative memories of my youth.

But that deep connection to nature came principally from spending summers in Greece with my grandparents, who were born there, and my extended family. Everyone in our village had a garden, and on Fridays we would pick our own grape leaves and eat them stuffed. I’d swim in the ocean and pull mussels off the rocks, which we’d cook for dinner that night. I’d bring buckets to the man with the cow for milk, and of course we always had locally made olive oil.

My parents referred to our diet as “peasant food,” but it was delicious and fresh. I never once heard the word “organic,” but we lived it. It just makes so much sense to live off of the bounty of everything around you – for food as well as for other basic human ministrations. Because of my cultural background, a lot of products I used contained natural ingredients – olive oil-based shampoos and soaps. As a Greek kid, that was your medicine. You fell and hurt yourself? Put olive oil on the bruise. I may have smelled like salad but the bruises went away quickly.

When you become a parent, you’re offered a chance to do things in a new way, to be more conscious about the decisions you make because each one affects more than just you. You want to give your children the greatest parts of what your parents gave you and then maybe take it even a step further. From my family I learned respect for using and not abusing the land, not taking it for granted.

Now I’m trying to convey to my two girls the value of simple things, especially given the opulence of LA and big-city life: eating fresh food from the farmers’ market; looking for fairies or lightning bugs in the woods rather than sitting in front of the TV; observing how the flowers and trees change with the seasons.

We love watching things grow. In our yard we have some amazing fruit trees – grapefruit, lemon, fig – which remind me so much of Greece. You can just grab the grapefruit off the tree and eat it for breakfast. I am always yanking figs off the tree for a snack. My father-in-law, who’s also Greek, likes to pull a cucumber out of the garden when he gets to the house and eat it with sea salt. Just as in Greece, where everything’s natural, we don’t use pesticides.

I can’t contemplate putting poison on all this incredible greenery, not to mention in places where my girls play. I’ve only started to dabble in organic gardening – my husband is the maestro at it, but I keep up the effort to assist – and being the granddaughter of immigrants, it’s ingrained in me not to waste anything. To me, respect for the environment is simply another core value we can give our children, like respect for family or good manners. It’s something I work on doing a little bit, every day. Because it’s really our contribution not just to them but to their children.

Taken from Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Cleaner, Greener, Safer Home. Reprinted by arrangement with Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright (c) 2009 by Healthy Child Healthy World. To read more from Holly and many others, pick up your copy of our book, today.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of Healthy Child Healthy World.