Groundsite Image Gallery
Green-beans
Artist: Jost, Lora
Date: 1999
Medium: mixed-media with embroidery and paper plates
Height: 0.000"
Width: 0.000"
Keywords: subsistence
Quote (within artwork) by a Kansas Garden Farmer, 1999: “There isn’t any rural area anymore. These people buy their milk at the store. They buy their eggs at the store. My neighbor woman—her husband’s one of the bigger farmers in the area, and she had to ask me what you do with fresh green beans—somebody’d given them to her. They don’t know what food is anymore. That’s what makes me think I’m not sure they’re really farmers. I mean—I know that they know a whole lot more than I do about herbicides and pre-emergers, and all the words that are in their vocabulary that aren’t in mine. And I’m just not really sure that they understand about the dirt, and the fact that—you know you can grow tomatoes in a can of rocks as long as you put fertilizer on it. And I feel like that’s what they do, you know, that they don’t—that there’s nothing there for them. And I’m not sure that if you go on for a long time that way, maybe you’d be satisfying the bank but not satisfying the soul. Then I’m not sure you’re a farmer.”