Celebrating diversity
Friday, 31st January 2020 by Chen
colourful organic vegetables

 

We wrote this blog post back in June 2016, just after that vote. This feels like a good day to republish it.

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Now, more than ever, we need community, friendship and collaboration. We need to show even more emphatically that better ways of doing things are possible, ways that are fair and inclusive, nourishing and generous. Ways that are based on values and principles, not blame and selfishness. So we'll carry on doing that, celebrating the diversity of the GC community, bringing you the best produce that Europe's farmers can offer and hoping we can all find a positive and progressive way through these challenging times.

 

The roots of diversity...

Kerry came up with this brilliantly simple way of demonstrating how diversity is no end of a good thing.

We did some digging (sorry...) into where some of the fruit and veg in the bags came from (not this week, but where they originated from, millennia ago). This is what we found: 

carrots were first been cultivated in what is now Turkey; 

lettuce - Egypt; 

spinach - Iran; 

broccoli - Italy; 

onions - Pakistan;

potatoes - Peru; 

cucumber - India; 

peppers - Ecuador; 

asparagus - Greece; 

cabbage - Asia;

squash - Mexico;

apples - central Asia; 

oranges - southeast Asia; 

plums - Caucasian mountains;

bananas - West Africa; 

peaches - China

So pretty much everywhere but here. In fact, the only veg we could identify that the ancient inhabitants of these islands might have munched on were turnips and laver seaweed (both delicious, obviously, but you wouldn't want them every day). Says it all really. As a microcosm of how lives and cultures are enriched by immigration, look no further than your GC bag!