BY: Sharmila Ganesan-Ram
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/GM-food-is-almost-anti-Hindu/articleshow/5280499.cms

Seventeen years ago, Jules Dervaes placed in front of his three hungry kids a quarter-pound burger and a slightly heavier condition. They had to choose between the beef sandwich and a rectangle he’d drawn in the living room, which measured 55 square feet. “For every burger you eat, you lose about that much of rainforest,” Dervaes warned, pointing at it.

That day in 1992, space prevailed over food. The young trio killed their appetite, and the family has been vegetarian ever since. “You have to make people feel bad enough to make something good happen,” smiles 61-year-old Dervaes, who’s been trying to do precisely that for over 25 years-make others feel bad enough to want to plant seeds in their backyard.

The jolly American, who likes to call himself an urban homesteader (farmhouse owner), started sowing seeds outside his house in the monster city of Los Angeles almost two decades ago. Today, he owns a urban homestead which attracts not only green activists, science students and Americans who mistake his daughter’s goat for “some kind of a dog”, but also film festivals the world over. Recently, the Dervaeses screened their award-winning documentary Homegrown Revolution in Mumbai for wannabe homesteaders.

The film, which chronicles the family’s domestic green movement, starts with the Vietnam war, which disturbed then college student Dervaes enough to develop an ambition. He soon migrated to New Zealand, took up farming and felt like “I was travelling back in time”. While sweating it out in the fields, he ruminated about the path to progress: “Taking a step backwards.” A combination of circumstances forced him to move back to his homeland Florida, where he bought a 10-acre farm, but the need to give his kids “a better choice” forced him to sell the land and move to a low-income neighbourhood in LA in 1986. The backyard was full of mulch, and growing grass demanded money, attention and water.

So in the same uptight city, where vegetarians were branded as hippies, the Dervaes family decided to convert about 4,300 square feet of their backyard into a farm. The task ahead was Herculean-the soil had to be changed, a lot of digging was required and there was absolutely no precedent for their effort-but the three home-improvers were determined. Despite successive failures, non-cooperative weather, consistent loss of crop, time and money, they managed to transform their brown, worn lawn into a green organic garden. Their slow and steady endeavour, which now yields a produce of 6,000 pounds of tomatoes, broccoli, berries, peaches, red mustard, guavas and edible flowers annually, and is even supplied to local restaurants, is called Path To Freedom.

This freedom struggle entails some drastic lifestyle changes. There is an outdoor shower and the family bathes only once a week (sweat is fought by drinking water instead). The run-off helps irrigate their small farm. Three pygmy goats, two chickens, ducks and rabbits help the quality of soil by creating manure and form “the cutest composting system” according to 23-year-old Jordanne, the Dervaes’ youngest daughter. When she takes the goats for a hike, people stump her with their ignorance. “Is that a rabbit?” they’d ask. “A llama?” was another gem.

Jordanne says friends found her weird as she walked barefoot in the house, ate eggs that came from the chicken’s butt (”Where else do they think eggs come from?”) and had goats for pets. “You don’t smell like a goat,” they would say. “There is such a disconnect with basics,” Jordanne muses. In the US, she hears that farmers are starving. “But when we ask them how much land they have, they say ten acres,” reveals Jordanne, blinking. “I feel like saying, we have two chickens, you know.”

When the film was shown to students of an Udaipur college recently, a student said, “Thank you for bringing the Indian culture back to India.” That touched the Dervaeses, who feel more comfortable in India than in America. “In the West, we tend to think linearly,” explains Dervaes, drawing a straight ray and marking points named A, B and C across it on a notebook. “After producing and using, we don’t know what to do with the waste,” he says, circling the letter C. In the Third World, however, he finds that the same three letters form the vertices of a triangle called development. “Here, everyone recycles and works with their hands so there’s an instant connect with Nature.”

“Growing your own food is the only way of radical protest,” feels this persistent homesteader, for whom freedom means an escape from commercial monopoly over seeds and food. In 2001, when Genetically Modified corn turned up in food at Taco Bell, the cheerful gardener turned into a protester. The idea of GM food, strawberries being injected with a fish gene and the like seemed like an act against Nature to him. “GM, in my opinion, is almost anti-Hindu. The religion worships its trees and Nature,” feels Dervaes, who now has his own brand called Freedom seeds.

Homesteading may be a full-time occupation with crucial investments called time and space, yet Dervaes sees hope for Mumbai. When told about the terrace gardens here, he is impressed. “It’s a good thing you all have terraces-our terraces are full of air-conditioner ducts,” he smiles. “Start with whatever you have. Plant a seed, turn off lights, save water. The first step is to want to do it,” he says. The next one is to draw a rectangle.