Leanda Lee
Early in my move to Macau, an old-hand expatriate advised me that to maintain healthy equilibrium, I should regularly spend time away from the city. Currently on that prescribed health break, I am at my kitchen table in the southern hemisphere’s late summer surrounded by sticky sweetness.
I’ve interrupted the honey harvest for the moment. There is a borrowed spinner with full frames of de-capped honey slowly dripping into a net-covered bucket – extracting honey and filtering wax in one go. On the table sits a full frame which I’ve partially de-capped with something that looks suspiciously like a giant lice comb. Another container holds the scrapings of wax capping which will be hung in a net bag over a bucket for a day or so. Then, there’s a pile of bee-gum: bits of dead bee, old comb and wax to be rendered down at some point for candles, moisturizers and BBQ fire starters.
Already spun frames sit ready to return to the bees to clean, reclaiming any remaining honey. Water that I have used to wash hands and sticky surfaces will also go back to the bees in shallow containers, so they don’t drown.
Everything’s honey sticky. Particularly the back-door handle – thus the hovering bee staring me down as I come and go.
I’m a world away from my life in Macau where we owe our existence to money.
I owe my existence to six inches of soil, rain and my bees. Indeed, we all do, but we tend to forget it, and leave its guardianship to someone else.
The issue of food security is not much discussed in Macau but typhoon Hato and the loss of water supply should have alerted us to our precarious reliance on centralised systems, import logistics and a lack of knowledge about how to produce food for our families. We are a generation of those who have forgotten. Our youth graze on pseudo-food snacks, and will run out to a fast-food joint instead of forage in the fridge. Convenience has brought with it the demise of self-reliance.
It is said there are three things in modern urban culture that cause all our disease: Lack of nutrition in our food, environmental toxins and stress. We are able to impact all three of these by taking back some control of our food. The lack of nutrition is because we are losing the knowledge of what to eat, how to cook, how to eat together and how to grow.
Complete dependence on the supermarket and F&B industry supply chain is not a fait accompli, even in our concrete jungle. Urban farming does not require a back garden. There are bee-hives on rooves in major cities which produce more prolifically than those in rural mono-culture agri-business farm regions because of the sheer diversity and abundance of well-maintained municipal gardens and home balconies.
My chillies, basils and even tomatoes do better on my Macau window-sill than against marauding possums and rainbow lorikeets. Nutrition is far higher from these pots than anything that can be bought after sitting in boxes and on shelves days or weeks after harvest.
Grow something, anything. Teach the skills to your children, and increase your health through nutrient-dense produce. It is hard to get away from stress, its everywhere, but tending an edible plant can be quite the zen-like experience.
There’s a bit of the tree-hugger in these ideas, but urban micro-farming is not a wacky far-fetched concept. Food security, community building, abundance and health are all positive outcomes from many people each doing a little bit. Now to determine what urban micro-farming might look like in Macau: at least we know one thing, we have a mountain of solid/organic waste to kick-start it.
Any IRs up for starting a kitchen garden? I’ll have an apiarist on stand-by.
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