I planted my first seeds last weekend. Do you find that a bit early? I always do it at this time, regardless of weather. Once I even dug down through a foot of snow and hacked into frozen ground to do it. I use some old wire baskets turned upside down for a frame, then cover the whole thing over with plastic.

I plant leaf lettuce, spinach and radishes. Those can freeze and thaw without harm, like grass. By early to mid-May, I’m picking. Meanwhile, some of last year’s parsnips are still in the ground, and 10 times tastier than that pasty stuff you buy in the store.

For people in the fast lane, “gardening” has the ring of some fuddy-duddy hobby. But in fact, it’s a good place to start when contemplating a number of troublesome issues, mostly endemic to the fast lane: bad eating and obesity; the problems arising in our increasingly globalized, chemically sodden, energy-wasting, genetically manipulated food system; and our personally and societally destructive detachment from nature.

One thing seems to me particularly wasteful. On average, we’re too fat and out of shape because we eat badly and don’t exercise enough. When we do exercise, we go to gyms, walk for miles, and whatnot. If even part of that human energy could be diverted to useful ends, we’d be on our way to a better state of affairs.

Growing your own is one of those useful ends, in that you both eat better and keep fit growing it. Nor does living in the city necessarily exempt you.

One of the eye-opening horticultural events of recent years involves Havana, Cuba. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 1980s, so did its subsidies to Cuba, and Cuba was in trouble. Since then, Havana has come to grow some 75 per cent of its own food within the confines of the city; and Cuba generally, political tyranny or not, has delivered one of the world’s most remarkable examples of self-starting, sustainable agriculture.

Other Third World cities do the same to some extent, out of necessity. But in the usual places — the U.S. West Coast, parts of Europe — urban agriculture is catching on in the First World as well. At one school in Berkeley, Calif., they’re even teaching it in school — the kids grow, analyze and sometimes cook plants as part of biology class.

In Halifax, it has always annoyed me to see those bland suburban lots from end to end doing nothing — except, perhaps, being groomed at tremendous cost to look like artificial turf. And a huge lot, acres wide, fertilized and mowed to within an inch of its life is something I find downright shocking — like monster homes and vehicles, it’s a symbol of waste, not to mention lack of imagination. Let a few wildflowers grow, plant fruit trees, have a garden, for heaven’s sake!

And even in a very small space in the city, if there’s sun coming down, things like tomatoes, string beans, cucumbers, squash, lettuce and others can produce a lot in a small space.

Then there’s the question of the quality of the food. You can’t beat picking it and cooking it, or eating it raw, right out of the garden — if not your own, then from your local organic farmer.

That’s different, to say the least, from suspicions about herbicides, pesticides, genetic engineering, preservatives, additives and whatnot rampant around the established food system.

And now the questions are going further. I was reading recently about some British expert opinion making the connection between degenerative diseases — osteoporosis, diabetes, etc. — and chemical agriculture. The argument was that plants grown exclusively with chemical fertilizers don’t pick up minerals from the soil properly, have thinner cell walls and are therefore deficient, although they look good. People are being starved of the necessary minerals.

If you grow your own, you’ll tend to like your stuff. You might be more inclined to eat what’s in season, rather than expect the same thing year-round, trucked in from California. After you’ve eaten your own tomato, your nose will go up at that wooden stuff.

You might rediscover the “slow food” your grandmother made, and whose traditions have largely been lost as McCains, McDonald’s and the fast-cooking crowd substituted their wares for hers.

You’ll likely compost in the backyard, using it for fertilizer and therefore reducing the waste burden. As with local farming, you’ll be making a statement about homegrown production.

And, finally, you’ll pick up the lost connection with nature, and you may even find a bit of calm amid the frenzy while tending your plants. Plants have their imperceptible pace, refreshingly different from ours, and every seed that opens is a miracle of birth at its most elementary level.