In July 2016, I was sitting on the rooftop of a building in central London, listening to the gentle rumble of a nearby beehive, when I realised that my life had changed entirely. I didn’t intend to quit – quitting crept up on me. After eight years of working in the media, I was on a path to becoming an organic food grower, with a temporary side hustle of city beekeeping. Not long before that point, I was just like the people in the office building below me. My work days were spent behind a desk or lugging around camera equipment, but now I am devoted to a life of nurturing the soil and growing the plants that end up on our plates. I’m actually pretty comfortable with being a quitter. I used to work in television production, and with its short, temporary contracts I’d grown accustomed to making big changes every few months. In fact, it was a desire to evade a contract extension that put me on a plane to New York in 2010 without a return date. I was growing tired of my life in London and I wanted to explore somewhere new, and it was in New York that a seed was (literally and figuratively) sown for my unexpected change of profession. I encountered the alchemy of food growing for the first time at Brooklyn Grange – a rooftop farm that sits above New York’s busy streets and overlooks Manhattan. Dusky leaves of tuscan kale, peppers and tomatoes in unexpected shapes and colours, striped aubergines wearing spiked sepal hats – chaos of abundance in the most unlikely of places. I was captivated. From that day, all I could think about was getting through each week of working in documentary production so that, come the weekend, I could join the other farm workers at Brooklyn Grange while they harvested, planted out and raked the earth to a fine tilth, ready for the next sowing of seeds. After two seasons of volunteering there, I was determined to make growing food a bigger part of my life. So, as the city I’d come to love was celebrating Halloween, I boarded a plane headed for London. By the time I’d moved back to Hackney, I had a job working in the evenings – and occasionally nights – which left my days free to seek out the unlikely spaces where edible plants could be found growing in the city. After a year, I quit that role and tried to take on any job – each day a different one – that meant I could spend my days outside, my hands in the soil. I stepped into all kinds of roles and every one taught me something precious. Working as a school gardener showed me how little room there is in the school day and national curriculum for children to learn about how food arrives on their plate; training as a beekeeper taught me that growing nectar-rich flowers is a far better way of supporting pollinators than keeping hives; and growing organic salad leaves to supply a veg box that filled the plates of people in Hackney made me realise there is nothing quite so ordinary and yet somehow remarkable than the act of feeding people. Leaving London in 2019 to move to a more rural location changed the shape of my life. Now, in a garden of my own, I grow vegetables and fruit of my own choosing, and I write and talk about the importance of doing so while encouraging others to give it a try. I also write and talk about the issues around food growing that have captured my attention along the way – such as the inherently political nature of working the land and issues around land justice, the dynamics of race and belonging especially in rural spaces, and how the legacies of colonialism manifest themselves throughout agriculture and horticulture. I’m probably too romantic in the way I speak about working the land. The fact that it is a difficult and arduous way to make a living is worth stating – if only not to seem delusional. It is work that is backbreaking, exhausting and painfully underpaid. I have sacrificed my bodily wellbeing at its altar many times, yet it remains the most important thing I’ve ever done. This essential work has given my life more meaning than I have ever known and more purpose than I ever found pursuing a career in the media. Learning how to grow the plants that feed us has enabled me to cultivate a sense of deep connection with the natural world that had, before then, been entirely absent. It is a humble, skilled and determined pursuit, and I happen to believe it was meant for me. I’m certain I would always have found my way back to the soil, one way or another. Claire Ratinon is an organic food grower and writer