If you are worried about melamine in your milk, or what's on your veges, you might be keen to join the burgeoning movement of keen, home-grown enthusiasts getting into the garden.
Among them is Queenstown Times journalist Felicity Wolfe, discovering the joys and challenges of gardening and, like so many others, keen to take control of where her food comes from.
"Home-grown" takes on a whole new meaning in the light of the melamine exposure, yet another chapter in the somewhat scary unfolding saga of what is in the food we eat.
The latest movement to people growing their own comes some 30 years after the earlier mother earth, wholemeal, whole earth (remember the Whole Earth Catalogue?) revolution in the 1970s.
The issues back in the peace, love and freedom days of the '70s were avoiding pesticides and herbicides and eating an organic, balanced, whole foods, wholemeal and, sometimes, vegetarian diet.
Now, there are the additional concerns of genetic engineering, terminator gene technology (where seeds are bred to be infertile after one crop), mad cow disease and, for extra excitement, melamine.
Then there are additives.
When was the last time you read a product label? Did you know the number 621, for example, represents monosodium glutamate (MSG), a controversial flavour-enhancer?
And for those who like to think they have a conscience, what about the fair-trade status of your food product or the carbon footprint embedded in its production?
Just yesterday, news from research published in New Scientist showed the carbon emissions used to produce everyday food, such as a bowl of breakfast cereal and milk, had emitted as much greenhouse gas to get to your table as a 6km drive in an SUV would produce.
And as if all these are not good enough reasons to grow your own food, there is also the obvious benefit of enhancing your fitness and wellbeing.
While there is now plenty of research-based evidence to show the health benefits of getting out and into your garden, it is something our parents and grandparents practised through necessity and, some may say, for lack of alternative recreational opportunities.
The Arrowtown Horticultural Society flower show follows a long tradition started in this country in the 1800s, when the pioneers arrived and started growing their own food, and horticultural societies sprang up in every small town to foster gardening for pleasure as well as production.
Growing your own is one sure way, as the pioneers found, of taking control of what you eat, but also of celebrating the joys of gardening and assisting your sense of wellbeing.
Growing your own is not just about the food you eat, but taking time to smell the roses.
