You're making a huge number of assumptions, both about gardening and about farming. 1. Not everyone uses those pots, and there are lots of alternatives. Many s

You're making a huge number of assumptions, both about gardening and about farming. 1. Not everyone uses those pots, and there are lots of alternatives. Many serious gardeners start from seed. Also, you provide no actual analysis of how much waste these contribute relative to vegetable farms + shipping + supermarkets, which also involves a lot of plastic. 2. Peat is terrible, and also totally unnecessary. What's needed here is regulation. 3. Expensive, perhaps. Claiming that farms use surface water is simply untrue. Try flying over the American west some time: those little circles are often the result of depleting ground water and pumping it onto the arid ground. Both gardens and farms can be far more water efficient than they currently are (personally I use salvaged mulch and drip irrigation), but farming is currently crazily unsustainable water-wise, both in terms of consumption and contamination. It is definitely, definitely possible to garden in an environmentally positive way. Almost everything used can be reused or obtained from other sources (single use food plastic is great for seed starting), pests can be managed at a small scale without pesticides, and efficient water practices are easy. It's also easier to incorporate efficient perrenial crops at a small scale. Also, there are second order effects to be considered in connecting people to their food systems. Nobody notices if the far away farm providing their veggies is operating responsibly, but growing their own or getting involved with urban growers lets them see the process up close and be connected to it.