One basic lesson to be learned while growing up is that there will be trouble if you don’t consider the potential consequences of your actions. Say you drew an excellent portrait of the mean old neighbor lady on the sidewalk in front of her house, forgetting in the heat of creative endeavor that she’s usually at her window, looking for things to complain about.

It’s likely that soon your father or mother yelled: What were you thinking? You’re in trouble. There’s a price to pay. Maybe it was worth it. Maybe the only thing you regret as you erase your art work is that you used indelible markers. Next time you’ll be more careful, think ahead.

A basic skill most of us acquire is how to recognize things that belong together and to put them together. Some learn that only enough to get good grades on multiple-choice tests. Others come to see connections between the chicken on the table and the factory farm where underpaid workers cut up that bird, their hands hurting with tendinitis.

As we mature toward wisdom, we may also notice that “out of sight, out of mind” doesn’t work. Everything we try to destroy or banish turns up again, and sometimes it bites us.

Yet as a society we often ignore these basic precepts. Almost all our troubles grow from failure to consider in full the effects of personal, corporate, and government actions.

The young people who converted old school buses to run on fast-food restaurant grease had a good idea. But it’s a terrible leap from there to growing subsidized corn for biofuel. Surely it was foreseeable that the price of food would rise around the world, more people would starve, and the destruction of rainforests in Brazil would accelerate. Why wasn’t that taken into account?

Failure to examine the effects of new products beyond their intended uses keeps creating new problems. It’s more than a half-century since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, yet new chemical substances continue to be marketed in ill-considered ways.

As a society we keep making the same mistake. We grab an idea--maybe a good one, but insufficiently examined--and run with it, not seeing that it’s only a bit of some larger whole. Then we trip over what we’ve ignored. An example is the situation described in “Rx Quandary.” Billions of dollars are spent on developing and selling prescription drugs, without considering what happens after people buy them. Why are Americans taking so many narcotics--mostly prescribed? Why do so many young people turn to this form of self-destruction? Shouldn’t the drug control agencies consider what is missing in so many young lives?

Tangled up in thinking about the “Rx Quandary,” I stumbled upon a great remedy for stress and confusion on Labor Day weekend. In front of San Francisco’s City Hall, on the formal plaza traditionally used for protests and demonstrations, an amazing Victory Garden had materialized. It was one of several parts of the first-ever Slow Food Nation festival, which brought together some 60,000 people.

Huge mounds of rich, dark soil had been piled atop the concrete and beautifully planted with a wide variety of vegetables. Chard, kale, beets, tomatoes, corn, and other healthy edibles, selected for harmony in shape and color, were glowing with health and vigor. Long beans supported by split-bamboo pyramids reached for the sky. Sunflowers smiled above the crowd.

The garden was enclosed by sinuous low straw-bale walls and threaded by winding paths. Outside it, booths offered farm products to take home, compost and worm castings so you could grow your own, and wholesome food to enjoy on the spot.

The aroma of spicy pork on a grill drew me to a booth where Italian sausage sandwiches with red peppers and onions were being dispensed. The pork came from a farm in Myrtle, Missouri, where pigs get to do what pigs enjoy, and no antibiotics whatsoever are used.

I signed the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture, and then a statement of support for State Proposition 2, which would prohibit the confining of calves, breeding pigs, and hens in tiny cages barely larger than their bodies. (That’s long been illegal in Europe.) Then I moved on to a booth where Ben Chan, public relations officer for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, was enthusiasticaly dispensing tap water--water fresh from Hetch Hetchy reservoir--in cups made of corn. Delicious.

Slow Foods started in Italy in 1989, in resistance to fast food and fast life, but it has matured and grown a lot since then. This was far more than a celebration of simple foods and the pleasures of growing, cooking, and eating them. Here the entire cycle of our food chain was being considered.

Before leaving, I stopped at a stall selling shiitake mushrooms, $4 for a basket. I usually buy them for $3 at the big City Farmers Market--which started during World War II, when the only other Victory Garden was created in front of City Hall--but the grower I buy from, John Garroni, also has a stand on Sundays a block away, at a farmers’ market started many years ago by the American Friends Service Committee. So I walked over and found him. “Why are you not at the Slow Foods festival?” I asked. He laughed. His mushrooms were there--he picked the good-looking ones for that--but he was at his stand for his regular customers. His “uglies” were $3.

Garroni’s parents came from Italy after World War II, grew pears, apricots, and other crops in Santa Clara County, and sold them at the City Market. John got into mushroom cultivation. “Have you tried these?” he asked, pointing to some crinkly white fungi. I hadn’t. “Here,” he said, handing me a paper bag. It was a gift to a long-time customer. What a good feeling. I walked back through the square. The nation is in big trouble, but great stuff has been growing in our communities all along. We only need to look.