Grow & Share Food

Our common ground best manifests in our food– we all eat, and we all become what we eat. We talk, we cook, we share. Take a walk down any historical path and you’ll eventually get back to food. 

Many of the first colleges of the modern American higher education system were land-grant universities that taught farmers agricultural practices. The first sizable civilizations were farm settlements. Currency, wheels, fire, pretty much all technology traces back to something to do with agriculture. 

Nothing about this is coincidental as all civilizations are made of biological beings that learned over time to innovate ways to use Earth for sustainable sustenance. Humans and land have co-evolved for millennia. Just like ants, termites, and fish build their land and coral colonies. 

We find ourselves at a paradox, because on the one hand we need more food for our growing population, and on the other hand we have billions who are food insecure. All the while there are tons of food waste, and countries like the UK and America live in abundance of food, textiles, and electronics. We are running out of space with fertile soil, and climate change is ruining crop seasons and putting farmers further into debt. Modern day colonialism and warfare threaten food sovereignty in Middle Eastern and African countries. 

The title of this section is Grow & Share Food, and I realize that seems like an extreme over-simplification of everything I’ve described, as well as is very US-centric, but allow me to explain. 

As a whole, I believe Western citizens, particularly in the US, ought to have a kind of agricultural renaissance. Farming as a career has dwindled significantly over the years as companies are known to have strict policies on which seeds to grow, how animals are kept, and continue to push farm families into a cycle of poverty. There’s also many cases of more severe practices happening on both US soil and exporting countries. But far separated from the side-effects, grocery shoppers pick from air-conditioned fruit orchards, our department stores are cotton fields, the Best Buy is a mineral mine. Perfectly designed food and products come off the shelves after the materials have bounced around miles before landing in carts. Land cultivation is widely accepted as an unideal job, but also one that is abstract to most consumers.

Taking pages from other sections in Context Grounding, I believe that drawing down on consumption, learning to cultivate our land with kindness and share what we grow will over time draw communities inward. To me, what happens in the grocery stores and the roads of America are not separate from the loneliness, depression, and opioid epidemics. We have built our own prisons, locking ourselves in with only pleasure-inducing activities, and kept the windows open just enough to keep us from totally collapsing. But the walls are beginning to break as we claw for fresher air. It is in simplifying the narrative that I believe we will find ultimate peace.

How do we simplify the narrative? We return to our roots. 

We grow food, and we share food. 

It sounds so easy that it’s ridiculous. There’s no way. You have a job. You have kids. You live somewhere where you can’t grow food. You don’t know how, and it seems hard and hot and dirty and expensive. Not to mention, the world’s people can’t be fed on subsistence agriculture.

I know, and believe me I understand. Here is where I begin to reintroduce the idea of embracing paradox and uncertainty. I too have trouble imagining a world where Americans turn our lawns and golf courses into gardens and growers markets. I’m not sure about the future of Florida where I’ve lived my whole life, let alone the rest of the world. But I do sense signals. There’s a trend of people buying property to start forests and farms. Abandoned parking lots are turning into successful community gardens. Regenerative agriculture and permaculture techniques are becoming more popular. Organizations are working to protect the lives and livelihoods of laborers. 

I’m aware of the typical responses to what I’m presenting. I’m no fool, I know this has significant idealist undertones. You may have thought when reading Sunshine Valley that it would be impossible to implement such a system in the “real world”. The problem is that in our Catch-22 “real world” situation, we are working towards our own demise. Farmers, miners, white-collar workers alike are all employed in a system edging towards collapse. This is not meant to compare circumstances, but instead to rescale how we debate these issues by drawing a larger frame. 

The uncomfortable, paradoxical truth is that there wouldn’t be poor labor and environmental conditions if wealthier consumers didn’t pay for products that relied on intense fossil fuels. But corporate dollars fund livelihoods for both importers and exporters. In the US we’re faced with either climbing our ladder of choice, or trying to make it as an entrepreneur. Owning a small business feels to many leaders like they’re breaking a cycle and doing good for society. But it always seems at some point, decisions are made to cut costs, causing harm somewhere in the supply chain.  

We have far more to gain than lose if we all learned how to grow and share food. More Western scientists and doctors are starting to look to our guts and soil for secrets to longevity. In a very magical sense, life transfers from soil to plants, from plants to animals, and tiny organisms in our bodies help break everything down into usable energy. Outside in the dirt, barefoot in the sun is where life cycles through us. When we think of farming as an abstract concept, it falls to the same pattern as Nature itself. Not only do we misunderstand natural rhythms, but we separate ourselves from what we’re connected to. We’re lonely, having been removed from our mother, forced to fight with each other for fakeness in the shops. 

Grow & Share Food is not an answer, it is a pathway. It is up to us to decide how we walk along. In that spirit, we get to determine what makes sense for us in our situation. That is one of the most critical lessons in local agriculture that industrial ag consistently gets wrong– there is no one-size-fits-all solution to growing food. Bioregions and cultural diets alone create enough complex dynamics to warrant localized care. Grow & Share Food is not about forcing everyone to become a farmer, but to instead consider what it means to be a person who has to eat. What does that mean? And how do our choices shape the future? Returning to the Introduction, life always impacts.

If we can collectively simplify how we choose to live and eat, there may be more to follow.

Read more in The Charter 1.0