Guys, I can’t stop thinking about food systems. It’s haunting me and I can’t seem to give it up. I keep running over and over all the different variables and factors in my mind trying to make sense of this incredibly complex industrial system desperately looking for solutions.
It's interesting, yeah? Because someone needs to grow the things that the others don't grow. For all the people growing food in their yards, no one wants their extra cherry tomatoes and zucchini, because they are also full to the gills on Cherry tomatoes and zucchini.
And land. I'd love to be the wheat grower or the rice grower or the sweet potato grower in this equation, but no matter how regeneratively and intensively I plant my 1/8 acre, I'm not feeding anyone extra if it's all in wheat and then I'm out all my cabbage and collards and green beans... But then maybe I become a receptacle for that excess zucchini and cherry tomatoes - ha!
Have you stumbled across Skywoman/Blackbird/Chris Newman in your food systems work? He has some takes on how to go about it that aren't the same as all the others.
You know, part of this train of thought was brought on by the podcast Chris did with Poor Proles Almanac and I found it really disheartening. There was a lot of slamming of small scale ecological farming in the name of productivity and I think sometimes that trying to fit agriculture into the framework of capitalism makes us lose sight of the intention. I'm still sitting with this...
I think land access is a huge piece of the conversation. I think about the unused spaces in the rural community around me: swamps that might be used for wild rice; corn fields about that could maybe hold some different grains. And while I acknowledge that we can't all live on cherry tomatoes and zucchini alone, I do think we could do a lot by prioritizing those easy to grow crops!
I love the way the Internet can go in cycles of thought and content sometimes.
It does get disheartening, doesn't it? And there's so much to undo or think a-new with so many paths trying their best to get there.
I think about how I learned that the intent of capitalism (whether or not this is actual fact, rewritten history, or someone's hopeful account of it, I'm not sure...) was to create an excess. And then to have that excess distributed back into the people as the surplus it is. But instead it is hoarded and compounded exponentially creating wider and wider swaths of "less" in its wake of "more."
Go figure that once again, something thought up with the best intentions was turned sour by those who got ahold of it.
Coming back to this after some thought: do you think that was the intent? I wonder sometimes if we've deviated from a standard market economy and capitalism is a different beast that really does require inequality baked right in there. It's hard to remove my own bias to look at objectively knowing what I know about how it's all tuned out.
I tend to give many more benefits of the doubt than may be wise. I do think I read that somewhere that it was the intent, back when the system was someone's philosophy before it was someone else's real market, but I have attempted to sleep so many times since then that I couldn't say for certain.
I'd like to hope it was the intent. Like I hope the intent of those creating the internet was well-meant and they would pull the plug now if they could with where it's gone with hate and trolls and addiction.
I don't think we're inching away from an actual free market anymore. I think that died decades ago, if it ever actually existed. I think this corporate-run economy is a beast more akin to feudalism maybe than capitalism. We must work for the (corporate over)Lords in order to be allowed to live on their land and eke out an existence for our children. If we try and step out of the system they've created for their own benefit, there is no path and no longer enough collective memory (nor actionable energy) to create those paths quickly enough to not need to hop back into the system.
That was a random brain dump. Hopefully it made sense. I tried to step out of the system a few years ago. I am trying harder now to not be forced to step back into it as the cost of everything continues to soar.
It's interesting, yeah? Because someone needs to grow the things that the others don't grow. For all the people growing food in their yards, no one wants their extra cherry tomatoes and zucchini, because they are also full to the gills on Cherry tomatoes and zucchini.
And land. I'd love to be the wheat grower or the rice grower or the sweet potato grower in this equation, but no matter how regeneratively and intensively I plant my 1/8 acre, I'm not feeding anyone extra if it's all in wheat and then I'm out all my cabbage and collards and green beans... But then maybe I become a receptacle for that excess zucchini and cherry tomatoes - ha!
Have you stumbled across Skywoman/Blackbird/Chris Newman in your food systems work? He has some takes on how to go about it that aren't the same as all the others.
You know, part of this train of thought was brought on by the podcast Chris did with Poor Proles Almanac and I found it really disheartening. There was a lot of slamming of small scale ecological farming in the name of productivity and I think sometimes that trying to fit agriculture into the framework of capitalism makes us lose sight of the intention. I'm still sitting with this...
I think land access is a huge piece of the conversation. I think about the unused spaces in the rural community around me: swamps that might be used for wild rice; corn fields about that could maybe hold some different grains. And while I acknowledge that we can't all live on cherry tomatoes and zucchini alone, I do think we could do a lot by prioritizing those easy to grow crops!
Thanks as always for your thoughts Alli :)
I love the way the Internet can go in cycles of thought and content sometimes.
It does get disheartening, doesn't it? And there's so much to undo or think a-new with so many paths trying their best to get there.
I think about how I learned that the intent of capitalism (whether or not this is actual fact, rewritten history, or someone's hopeful account of it, I'm not sure...) was to create an excess. And then to have that excess distributed back into the people as the surplus it is. But instead it is hoarded and compounded exponentially creating wider and wider swaths of "less" in its wake of "more."
Go figure that once again, something thought up with the best intentions was turned sour by those who got ahold of it.
Coming back to this after some thought: do you think that was the intent? I wonder sometimes if we've deviated from a standard market economy and capitalism is a different beast that really does require inequality baked right in there. It's hard to remove my own bias to look at objectively knowing what I know about how it's all tuned out.
I tend to give many more benefits of the doubt than may be wise. I do think I read that somewhere that it was the intent, back when the system was someone's philosophy before it was someone else's real market, but I have attempted to sleep so many times since then that I couldn't say for certain.
I'd like to hope it was the intent. Like I hope the intent of those creating the internet was well-meant and they would pull the plug now if they could with where it's gone with hate and trolls and addiction.
I don't think we're inching away from an actual free market anymore. I think that died decades ago, if it ever actually existed. I think this corporate-run economy is a beast more akin to feudalism maybe than capitalism. We must work for the (corporate over)Lords in order to be allowed to live on their land and eke out an existence for our children. If we try and step out of the system they've created for their own benefit, there is no path and no longer enough collective memory (nor actionable energy) to create those paths quickly enough to not need to hop back into the system.
That was a random brain dump. Hopefully it made sense. I tried to step out of the system a few years ago. I am trying harder now to not be forced to step back into it as the cost of everything continues to soar.