Time was, a rose was a rose, and an apple was an apple. They came from someone’s plants long before money came along to insinuate itself into the deal. No labels, no sticker, no barcode; just plants.
So I’m wondering, when you picked a rose or plucked an apple, was it considered to be an economic activity? How on earth did buying and selling them become more respectable than growing and exchanging? Just because we call it produce, doesn’t mean it has to be a product. And probably better if it wasn’t. At least it would be nice to have a choice. To buy or not to buy, that is the question…
Food cannot really be considered part of the economy, even a so-called local economy, if that means some kind of necessary exchange of money for food. Food is more of a required condition for anything like an economy to become a recognized entity. Without a food supply, nothing resembling economic activity would ever become apparent. No one would be “there” for it to be apparent to.
Now with the global economy collapsing everywhere, commoditized food joins the list of endangered species. We will discover that an enduring food supply is one that has de-coupled from the money economy, one that has been de-commodified as a source of dollars. For a food supply to become ecologically endurable, for it to have any longevity into future generations, it must become once again something gifted and exchanged among neighbors.
And that can only happen when more neighbors are actual producers instead of consumers. But not producers for a market, not producers of something to sell. Neighbors can become the producers of sustenance, nutrition and fertility that stays close to home, because it’s what Home is really made of, after all. These kinds of Producers produce a hit show called Feed All the Babies and Put Them to Bed. Matinees daily.
And how do we go about de-commodifying food when buying food is the way food is done today? This is the genius seed that lies latent within the Community Supported Agriculture farm marketing system. Even though shares in a CSA farm are now largely purchased with dollars, that’s only because we are all currently stuck in a gambling house that only accepts house chips!
The core CSA idea of collecting a membership around a producing farm is the very nexus, the synaptic cross-over point where the transition from a dollar economy to a direct exchange economy can be nurtured, cultivated and grown to maturity. In this sense, even though it could be perceived as a loss of economic activity, the sooner that purchased food becomes obsolete, the better.
But won’t removing food from economic activity result in isolation, the destruction of markets and an absence of trade? Big Corporate AgBiz would like you to think so. But that would be as absurd as a complete, blind dependence on buying and marketing for every conceivable human need; now who could ever put up with that?
Less spending of dollars and more exchanging and barters; that’s the way food will be done now and into the future. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a scarcity of dollars or a scarcity of food that compels us there. Or both at once! One way or another, we’ll be back to feeding each other, so we might as well start now so we can remember how to do it before we really have to.
Because with food, believe it or not, there’s a direct correlation between distance traveled and quality. That is, the worst food comes from farthest away, and the best food comes from closest at hand. You’d think this would be obvious to folks who eat food every day. It’s not missed by those who grow it every day.
Likewise, a direct correlation in food exists between distance and its actual presence or absence. When food comes from nearby, it’s more likely to be regularly available, and more importantly, less likely to become completely unavailable. Whereas the opposite is equally true; the farther away one’s source of food, the less likely it is to be endlessly available, and far more likely to someday become unavailable.
Only a society of shoppers drunk on oil could possibly miss this. But gardeners don’t.
These perennial facts are obscured through our utter and complete reliance upon fragile refrigeration and our irrational faith in its enduring ubiquity. For without acre upon acre of warehoused cold storage, the industrial food machine sits and rots on the dock.
The dependability of interstate commerce as well as electrical power supply grids must be invincible, infallible and uninterruptible for the nutrients to flow down fluorescent aisles in the manner to which we are, unfortunately, accustomed to the point of addiction.
And we all know they are none of the above.
Tags: agribusiness, food supply, gardening, local economy