The Unsquashable Local Food Dream
I have this dream. It’s been hanging around in my mind for a few years and I can’t quite shake it. I envision urban spaces where we grow food to feed the community. Raised beds on empty parking lots. Small scale farms in front of industrial complexes. In my dream, we’re growing this food together as volunteers, reaping the harvest together, distributing the food to people who need it most.
It’s a lovely dream, but comes with a lot of questions. Questions about land access, labour cost, financial sustainability, governance, structure. I roll the questions around in my head and shelf the dream because answers seem out of reach.
Now maybe it’s the algorithm or maybe it’s the landscape or maybe it’s the people in my circle, but I feel like now is the right time to try and answer some of these questions and, more importantly, share them with other people. The notion of building a post-capitalist food system that decommodifies something as important as food is not a dream one can have by one’s self.
Here’s some of the questions I’ve been asking:
- How might we might decommodify food in a capitalist economic system?
- How can we easily access land to grow food in urban or peri-urban spaces?
- Is it possible to be financially sustainable and be a small scale ecological farmer or market gardener?
- How can we position local food in the circular food economy when so much focus in on surplus food waste?
and most importantly:
- What is the role of local food production in resilient food systems?
Part of the problem is that I don’t know how to ask these questions. None of us do. There is no room for questions like these. They are riddled with conflict and division and heavily uninformed opinions. There is no time to ask them. There’s no room to ask them. And in the rare case that we do make space, we are so poor at extracting meaningful tangible answers that the best we can create is an empty framework or whitepaper destined to sit on a shelf for 30 years.
So I roll these questions around in my head on the regular and occasionally spout off to the good people who also express interest in asking these or similar questions. The dream becomes clearer as I think more deeply about the imaginary logistics of bringing the dream to life, but I know full well that this isn’t as easy as finding some land and putting seeds in the ground. We lack the collective infrastructure to support a dream such as this. The answers I’m seeking will only come when we can collectively make room for developing the platform for discovering answers together; a time and space where there’s not only room for answers, but also space to implement them in meaningful ways.
When you have questions that you don’t know how to ask properly, instead of writing about answers, I guess you write about how hard it is to ask questions. I feel like I do this a lot. I don’t even know what to do with this writing. Do I post it on my failing blog? Send it into the ether? Entwine it in the greater spectacle? Send it to people who I hope will help me find ways to answer questions? Usually the answer is all of the above, but I fear that sharing this publicly in any form is a like the first shove in getting a ball rolling that I’ll need to keep pushing uphill and I don’t know if I have the energy to keep pushing. And then the self-critique kicks in: why do you think this is your ball to roll? As if thousands of other people haven’t already asked these questions.
And you see what’s happened here? Now it’s not about the questions at all. It’s about me. So best suck it up and just hit share and start rolling the ball.