Food & Water

What impresses me about Cooking Sections’ art and activism is their ability to show that climate change is not something distant and abstract, something that politicians and experts will somehow take care of. The CLIMAVORE work shows that climate is utterly personal and local.

I think the reason that gardeners and small-scale farmers have such passion about their calling is that their deepest needs are satisfied. I am calling it beauty but it is more than that. It is fullfilling a longing.

The truth is that when this nation chose to eliminate four million farmers (with their families, hired help, buildings, and boundaries) on the advice of the colleges of agriculture, the agricultural bureaucracy, and the agribusiness corporations, it committed a sort of cultural genocide.

The land wisdom of peasants and indigenous people is ultimately the land wisdom we moderns have to learn, not by some magic process of technology transfer but by long cultural development, starting now.

The benefits of growing food together should be accessible to everyone, believes Transition Town Dorchester. And this week their community farm launches a new partnership with another local charity to make that real for more people in their town.

It seems unlikely to me that many of the modern-day technological appurtenances so baffling to my mother will count among the gifts that present generations hand on to succeeding ones.