Andrew MacDonald

Bob Waldrop was the driver behind the forming of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative in 2003. Here Bob explains how the co-op, which started with just 60 members and 15 producers, has grown to 3400 members and 200 producers, effectively transforming the local food scene in Oklahoma. Bob shares thoughts about doing it where you are.

Local food, while spreading like quackgrass, is hardly out of the starting gate. It has many strong seeds. Not all of them will grow but I’m betting a lot will.

There are days I wonder if I’m out of my depth homesteading. (I’m a new homesteader in rural Ontario. You can read what that’s looking like here.) So much of my natural occupation has been about documents and computers. I’m at home in that world and understand it. But here in DIY-land there’s so many parts I don’t know, so many systems Like the Fool, my friend in the tarot deck, I step out with unknown perils ahead.

In this time of transition, two stories run through the culture. One is about continual growth and ascendancy. It’s mainstream culture’s story, the everyday world we’re familiar with. The other is the as yet little known story of radical change and descent as we enter the time of necessary simplification – reskilling, retooling, relocalizing.

What to do? You’re in an organization or process you see isn’t working, but you suspect or know that people involved are assuming that change is impossible. Not an abstract question by any measure. Like me, you may frequently find yourself there.

Communal life – our tribal past – valued the group over the individual. We left our communal past to put the individual’s benefit (and especially material benefit) before the common good, in the process losing much of our memory of community.