Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Can food and food sovereignty be the catalyst for a Commons Transition? For over 30 years, FIAN International has been advocating for the right to food sovereignty. Their work unites bottom-up grassroots movements and local administrations, with a special focus on inclusivity and enfranchising those who are most often left out.
Americans do love their denim, so much so that the average consumer buys four pairs of jeans a year. In China’s Xintang province, a hub for denim, 300 million pairs are made annually. Just as staggering is the brew of toxic chemicals and hundreds of gallons of water it takes to dye and finish one pair of jeans.
After the food price hike in 2007-2008 and in a world that many feel is less secure, there is a renewed interest in food self-sufficiency. Food self-sufficiency is, however, widely critiqued by economists as a misguided approach to food security that places political priorities ahead of economic efficiency.
I am a farmer and that is where my world begins. What is an agriculture? I say it is a culture of cities, towns and villages, bridges, roads, canals, harbours – of trades’ people and the trades, which have been created by the specialised cultivation of fields. The industrial revolution was a revolution within agriculture – germinated by fossil fuels, so that today, nearly every culture on Earth is an agriculture.
Sandra sees her family’s five acre Northern California farmland and the privilege to work it as the greatest source of wealth. For Sandra and her family, wealth comes in the form of fruit trees, lambing season, biodynamic farming, mushroom hunting, growing the food her family eats, hosting farm dinners, wearing the clothes she makes from the farm’s fiber, and giving back to the community.
I actually grow and produce food. I like to lead by example, and I have found that while there are more conversations about food and food systems, those conversations often lack the voices of real farmers who are typically more comfortable working in the field than attending food conferences and posting on social media.
“Black people need to return to being growers, builders, and producers, so when we’re consuming, we’re also feeding one another, and we’re feeding our liberation,”
We often fail to realize that food is also ubiquitous in our modern society, not only providing nutrition, but also a strong determinant of most aspects of the economy, society and culture.
Why does tending a sourdough starter seem so annoying? Pondering this question, I realized it had little to do with the ritual itself—which only takes five minutes—and everything to do with that lingering, underlying sense that it was inconvenient and that there were “other (more important) things I should be doing.”
The gift from the stranger arrived thanks to a new online map, the Black-Indigenous Farmers Reparations Map, a project to promote “people-to-people” reparations.
In projects across the UK, people are growing, preparing and sharing food together. In this time marked by unpalatable narratives of us and them and who deserves to be where, food can create a common ground on which to meet.
As we at the Real Bread Campaign always say, not all loaves are created equal. We believe that there are ways to make bread better for us, better for our communities and better for the planet.
