A few weeks ago Eric and Anne gave me a wonderful tomato, grown by Eric in their garden. One slice entirely covered a slice of bread. It was juicy, as full of tiny windows as a New York apartment building and so tasty I’m writing about it three weeks later.
A tomato like that sheds a good light even on the storm that’s gathering around us. The storm of course is the effective collapse of the house of cards global system, coming sometime soon to a neighborhood near you. How soon is anybody’s guess but for practical reckoning, I just consider I’m in it now since my thoughts keep cycling back to it anyway. I just assume this is what collapse looks like in the early stages as it continues to gather. As someone said, I feel better much since I gave up hope.
The gathering storm adds pressure to that familiar sense of alienation many of us have dipped our toe in, or more likely taken full-body baths in till our skin got all wrinkly. Alienation is that modern initiation, the trite-to-mention but oh-so-real sense of dislocation that comes from personal versions of feeling like a cog in a machine, having to do a job we don’t respect, being subject to a political process we don’t trust but don’t know how to change, and more. You know what I’m talking about? This common initiation frequently extends all the way down to day by day feelings of being and not central in our own life – as if the system has commandeered that role for itself. It’s not a good feeling. A GP friend tells me three-quarters of his patients are on medication for stress and psychological complaints; untold numbers are under the radar, toughing it out. If angst and alienation is not with us personally now, they likely have been and are sure to be for people we know and love.
I’m contrasting the storm with the presence and bearing of Eric’s tomato which stands bravely before it. And behind his tomato, the entire local food system peeking out. (Bear with me please as I thoroughly conflate Eric’s tomato with the emerging local food system; it’s the poet in me.) We’re so caught up with the unconscious assumptions of the global system, so entangled with it, that we can hardly see all the rich implications of the emerging local food system.
That may be just a matter of time. 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.
Here are some of the ways the seeds in Eric’s tomato, and the burgeoning local food system, are likely to grow:
Each and every step of local food production demonstrates that members are valuable, important and essential contributors to the well being of the whole. Tasks are done for their own sake, not only for profit. (Profit is a good thing, not a bad, but it has limits as a primary motivator.) People working in a local food system are more than figures on the balance sheet and they know it, or they’ll leave. They get that they’re part of something bigger than them that’s creating daily joy, especially right around mealtime, something that connects their family to larger meaning and is very much in their best interest to keep going.
Members share a perception of increasing wealth. Wealth in the gift food system is marked by something as simple as the willingness and ability to share a tomato. Anyone can have a part of this. The local food system develops powerful roots and interconnections that become available to each new member. This includes the felt realization that wealth stems from land and soil and the complex web of interconnections that support it.
Civic priorities shift toward the local and participatory. Voting-once-every-four-years democracy, the art of maintaining the system at all costs, is increasingly seen as irrelevant and members will tend to reform the system or abandon it completely. (Still others will watch the Daily Show. )
Health smarts go up. Members tend to see that health care means taking responsibility for their own health, eating that tomato, working to produce it, and being part of the network that shared it around.
Family strengthens because members tend to be united in appreciation for the real tomato.
Just as the tomato taps into the vine and the roots, local food systems tap into the community and local networks of distribution, connecting more and more people.
The tomato also gives us an opening to the social justice dimension of food, the possibility and hope that all can be fed.
Some some will see that their personal story (what they most want and need) and the world’s story (what it needs) are richly interconnected. In other words, it isn’t just that food relocalization makes practical sense though it does that. It’s also that full immersion leads to the community and culture that has a powerful effect on our most intractable personal problems, the thing that can wake us up at 3 A.M. in a cold sweat.
Those are just a few. The seeds of possibility inside Eric’s tomato are actually endless because they open up to new possibilities that open up to still new ones . . .
