Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The science is clear: the long-term challenges for our food systems are adaptability to climate change and reversing the decline of biodiversity. But as is often the case, science was muted.
In reality, the antonym to competition is not at all monopoly but is rather cooperation and solidarity.
Perhaps incorrectly, or even arrogantly, I’m anticipating that my soon-to-be-published book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future might elicit pushback from those unconvinced by its arguments for agrarian localism.
We evolved with fermentation. Our language and cognitive function, our physiological and social structure, evolved around bread.
The countryside is a nice place to live. Farmers are happy. That’s what we heard on the ground in the cooperative farms we visited in France in 2021 and 2022.
It is time for “regenerative food systems” to radicalize or get out of the way, to step aside and allow human-scale, disruptive, actually diverse and localized collectives to emerge and feed the world, one community by one community at a time.
To quit the existing model, we need to have bigger ambitions, collectively. We need more of us.
Agroecological research has proven that agroecology and local food systems bring a range of goods, including making better use of resources, spending less on packaging and materials, using less transport, and health benefits. Why then is its implementation not supported more broadly?
Despite regenerative agriculture’s popularity and its focus on sustainable food production, it fails to tackle systemic social and political issues. As a result, the movement may perpetuate business-as-usual in the food system, rather than transform it.
While it may take a community to make a change, it is possible for a single person to change a community. Might you be that person?
To foster those opportunities there’s a lot to be said for embracing Luddism – that is, for assessing whether new technologies are likely to benefit in the round the people or other organisms they affect and, if not, organising against them.
Now imagine the pleasure offered by farms where families are free to roam fields filled not just with one crop, but dozens – from mushrooms and tubers to berries and small fruit trees, with larger nut trees towering above and edible vines in between. This is the true, incalculable value of promiscuous cultures.
