Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  ALSO BY VICKI ROBIN

  Your Money or Your Life

  9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence

  Coauthored with Joe Dominguez and Monique Tilford

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © Vicki Robin, 2014

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Robin, Vicki.

  Blessing the hands that feed us : what eating closer to home can teach us about food, community, and our place on earth / Vicki Robin.

  p. cm.

  Preface by Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15144-4

  1. Local foods—Washington (State)—Whidbey Island. 2. Community-supported agriculture—Washington (State)—Whidbey Island. 3. Self-reliant living—Washington (State)—Whidbey Island. 4. Whidbey Island (Wash.)—Social conditions. I. Lappé, Frances Moore. II. Lappé, Anna, 1973– III. Title.

  HD9007.W2R63 2014

  363.809797’75—dc23

  2013018397

  Frontispiece map illustration by Rosie Scott

  Version_1

  I dedicate this book to all the children born just about now. May you have green growing things outside your door. May you flourish in a garden world. May you have plenty to eat. May our generations have done something simple and good for you through encouraging sustainable agriculture and thriving local communities.

  Contents

  Also by Vicki Robin

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface by Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter One Localize Me?

  Chapter Two Putting My Mouth Where My Mouth Is

  Chapter Three Yes! But How?

  Chapter Four Week One: Grounded!

  Chapter Five Week Two: Getting the Hang of It

  Chapter Six Week Three: The Week of My Discontent

  Chapter Seven Revelations of the Final Week

  Chapter Eight Relational Eating

  Chapter Nine Bringing Our Eating Closer to Home

  Epilogue Continued Blessing

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Preface

  It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.

  —Robert F. Kennedy

  Vicki Robin takes the world personally and, because of that, passionately engages in questioning assumptions and searching for new ways of seeing the world that suggest new ways of being. And in this way, we see ourselves in her. Being this way in the world isn’t always comfortable. It means finding yourself at cross purposes with the powers that be or at odds with received wisdom, but Vicki’s writing, and this beautiful new book, allows us to experience the joy of a lifelong practice of asking questions.

  When I wrote Diet for a Small Planet over forty years ago, I was a kid with a question: Why are people still going hungry? I believed that if I could figure that out, I’d have direction. At the time, the Vietnam War raged, the National Guard shot students for protesting, and discrimination was still rampant despite new civil rights laws. I was lost. I desperately wanted to help make things better, but I needed a theory of why, some notion of how we got into this mess, some idea of the root causes.

  Then my twentysomething intuition kicked in. I suspected that since food is among our most basic human needs, grasping the whys and hows of hunger might unlock the whole mystery of economics and politics. So I set out on a quest, not to write a book, but to find the truth and share it with friends.

  Soon I discovered that more than enough food was then being produced for each of us. And today it’s even truer, with 2,800 calories produced for every person every year—at least a fifth more food per capita than in the late 60s. We are living in a story of scarcity, but not a reality of scarcity! I believed that once we released ourselves from the false fear of scarcity, we could get down to the real business: remaking the social and economic rules that concentrate wealth and power, making hunger inevitable no matter how much we grow.

  Meanwhile, Vicki Robin was questioning another assumption: Does stuff make us happy? With her partner, Joe Dominguez, she scrutinized the link between money and fulfillment in the petri dish of her own life and noticed how unhooking money from happiness revealed the entrapment of “too-muchness” and the empowerment of “enoughness.” They understood money as one’s “life energy” and saw how investing life energy in relationships, competencies, community, and spirituality produced real wealth. Eventually they taught their radical approach in Your Money or Your Life.

  Needless to say, the ensuing four decades haven’t seen the remaking of the human story we’d imagined. Today the number of hungry people worldwide is almost exactly where it was in the 1960s. And our fear-driven culture prods us to stay within the tribe through “common purchases” rather than bonding through common purposes.

  The interlocking global challenges appear far more complex and contradictory than our younger minds anticipated. And it’s easy to feel so overwhelmed with fear and loss that one wonders how new ideas and new connections can possibly break through. So as the decades have passed, I’ve come to ask myself just one question, How do I keep the channel within me open—the channel of life’s incessant insistence on more life?

  Vicki helps me stay focused on that question. She and I actually met face-to-face nearly fifteen years ago at that moment when we were both recognizing the immensity of the challenges and both seeking a deeper understanding of what holds the old systems in place—even when we can see what’s wrong and solutions are everywhere.

  Twelve years ago, I joined forces with my daughter, Anna, to pick up the questions raised three decades earlier in Diet for a Small Planet—and we join our voices here to share the rest of our story and how it relates to Vicki’s new book.

  We wanted to know: Where in the world could we find communities showing new models for knitting together community, economics, and food systems so all were fed and nature’s resources were treasured, not plundered. To answer this question, we traveled together to five continents and witnessed how behind the headlines and statistics about hunger and environmental devastation a globally grounded transformation is welling up. It is arising on every continent, from the neighborhood, village, town, city, and even some parliaments and global forums.

  Our journey changed us forever.

  Aldous Huxley wrote that “all that we are and will and do depends, in the last analy
sis, on what we believe the Nature of Things to be.” And we came to see that our collective understanding of the Nature of Things is shifting. We humans are shedding the failed and false view that we are isolated “atoms,” and with it the depressing idea that we’re all essentially self-interested and selfish. We saw the evidence in community after community of the profoundly social nature of human beings.

  On our journey, we met so many people starting from this experience-based—and also science-based—understanding of humanity: that our species’ deepest needs are for connection, meaning, and efficacy (having a say and knowing we can make a difference). And that it is embedded in who we are to perceive our self-interest in the well-being of our communities.

  Tapping these deep needs, and capacities, is just what’s needed now to turn our planet toward life.

  In this important new work, Vicki expresses this uplifting understanding of what it means to be human and our sense that food is a powerful avenue for engagement in a healthier and happier future.

  Vicki’s new work captures and furthers a movement grounded in what we think of as eyes-wide-open hope. She captures here one of our “aha” moments from our world journey. Whether expressed in Hindu farmers in India saving and saving seeds, Muslim farmers in Niger turning back the desert, or Christian farmers in the United States practicing biblically inspired Creation Care, the revolutionary power of the food is its capacity to upend a life-destroying belief system that’s brought us power-concentrating corporatism.

  Corporatism, after all, depends on our belief in the fairy tale that the market works on its own without us. The global, diverse, citizen-driven food movement breaks that spell—shifting our sense of self: from passive, disconnected consumers in a magical market to active, richly connected coproducers in societies we are ourselves creating—as share owners in a CSA farm or purchasers of fair trade products or actors in public life shaping the next farm bill.

  Food’s power is connection itself. Corporatism distances us from one another, from the earth—and even from our own bodies—while the food movement celebrates our reconnection. Years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, CSA farmer Barb Perkins said that her most rewarding moments are “like in town yesterday,” she said, “I saw this little kid, wide-eyed, grab his mom’s arm and point at me. ‘Mommy,’ he said, ‘look. There’s our farmer!’”

  To us, this story captures Vicki’s great term, “relational eating.”

  Food, making us aware of the power of our choices, encourages us to “think like an ecosystem,” enabling us to see a place for ourselves connected to all others. For in ecological systems, “there are no parts, only participants,” German physicist Hans Peter Duerr reminds us.

  Blessing the Hands That Feed Us suggests that it is possible for us all to be nourished by a regional diet by feeling the relationships embodied in our food. Of course, you may be familiar with the experts who pooh-pooh such ideas, dismissing as naïve the notion that organic, regional foods can feed the world. We like to remind those so-called experts that a food system increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations is doing a decidedly poor job of feeding us, and will only become less able to do so. Almost 870 million people are suffering severe and chronic undernourishment; and obesity and overweight, linked to corporate-propagated, addictive high-calorie-low-nutrition food is the fifth leading risk factor for global deaths. We know that in aligning food and farming with nature’s genius, there can be more than enough for all.

  As we have encountered—and as this book shares—another way of eating and being is working, opening the door to perhaps the most important lessons of all about hope.

  For starters, it’s not for wimps: Hope is not wishful thinking. Real hope lives in our whole bodies and that only happens when we put our whole bodies into it. This is what Vicki is showing us. Hope has become for us an action verb, not a state of being, but motion itself—moving one’s life day by day ever more into alignment with the world we want, ever more into alignment with what we know can meet our truest, deepest needs. And that means taking risks, risking failure and frustration, and more . . . and yet not giving up. It means knowing that we are moving shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of millions of other risk takers, the planet over, in the most exhilarating and consequential walk our species has ever taken.

  All of us are in very good company as we join Vicki in learning rich lessons from a simple experiment of eating closer to home.

  Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California

  Frances Moore Lappé is the author of Diet for a Small Planet and EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Change the World We Want. Anna Lappé is the author of Diet for a Hot Planet and the director of the Food MythBusters Initiative. Together, they wrote Hope’s Edge and cofounded the Small Planet Institute.

  I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as “consumers.”

  —Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” December 10, 2009, The Contrary Farmer Blog

  “Local food? In New York all food is local. You go down to the street and it’s right there.”

  —Phyllis Wertzl (Vicki Robin’s alter ego)

  Introduction

  In September 2010, I undertook an experiment that turned out to be one of the greatest adventures of my life. It was so small at the start, but it eventually grew—and blew me wide open.

  A farmer friend wanted a guinea pig to test whether she could actually feed another human being for a full month from what she could grow on her half acre. I wanted to test, from a sustainability perspective, if we here on Whidbey Island could survive without access to that cornucopia called the grocery store. We called the experiment a 10-mile diet.

  I’ve done other “sustainability as an extreme sport” experiments many times. I’ve fasted—from food for ten days, from talking for a month, from air travel for a year—anything that would bring me closer to a life of integrity. I think sustainability is meant to be put into practice, not just debated.

  The 10-mile diet was simply the next in the series. I did this experiment in hyperlocal eating wholeheartedly in September 2010, on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. Whidbey is a gentle place. The island connects to the mainland via a twice-hourly ferry to the south and a bridge to the north, so our culture here is rural with an urban flair. Our climate is moderate. Driving up the long midisland highway, you might think—and tourists do—that it’s a bucolic and bountiful land with a few cities strung like precious pearls on a long chain. True, but there is much more to the story.

  Almost all of our daily fare comes in on semitrucks on those ferries. Our grocery stores, apparently stocked to the gills, have only a three-day supply of food. If energy prices double again—as they have in the past decade—our transport-dependent pantry might get pretty bare. But what about all that rolling farmland? Some of those crops are for export off island. Some are to feed our animals. Not everyone who owns a farm, farms. What the owners do with their land is up to them, and many who can afford big spreads don’t need farming income. Then there is the wild card called climate change. Will the crops that grow well on Whidbey now grow well in the future? This year we had a late blooming summer and then months without rain. At the moment that’s a pity for the farmers but not for consumers. Our “local” suppliers are not from here. Grocers buy from whoever has a reliable supply—which could be Thailand or Chile or New Zealand.

  Only some Charles Addams ghoulish character would contemplate these uncertainties with delight. Most of us simply don’t want to contemplate these conditions at all. After all, what can we do about it? This for me is
where the “extreme sport” comes in, the real life game of skillfully reshaping assumptions and choices in light of the most likely scenarios. I know that change can be rapid, unpredictable, thrilling, but not always pleasant. I like to get ahead of the curve and surf. And, knowing my destiny is inextricably linked to my community, I like to build arks, not just surfboards. Call the 10-mile diet prototyping arks.

  There is no special virtue in a 10-mile diet. Or a 50-mile or 100-mile diet. The miles are simply markers for something else: bringing our eating closer to home. Why? We have lost touch with “the hands that feed us” to our detriment, and this story is meant to show you what’s at the other end of the industrial food scale, to help you see that there are reasonable and heartening alternatives.

  This book, then, is not about pious restraint. It is not about sucking it up and making do. It’s a banquet of good stories and possible skillful interventions that can tilt us toward food sufficiency. I describe the hows and whys of my 10-mile diet experiment, what I discovered, what I loved, what I hated, what I missed, what I learned, and a level of body and soul satisfaction I barely knew existed. It was only a month of that extreme, but they say new habits take twenty-one days to anchor, and so it was for me.

  The 10-mile diet changed me. I blogged every day, diving into food issues, awakening sleeping-beauty skills of cooking and gardening and reengaging with an old passion for social change, sidelined while I recovered from cancer. Best of all, I finally landed somewhere on earth, in a real place with real soil and forests, a real community where I belong the way my skin belongs to me. I am part of life; not at a remove in self-sufficiency but connected in reciprocity, mutuality, and care.

  Whidbey was a perfect place to run this experiment. In fact, if I lived across Puget Sound in Seattle, a 10-mile diet would have been far harder. Even with all the backyard gardens there, it’s mostly paved and built up. When I lived there, I always had a patch of lettuce and kale in the yard, but little about Seattle says, “Eat here,” so a 10-mile diet might not even have occurred to me. The point, though, isn’t for you to replicate what I did. I scouted out a possibility and documented it here because it points at a way out of our dependency on the centralized, industrial scale food system. As you will see, when you look at a broader definition of local food, we can all provision ourselves regionally—if we commit to personal and political change.