Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

by Vicki Robin

  Britt, a wanderer and explorer, like me, has always had multiple interests, from shamanism to surfing. She met Eric in a class at Western Washington University in Bellingham—Eric was the student facilitator and Britt was the student—and felt a sense of destiny and deep love. Their vision of a sustainability center on Whidbey matched mine—and it was a concrete step we could take immediately.

  I put my restless, creative mind on finding land to fulfill their vision—and include me in it. It was then that Ms. Frugality started saying wildly imprudent things, like “What’s money for anyway?” and “I want to die with a dime in my pocket and not a day later” and (even worse) “I can take out a home equity loan. Why not?” Clearly I was in love with the vision and these passionate young people.

  We almost bought a ten-acre property with another couple, but the deal fell through. I then tried to buy a hundred-year-old church with a parsonage, three acres, a big open sanctuary perfect for Conversation Cafés, classes, film nights, and social events, and a downstairs kitchen where we’d make soups and can vegetables in the fall. Again the deal fell through. My angels were hard at work! But the question remained: if my young friends and I couldn’t relocalize, how could a whole island?

  Transitioning Us All

  Thankfully for my future financial security, I finally found a community-organizing strategy that wouldn’t drain my life’s savings. It was the Transition Town approach to relocalization.

  Britt, a dozen others, and I helped start a Transition initiative on our island, with my silently swearing that I would keep myself in check and not drive myself off the cliff.

  Aaah. I was now swimming in a current that made sense, that merited my energy. Started by the understated but ever-optimistic permaculture educator Rob Hopkins, the simple approach to intentionally powering down communities spread first in the UK and by now around the world. It’s a head, heart, and hands approach.

  Head is understanding—and helping neighbors understand—the climate, resource, financial, and energy challenges bearing down upon us.

  Heart is unleashing the now-pent-up passion of communities to “Do something!”—to discover and get going on a less consumptive, more abundant way of life, one that runs on local sun, local soil, local industry, local love.

  Hands is doing it—growing food, growing local currencies, growing businesses, encouraging pedal power, educating the public, changing ordinances, and hosting potlucks and parties and parades.

  Within mere months we’d attracted a hundred-plus people, ready to act—and then we muddled through trying to organize that energy into a single engine—not easy with my unherdable neighbors. For all the good we were doing, though, we seemed a day late and a dollar short. We’d barely scratched the surface.

  Pam Mitchell’s Food Calculations

  I turned to Pam Mitchell, a market gardener, to help me gauge our capacity here on Whidbey Island to feed ourselves. Her back-of-the-envelope calculations presented a pretty dire picture. Looking at her numbers I thought . . . We’re toast.

  Pam is a rare farmer. She didn’t inherit land. She didn’t buy land. She doesn’t technically even rent land. She partnered with the owners, producing food for them in exchange for a (hefty) portion of the crop. I know this is called sharecropping in other parts, which is just this side of slavery. But Pam’s strategy is canny to the max. She farms with no land debt, allowing herself to live on the proceeds of her farmers’ market sales rather than plowing profits back into owning land.

  Her arrangement is maintaining the events and flower gardens during the summer months and then cleaning up, moving plants if necessary, broadcast fertilizing, manuring, and replacing the irrigation system in the winter months, in trade for a residence in the barn, the processing room downstairs, and the quarter-acre vegetable garden / greenhouse space.

  She has an engineer’s mind, a love for vegetable production, and the good sense to seek out a “sharecropping” model that worked brilliantly, called SPIN-Gardening.

  After years of tweaking the model, she has a precise system, a precise mix of growth medium for her seedlings, a precise selection of seeds, and a precise grow light system to produce vibrantly healthy starts for her gardens—and her customers. Her beds are built according to a successful formula as well. They are strung with watering tape, and soon after planting, uniformly gorgeous healthy vegetables march in straight lines, proud and ready to be harvested.

  Having managed to support herself through gardening alone—after giving up her fall-back job at Boeing—Pam thought to train others in her methods. Enter Tricia, my soon-to-be feeder. She attended Pam’s course on her high production and precision method and was well disposed when Pam and Laurie Carron (architect turned wannabe farmer) approached her with a proposal to start a CSA garden on the land she and her husband, Kent, had just bought. Tricia went one further. She wanted to be a partner in the business. In February 2008 they broke ground and started building beds with half a dozen volunteers. By June they had twenty-five customers.

  Tricia was no stranger to growing food. She grew up in Ohio in one of those heartland families where the grandparents still had a large kitchen garden and canned in the fall to provision the family for the winter months.

  Tricia and her husband-to-be, Kent Ratekin, met in 2004, got sparky, and were inspired to build a life together on their many walks in the woods. He too was from Midwest stock, and he was also a student of Rudolf Steiner, the father of biodynamic gardening (as well as of Waldorf education and many other spirit-infused arts). So it was natural for them to imagine buying a property and growing some food. They looked for just the right place and found a ten-acre parcel where a woman had raised seven children and countless chickens, dairy cows, and horses—all of which had amply fertilized sunny fields. The place was infused with love—and fertility. They made an offer, it was accepted, and they became not just occupants of the land but stewards.

  Eventually Laurie went back to architecture and Tricia and Pam decided to each farm half the land independently and ended the partnership, but still, the spread of SPIN-Farming had started.

  Pam went on to set up a garden on a different woman’s land. It was part of her vision: to multiply the model on successive properties, getting ever more garden partnerships going. Others are experimenting with this model as well. City Grown, for example, is farming using people’s Seattle yards. There’s genius in seeing that grassland yards can be farmland. And Pam is certainly a genius of the practical.

  The Straight Truth

  So it was logical that I’d turn to Pam to assess our actual capacity for food self-sufficiency on the island when the economic and energy crises brewing like off-shore hurricanes eventually swept ashore—which we both agreed they would do. That’s when she did that back-of-the-envelope calculation of Whidbey Island’s ability to feed itself. Agricultural land times estimated production per acre of veggies and fruits that grow well here times total calories we could grow a year divided by population . . . equals . . . practically no food beyond the abundant summer season.

  “We’d survive for August. Maybe.”

  That is a very big Uh-oh. How do you actually change a whole food system so that it can nourish us—at least two months a year, then three? How do we wean ourselves from utter dependence on food that seems to come out of nowhere, produced by nobody we know?

  I moved to Whidbey because it was—and still is—a politically and socially progressive community, especially the south end of the island, where cultural creatives and millennials, artists and shopkeepers, live alongside the Boeing commuters and socially conservative congregations with respectful diversity. In terms of the big waves coming, though, we were as blind as picnickers on the beach who fail to see the tsunami rolling in.

  The magnitude of the problem was not lost on Pam. In fact, she saw her work as part of bringing South Whidbey back to its commercial farming roots so it could
land on its feet.

  Life Goes On

  I mulled, asked questions, hosted community conversations, tried (nicely—we are so nice in the Pacific Northwest) to alert people to the dangers of inaction—and at the same time lived my daily life. Britt and Eric bought three acres of open sunny land to farm. I partnered with another midlife woman to buy a house big enough for two solitary people—and then started a home-based teleclass business to supplement my retirement income. I spent a year updating Your Money or Your Life. When it came out in 2008, I came out further from my cancer cocoon. I wrote articles, several blogs, and a chapter in a book about how we are going to live in this era of collapse.

  Bringing It All Back Home

  In all this time the question never left me about how any locale might feed itself once the big wave of the triple crisis arrived at our shores. I tried to stay calm, to wait and watch and support existing food self-sufficiency enterprises. My instinct—like a greyhound’s—was to chase solutions around the track. My body said, No more chasing rabbits. I watched us slip—politely—away from sufficient action. Like Cassandra, I hated the party-pooper role and tried to relax.

  Then there was plain old laziness. I was passionate about relocalization but as disinclined as the next guy to change my own eating habits. I certainly didn’t want anyone meddling with my choices, relishing my private life and my freedom to not be a paragon of lifestyle virtue. Yet I knew, deep down, that I was simply hiding, that my integrity would eventually out me. I was down to the only life I had any control over, the only human subject I could actually enroll in any experiment.

  All this wore my will down to the point where I knew I didn’t know, and I was willing to try one simple thing, not attempt everything. Stripped of all my big ideas, I was ready to do something real.

  In hindsight, I see that my best work comes when I’ve exhausted my big ideas and I arrive at a small challenge to my personal integrity—to living the values I hold most deeply.

  So there you have it. Tricia’s trajectory and mine intersecting on the Fourth of July and striking this unusual deal that I would be her guinea pig in September.

  I was ripe for such an experiment in radically living my values. Not changing the world but changing one little habit—where I source my food—for just thirty days.

  As I went through the summer planning for my plunge into hyperlocal eating, I began to get glimmers of what would by the end of the experiment be vividly clear. Our global food system is very much like our global money and stuff system, only grittier, more real and fundamental to our survival. Growing populations with growing tastes for complex foods have sent us into food overshoot, leaving us with the food-poor, the food-rich, and a food-compromised earth. I began to wonder if it would be possible to transform our relationship with food the way Joe and I transformed our relationship with money. Can we live again within the means of the earth? What is the role of personal change in that task? Might our lives gain meaning and dignity by linking our personal change to the collective change of our times?

  July 4, 2010, I was distinctly healthy and well established in my new life on my little island. My own crisis well past, I was ready to open the door again to this global crisis—and how I might help. Thanks to Tricia, it turns out that meant opening my mouth again. Not to speak, but to eat.

  Now It’s Your Turn: Your Food Future

  Just like we all have food histories, we have food futures. What do you believe about the future? Do your assumptions about the future affect how you live today? Would you rather not think about the future because it’s all too scary and uncertain? Do you love thinking about the future, planning and dreaming? Have you changed anything because of your assumptions?

  In this chapter I’ve laid out my view of the future, which has motivated my work for change and my life work as a sustainability activist and educator. Here are some questions to help you unlock your thinking about the future. As with food messages, focusing on your beliefs, assumptions, and research data can help you shape a food future for yourself—and for our world.

  • What helps you think about the future?

  • What do you assume about the future?

  • Do you believe your children will be as food abundant and secure as you are? More? Less? Why?

  • Do you believe that the big global forces—peak oil, climate change, financial instability—will actually affect your food future?

  • If yes, what steps are you taking now? Which ones do you mean to take but haven’t gotten around to yet?

  • People who relocalize do some of these things. What steps make sense to you, given your sense of the future?

  — rethink where you live

  — rethink how you earn and spend money

  — grow or expand a garden

  — get a plot in a community garden

  — join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture farm)

  — put some solar panels on your roof

  — change appliances

  — weatherize your home

  — join or start a local Transition group

  — influence politics

  — write and speak about the importance of relocalization

  — learn how to repair simple—or complex—things

  — form/join networks of mutual aid

  Your Dream Food Future

  Write anything, from one word to a page, about your vision of a desirable food future, one you want for yourself, your children, and your grandchildren—a foundation for generations to come. What can you be doing today to make that future a reality? What can you dedicate yourself to, in your daily habits and in your community and professional work? What new food rules can you set for yourself to help move this process along?

  HOW TO START A TRANSITION TOWN GROUP

  Personal change is challenging enough, but to change your community you need to work in groups. Transition Towns was the approach I found. Here’s a very short course on how to start a Transition Town Group; if you are going to actually do it, you’ll want to get The Transition Companion by Rob Hopkins, the originator of the approach.

  Transition Towns is a citizen-led approach to bulking up community resilience, a tool for people who wake up to the power communities have to respond proactively as global resources, finance, and climate prove ever more unstable. It is both improvisational—arising from the creativity and guts of local people who care—and systematic—a recipe with ingredients that together generate ever more food, energy, and economic and cultural community resilience. It’s both easy—just pick it up and get going—and difficult—odds of success improve with good leadership, good group-process skills, a volunteer or paid coordination team, good community-organizing mojo, and patience.

  WHAT DO PEOPLE DO WHEN THEY “TRANSITION”?

  They first get a group together to talk about the challenges of our times and how to get their community engaged. They talk to a lot of people about the issues and possibilities—from neighbors to government officials. They organize some community events to network existing groups and form new ones to get some projects going. Often it’s a monthly potluck or a community garden or a rural-skills series or a seed bank or trade/barter systems. Above this low-hanging fruit are bigger challenges: community-asset mapping and developing a plan for the near future, when fossil fuel will be dear yet local communities will be thriving. A lot of this depends on people sticking with it, finding a way to be relevant to many sectors of the community, having on balance more fun than frustration, constant learning, and skill building. It is the work of a lifetime, really, because if we are lucky the transitions will happen not in a scary few years but in a graceful adaptive process.

  THE 7 GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF TRANSITION TOWNS:

  1. Positive visioning—Generate a compelling picture of where we are headed, not just a compelling analysis of what is going wrong.

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p; 2. Awareness—Give communities the best current information about the challenges posed by resource and economic crises, trusting them to see the implications and act appropriately.

  3. Openness and inclusion—Make participation clear and available to all sectors of the community.

  4. Enable sharing and networking—Through all the wonderful tools of social networking—online and off—allow the community to celebrate the successes, see the failures, and jump in where they feel called.

  5. Build resilience—Engage in empowering and visible projects in every sector of community life.

  6. Inner and outer transition—Outer change makes waves in our minds and heart. Sharing our journeys is part of the process.

  7. Subsidiarity—A big word for making decisions as close to those affected as appropriate. Relocalization inherently means people-in-community power.

  Try These Recipes

  Lisa Morrill and Chef Vincent Nattress shared recipes for this chapter.

  Lisa Morrill owns The Braeburn Restaurant in downtown Langley. Since we’ve just considered our ecological footprint, exponential growth, and overshoot, I thought we’d need some comfort food right about now.

  Ma’s Meatloaf

  9 eggs

  5 tablespoons heavy cream

  1/2 cup Worcestershire sauce

  2 cups organic ketchup

  8 to 12 slices dried rustic bread, torn into small pieces

  2 cups sun-dried tomatoes, julienne cut

  1 large yellow onion, roughly chopped

  5 tablespoons fresh Italian parsley, chopped

  3 tablespoons fresh oregano, chopped

  3 tablespoons fresh rosemary, stemmed and chopped

  10 tablespoons crushed garlic

  2 pinches salt

  3 pinches black pepper

  5 pounds 3 Sisters grass-fed ground beef

  Preheat the oven to 350°F.

  Combine the eggs, heavy cream, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and bread, stir, and let sit about 3 minutes.