Runaway inequality is placing tremendous pressure on the world’s democracies and on our international capacity for peace. The widespread loss of security among the world’s middle and working classes has produced a Janus-faced response: one listening to our better angels and seeking equity, the other preying on our fears, looking to blame anyone with, say, brown or black skin. “They’re stealing our jobs!” Spoken just like someone who has never met, let alone worked or eaten alongside or shared with, an immigrant laborer. Meanwhile, our social, political, and economic institutions are teetering on the brink of collapse—climate change, racist candidates being elected to positions of great political power, unparalleled concentrations of wealth and property, and on and on.
One of our major tasks ahead therefore involves rebuilding a food economy that is sufficiently participatory. We need something that allows our household (oikonomika) to flourish while reinvigorating our sense of democracy.
I am hopeful, in part because I believe in letting hopes rather than hurts shape our future. But also because I have witnessed what can be accomplished, what has been accomplished, when people work together and share. This is where the concept of sovereignty comes into the picture, the idea that independence, freedom, and choice arise out of interdependence. The at-each-other’s-throats type of individualism privileged in some corners of our economy is not only wrong; it’s dangerous.
At the book’s beginning, I touched on the meaning of food sovereignty. The concept speaks to the sweet spot where access, knowledge exchange, and community building overlap. Seed saving and sharing, cooperative arrangements that help farmers negotiate fair prices, cooking classes that empower individuals and communities: those are all terribly important activities. Yet sovereignty cannot be reduced to a single set of practices. Instead, the ultimate power of food sovereignty lies in its ability to help practitioners live an alternative way of life because it gives those practicing it a different view of life.
The book Keywords, written by the iconoclastic, tweed-wearing Welsh academic and literary critic Raymond Williams, offers a unique perspective on worldviews.1 As eyes are to the soul, according to Williams, words are portals into the assumptions that animate our world. This makes inquiry into our shared vocabulary of immense practical consequence. Put simply, it is not enough to say “We ought to share” without also understanding the worldviews that guide and inform that declarative statement.
I recently witnessed the interaction between words, practices, and worldviews on a trip to California. I cannot say exactly where I was or name the two groups I was studying because of the politically sensitive nature of our discussions. People avoid talking on the record if perceived costs outweigh perceived benefits—I’ll be honest, there are few of the latter that come with talking to me if you inhabit a world that privileges individualism and short-term gain. To encourage participation, I therefore promised to keep the city as well as the organizations involved anonymous.
I can say that one group was an urban farming cooperative; the other, a commission that informed food and agricultural policy in the state and was aligned with industry. Thirty-eight from the urban cooperative were interviewed and another thirty-five from the industry based commission. The cooperative sample was diverse, especially compared with the relatively homogeneous (read mostly white, mostly male, all affluent) industry group. Annual household incomes ranged from below $15,000 to two reporting in the $100,000 to $124,999 category. The cooperative members described their ethnicities as 11 Asian Americans, 11 African Americans, 9 Mexican Americans/Latinos, 6 whites, and 1 Native American. Twenty were women and eighteen were men.
The land in the cooperative was in a community trust. Members produced food for personal household use, but they also pooled their harvest and sold to local restaurants and other members of the community. In addition to producing food, they held workshops on things such as seed saving, compost making, and cooking. They also made raised beds for gardening for members of the community to promote urban agriculture, healthy eating, and food access. These beds were sold at market rate to those who could afford them, allowing the cooperative to offer subsidized rates to those who couldn’t; in some cases they even gave the beds away. As for the soil used to fill the new beds: it came from compost generated in-house, made from garden waste as well as from food waste from surrounding restaurants that purchased from the cooperative.
One day sticks in my mind. I spent the morning talking with individuals associated with California’s food and agriculture industry as they attended a “summit” at a swanky hotel; in the afternoon, I walked across the street to meet with some cooperative members at a café. Later that evening, processing the events of the day, I went to one of those twenty-four-hour greasy spoons where people in the movies go when they cannot sleep. I was shocked by just how different responses were between the groups.
In order to gauge their ideas about sovereignty, I had asked individuals to select three terms that they associated with, respectively, “social justice” and “autonomy.” Prior to answering, they were shown a list of roughly fifty terms for each keyword—words that I thought they might choose, on the basis of my decades of experience in talking with groups like this. The terms on this list were defined to ensure that all participants were operating from a shared understanding of concepts. I then used software to generate “word clouds”—graphics that show the most often used terms in large letters, the least often used terms in smaller letters—based on their responses. Words mentioned fewer than three times were not included, to improve the figures’ readability.
Want to see what sovereignty looks like? Have a look at the worldview that animated the industry group’s way of life, and compare that with the one expressed by the cooperative members.
I appreciate word clouds because they can help us visualize data, and they offer more immediately stark images than any text could. Yet, in the end, there is no substitute for text. Data do not speak for themselves, as I tell my students. So it is at this point where I roll up my sleeves and do my best to be a ventriloquist.
The daylight dimmed to gold. Crickets had begun their song: a musical knee-knee that I imagined as the first movement of a suite soon to build and include the bass line of frogs and the pyrotechnics of lightning bugs. Michael and I were seated on a stone bench, which, still warm from the midday sun, heated our lower halves while the cooling air of the approaching evening chilled our tops. The bench rested next to the herbs in his shared garden plot.
FIGURE 9.2
FIGURE 9.3
FIGURE 9.4
Michael was a middle-aged African American and a longtime cooperative member. He had one of those voices that sounded as though it were coming directly from his chest and that consequently made yours sound as if you were talking through a bamboo tube.
As we reflected on the urban agriculture cooperative, the conversation moved to the topic of social justice: (Figure 9.1 and 9.2 offer “social justice” word clouds for industry and cooperative examples, respectively. Figures 9.3 and 9.4 offer “autonomy” word clouds for industry and cooperative samples, respectively.) I had not completed the word cloud exercise by this point, though I was aware that the two groups had very different views about this keyword.
When describing the concept, Michael wanted to be sure that I understood how its focus ought to be less on “the rights that people have and more about what people are actually able to do.” Those final few words came out like a rattling thunderbolt that I could feel in my own chest. This view stands in contrast to how those from the industry sample tended to talk about social justice. For them, the concept centered on the idea of rights, of making sure people have equal treatment in the eyes of the law and the market (note the terms “fair laws” and “free market” in their word clouds), irrespective of outcomes.
Not that the former outlook is unique. Prior chapters are filled with people who understand that social justice hinges on access and capabilities as much as on rights. People have the right to shop, buy, and eat whatever they want. But that doesn’t mean they have the ability to do so. Yes, adults can legally go to any store they wish, and have the right to buy anything there in exchange for money, just as anyone can legally own land and farm or start a restaurant. But we all know those rights are not always realized. This in itself is not problematic. I know people who think they would love to farm but who, if I am honest, shouldn’t—no business acumen, no green thumb, and, perhaps most problematic of all for one or two of them, they routinely sleep in past noon.
My concern is for those with the skills, passions, and sleep habits that suggest they could succeed if given the opportunity. They are not given a fair shake largely because they lack capital and credit. The previous chapters offer rich examples in which, through collaboration and sharing, people are able to realize those rights, together.
Perhaps the most memorable thing about my time with cooperative members was that no one seemed ever—ever—to have worked alone. (I am all too aware of many farmers’ relatively lonely existence. Having myself sat in tractor and combine cabs for hours on end during harvest and planting season, I know this isolation firsthand. And while farmers certainly work with others, the level of collaboration witnessed never approached what I observed at this urban agriculture cooperative or at, to take an example from prior chapters, Josh’s farming community.) Turning compost, caging tomatoes, constructing raised beds, planting, weeding, harvesting, fixing communally owned shovels and pitchforks, sharpening hoes, delivering produce to restaurants, picking up food waste from restaurants: being a cooperative member meant being continually with others. And, most striking of all, these interactions involved diverse others—white, black, Christian, Muslim, Democrat, Socialist, Republican, Asian, gay, lesbian….2
To say it was coincidence that terms such as “collaboration,” “cooperation,” “interdependence,” and “solidarity” appeared regularly in the “autonomy” word cloud for this population is to be blind to the power of practice, habit, and socialization. And the fact that the industry group offered no mention of these terms when defining “autonomy,” instead painting a polar opposite worldview with such terms as “individualism,” “self-reliance,” “self-determination,” and “survival of the fittest,” only strengthens my conviction that this observation is significant. The industry group’s “autonomy” word cloud is actually a textbook representation of what scholars call the “ideology of individualism,” the life giving atmosphere in which at-your-throat capitalism thrives.3 It reflects an understanding of autonomy that leads individuals to see neighbors as natural competitors—no wonder so many think good fences make good neighbors.
It was late in the afternoon when I arrived at the cooperative’s gardens on my final day. I would be flying back to Colorado the next morning. A handful of tall shadows stretched across a flower bed: men and women standing, talking together. Noticing me, a woman broke away and walked in my direction. She lifted both arms over her head, like a boxer being announced as winner in the center of the ring. I had an appointment with Colleen.
We decided to take a walk as we talked. We headed west, facing the setting sun, its power decreased considerably. Like an invisible hand perched above the horizon, Earth’s atmosphere had started to elongate the sun’s shape and weaken its rays.
Colleen recalled her “initiation into a cooperative way of life.” She was relatively new to the area and thus to the community. She had been a member for roughly four months. She admitted to initially having been uncomfortable with the way some things were done. “It was an adjustment getting used to how decisions are not executively made but come about through consensus, dialogue, and, if necessary, a little horse-trading.”
Yet with practice—literally, doing sharing and collaboration—this apprehension receded. Colleen again: “After an initial transition period, I became acclimated to my new world”—interesting choice of words, new world—“to the point that I now find myself wanting to collaborate even outside the cooperative.”
To show that this change had produced for her not only a new way of life but also a new view of life, she proceeded to tell me a story about an instance at her job in which her manager had made a decision without input and how that had greatly upset her. “That reaction wouldn’t have happened before my joining the co-op,” she told me. She then turned her head and lifted her right hand, shielding her eyes from the sun. The effect, though casting much of her face in shadow, made her eyes sparkle against the darkness. She was intently looking at me, unblinkingly, seriously. “It changed me, I just hope for the best.”
I think you can rest assured that it has.
The Union Kitchen was a hive of activity—abuzz with movement and accentuated with an incredible mix of smells and sounds. Those participating shared space in a fully equipped commercial kitchen, where they could rent anything they needed to make their food.
I have already discussed what a challenge it can be to start a food business. In Washington, DC, the only thing harder to do than throw a rock in any direction and not hit a lawyer is to find affordable commercial real estate. So, in late 2012, restaurateurs Jonas Singer and Cullen Gilchrist opened Union Kitchen in a 680-square-meter warehouse.
Cornelia and I were connected through a mutual friend. Her specialty was corned beef, which she made for area restaurants. She rented from Union Kitchen a couple of tables, cooktop use, and some storage space in a refrigerator.
While cleaning up her prep area, having just placed her beef in a giant tub for a seven-day soak (the essential brining process), she talked about how the sharing economy might assuage the worst of the world’s demons while strengthening its angels. Putting lids back on spice containers, she confessed to “wondering whether the present food economy is sustainable,” adding, “The sun might be setting on how we’ve conventionally thought about things.”
Sadly, outside of sharing circles especially, it seems people have an easier time imagining the end of civilization than anything beyond the conventional ownership economy. I was not sure whether Cornelia would add a rejoinder about how we are going to fix things. Often there isn’t one.
Drawing a line through spilled ground cinnamon at her work space, Cornelia had a think. “Conventional economies can never be free or freeing, thanks to market concentration,” she explained as she wiped her fingers on her apron. “We’ve got to move away from systems that perpetuate hierarchies and positional power.”
Hierarchies? Positional power? Rather than invite clarification, I decided to let silence ask the question for me. After a few seconds of direct eye contact and the best inquisitive look I could purposefully muster, she filled the void.
“The thing that draws a lot of people into these new engagements is the possibility to challenge structures, to empower people rather than corporations.”
With this comment, I felt a faint pulse: something away on the horizon, tugging, something I had felt before. Cornelia’s assertion about what animates participation in these sharing engagements is apropos for a concluding chapter. Her solo is actually a chorus. Of the more than two hundred people interviewed for this book, most had been drawn to these practices to shake things up.
That might be exactly what we need: for each of us to scream, I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore! And maybe, just maybe, some of the practices described herein can be used to give this primal scream some direction, while inspiring others on the sideline to take action too.
“And for God’s sake, we need to stop looking for ‘the Uber of food.’ Any model that concentrates wealth at the top isn’t worth emulating. You can’t put lipstick on a turd and think that will fix the stink”—as I’ve said, there is something pretty crappy about a business that sucks wealth from communities.
We’ve come full circle, as I criticized heavily the Uber platform in the introduction. A convenient ride and a means for middle-income households to supplement their income: beyond that, this popular sharing platform provides very little else. There certainly is nothing about Uber that would cause participants to rethink their keywords; nothing to suggest the experience affords people greater feelings of solidarity or empathy toward those different from themselves; nothing to make them feel like screaming about how mad they are at the current individual ownership economy.
That is where the real potential lies in many of the previously described spaces. Creating access to stuff, exchanging knowledge, and building communities are all important. Finding ways to encourage sharing platforms that serve multiple ends ought to be a priority, which in some cases starts by making sure the activities are legal. But remember also, as illustrated powerfully with the word clouds, the value of these spaces cannot be confined to their existence as exchange mediums.
To evoke the often misunderstood aphorism by Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message.4 This phrase actually means that the form of a medium, in this case the experiences afforded by certain sharing platforms, embeds itself in any message, such as how we understand certain keywords. Were it not for the word clouds, I would not dare speak in such grand tones. But you have seen the data, so I’ll dare: some of these practices appear to be world creating. I do not know how else to describe it—one group, for example, equating “fair laws” and the “free market” to “social justice”; the other, describing the keyword with terms such as “equity” and “fair trade”—but to talk of different worlds. Colleen from the prior section, if you recall, used the same term when describing her transition to a life predicated on sharing and collaboration.
In those worlds, where collaboration supplants an at-each-other’s-throats ethos, lie the seeds of something with the potential to decenter the individual ownership universe.
Here’s to our Copernicus moment: to sharing that affords food sovereignty.
