> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ableism – the discrimination and prejudice against people with disabilities, which rooted in the belief that typical abilities are better agrelational food systems - those that place people, land, and climate above profit colonialism – multifaceted domination; some combination of territorial, legal, cultural, linguistic, political, epistemic and/or economic domination – of one or more groups of people by a foreign power over an extended period of time food system - an interconnected web of people, coexistent species, resources, and activities that extend across all domains involved in providing human nourishment, supporting vitality, and expressing comestible culture healthism - the belief that there is a moral righteousness to the “healthy choices” we make around food and our bodies kyriarchy – the social system that keeps many intersecting oppressions in place system - an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something ## Chapter Summaries ### Chapter 1 > The first thing to come to terms with is that the food system is a system. Thinking in systems is a skill. Changing systems is a bit like preparing a multi-course meal and getting all the food ready at the same time. Mental juggling is involved. > in relationship, we must grapple together with the “shoulds” and “should nots” (ethical inquiry), take an honest look at “what is” and “what if” (ground-truthing and imagining) and attempt together to find moves that bridge rather than break (building new interconnections). > Perhaps the most sage piece of advice that Donella Meadows left us with is permission to dance: “We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity – our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.” Donella Meadows is not alone in thinking change is a dance. One of our favorite activists and spiritual badasses, Reginald Hubbard agrees. He says “I don’t want to be part of a movement that doesn’t dance.” [[eurythmy is about dancing with change]] > some people just give up and give themselves over to grief – a tempting response to what feels like a hopeless situation. But submissive surrender has a dangerous viral quality – it is all too easy to transmit that shut-down feeling to others. And immobilized masses aren’t good at making radical alternative futures into realities. > Others spend their billionaire winnings on space-man fantasies and ill-conceived Mars missions, failing to recognize that colonization plus capitalism already added up to a whole lot of climate crisis on a far more human-friendly planet. > Culture change is often ignored when people who study the environment, food systems, and economic inequality begin to spin out their “solutions.” Culture – the learned and expressed beliefs, values, and assumptions that groups of people share and consider valid ways of understanding the world – is handed down across generations, but it is also dynamic and changeable. Like cultivation, which shares the same linguistic root, culture is a process. Culture is created by relationships, through the stories we tell each other, and in our bodies. Culture is in all of us, not outside us, and it informs all of our ideas, actions, and decisions. Inattention to culture, and especially to the dominant or overculture is a key reason that good ideas veer away from their intended impact as they are implemented. Shifting culture is just about the most powerful way to shift the leverage points Donella Meadows talks about. If we don’t shift culture, we simply will not succeed and may not survive. We cannot cast seeds of change on saline soil and think they will germinate. > Making change, any change, involves altering the way we look at the world around us. We are creating alternate realities out of the same stuff of life that was always in front of us. This is one reason change is hard. We are primed to see the world one way, and when asked to tilt our heads and squint to see it differently, we’re resistant. [[Feldenkrais eye exercises can help us tilt our vision of the world]] > Change is also hard because we are usually asked to do it when things are bad, when we are experiencing a traumatic event, or when we are at the end of our rope. Stress puts us into protective mode, not learning mode. Stress prevents us from being receptive to and playful with new ideas. It makes us queasy, not curious when we peer out over the edge of the unknown. We want safety. We want familiarity – even when the familiar is tied up with our suffering. The late Thich Nhat Hanh said “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.” The wind of new ideas blowing through our hair feels precarious, and we already have more than enough precarity. > What we propose is a movement to change the interconnections in the food system across a spectrum, away from transactional interactions towards relational ones, away from competition and towards collaboration, away from consumption and towards reciprocity, away from extraction and towards empathy, and away from global and towards cosmolocal. > So, we must all work together to reorganize the relations. We’ll equip you to exist within a new paradigm so that as you make choices and changes, you can reorganize relations in ways that allow life to thrive. Small voices can change the values that drive those interconnections in the system to move together along the spectrum towards relationship, empathy, collaboration, and cosmolocalism. > > None of us can do it perfectly, and certainly not while extraction and supremacy working through capitalism are steering the ship. That’s okay, we don’t need to. **Perfectionism is an invasive species in our minds.** Love that last line. > If you have hard tendencies toward the perfect, try to remember that perfectionism was introduced into our minds by White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and human domination. That usually makes it easier to let go of. > For example, we both plan to keep drinking coffee and eating chocolate until it is not possible – forever if we make a cosmolocal trade arrangement possible. We believe in local food systems. Luckily we also believe nothing is all black and white. So we do what we can and we look for better ideas for the rest. And we will live under capitalism as long as it is here, making as many of the best choices we can while meeting our needs. We’ll just do it wearing the T-shirt that quotes the science fiction genius Ursula Le Guin: “We live in Capitalism – Its power seems inescapable but so did the divine right of kings.” We don’t need a perfect world or to be perfect people (or professionals) to make progress. In fact, being flexible and forgiving in the present prepares us for living new futures. It’s how we escape. > Our process and proposal for saving the food system and the planet is deceptively simple: Move towards relationship. > Because relationality is not how those interconnections in the food system work today, many of us have been living for several generations (but not for all of human history, nor in every place or community, which is important to remember) in a system that breaks connection on purpose, that isolates us, and keeps us from rooting deeply where we are planted. Making that relational shift requires both tools and fences. We use these **to build refuges in which relational culture can root**. > A move toward relationship is not even a novel solution. In fact, articulating it requires us to be as relational in our theory as we aim to be in our practice. Our theorizing draws from fields as diverse as computer science, science fiction, sociology, feminist philosophy, ecology, indigenous studies, narratology, biology, feminism, economics, critical studies, ethnography, theology, political science, gastronomy, mycology, geography, urban studies, community organizing, organizational development, psychology, neurobiology, comparative literature, ethics, agriculture, animal husbandry, critical race theory, legal studies, and agronomy. We bring them into relationship with each other to create our own transcontinental cosmolocal paradigm for sustenance and thriving. In more simple terms, we know that we can’t change the world with the ideas we could produce alone. We recognize a need to be in relationship both within our own fields and then with wider and wider circles of thinking and practice. > Our writing collaboration is, for us, a symbiotic relational undertaking. We are both so rooted in our fields that we need the other person’s knowledge and perspective to create something comprehensive. As we spin out new lines of thinking, one or the other of us will often laugh and say, “I don’t even know what that word means!” As we slow down and explain ideas that the other person has never heard of, we are bridging fields, ways of thinking, and personalities. This kind of exchange is essential to create anything that is encompassing and specific enough to address problems that were spawned globally but manifest locally. Problems that impact spheres as intimate as our bodies and as shared as the planet we all inhabit. We are also in deeply appreciative relationship with all the people we quote in this book. Their ideas, hearts, minds, and words are gifts offered with no expectation of immediate exchange in return. In sharing the ways they make sense of the world, they’ve pieced together whole sections of the puzzle we’ve been working on. How could we not love them for this? We would go as far as to say that nothing we, or any other thinkers, say is ever truly individual. We believe ideas, theories, concepts and even thoughts are relational and no one, even if they tell you otherwise, ever came up with one in some individualistic isolation. Just as we are a part of a relational network, so are our ideas and we celebrate that. > People making relational changes in the interconnections of the food system need to be change competent, and we suspect that many of us aren’t. However, change competence is made up of a few skills we already know how to cultivate. **Change competence** includes three skills: - tolerate discomfort or be in the trouble - stay in place long enough for the magical process to happen - relate or share our stories to people near and far #### Staying with the trouble > **Change doesn’t happen without trouble**. Trouble is, for us, a technical term. It’s the stuff that happens to us or that we create as we move through life that ends up changing us or changing the world. And we are now in very troubling times. When people say shit happens, what they mean is trouble happens. Trouble is like churning butter. We have milk, then we have this agitating churning process that feels messy and takes so long we think we will never end up with anything useful. Finally, a coherent lump of wonderfulness comes together; the unnecessary parts are strained out and saved for other endeavors. Most people don’t love the feeling of trouble, but **the ability to ride out the churn is essential to change**. > The skills in this part of the change process are to learn to be in your body while you are feeling stuff you’d rather not. As the great thinker and writer Octavia Butler puts it in the Parable of the Sower: “The only lasting truth is change.” And we mostly hate change. So while we need to be looking around us gathering the information we need from as many places, people, and ideas as we can, we need to be able to live in the discomfort and the trouble. Like bees going out to look for nectar, we need to be willing to go way outside our comfort zone to find out what reality is and be able to manage our body, feelings, and mental states. > When we are not able to face into trouble, we create coping mechanisms that make us selfish, self-seeking, petty, quick to judgment, and closed-minded. In other words, we respond from trauma rather than healing. If we don’t practice being uncomfortable, we will end up displacing our discomfort onto the planet, ecosystems, and other people. We see this in all the “isms” and phobias we have practiced on each other: racism, sexism, ableism, and the list goes on. While it is oversimplified to say that they are “just” the outcomes of being unwilling to be uncomfortable, they are certainly one of the more destructive manifestations. They are creating separation to avoid discomfort, or in the words of john powell, professor and bridge builder, they are breaking when we need to be bridging. **Being able to be in trouble and even go out and find new trouble you didn’t know about and still feel, think, and act without reflexively reacting, retrenching, or creating more harm is skill number one.** #### Rooting in place > Being rooted in place is a process of composting. All sorts of elements stay in relationship with each other long enough that processes can happen and what was scrap becomes nourishing soil. We need to become relational, communal, collaborative, empathic, and connected and we cannot do that if trouble makes us move, run, turn away, or give up. We have to stay put, stay open, stay flexible, and stay in the game. To go back to our bees who gathered pollen while seeking nectar, this is the process of that pollen becoming food. It takes time, a very specific place, and a set of processes. > If we don’t stay rooted we end up “pulling a geographic” (which means moving to a new place in an attempt to solve problems internal to us) and thinking that a new place or context will make us different people. We skip around, looking at problem after problem and having an initial spark of interest but not staying put long enough for any change process to occur. And in this phase, we need processes to unfold. In other words, we need to care longer. We cannot change all the leverage points in a system ourselves. We need other change shapers in order to make substantive transformation, no matter how important we think we are. Humility and relationality tell us that we need each other and we better get used to it. > To shape this change, we first need to have a set of emotional skills that allows us to be uncomfortable; then, we need to develop them so we endure. Stay longer. Consider longer. Care longer. By expanding our window of tolerance for trouble, we become available to more change. Climate crisis and collapse amplify urgency in very real ways, but they do not displace the need to cultivate this skill. If we rush our responses, they simply won’t be butter (or honey). The churning process, the compost process, the gestation process, the connection process, the processes that turn that nectar into honey, water cycles, even something as basic as digestion are not instant. They are most successful when you let nature get on with itself and you stay part of it. #### Sharing stories > Once we have learned all these lessons from the trouble and through staying in place, we need to share them across communities or in our community across time. We need to relate. But sharing change can be tricky: What worked for us might not work for someone or somewhere else. The way we share our learnings might turn others off, scare them, or shut them down. Have you ever loved a song, a movie, or a kind of food so much that you told everyone about it and people got sick of hearing you talk about it and ignored the very thing you loved because of how you could not shut up about it? It’s hard to share transformational moments or processes without blunting the impact by either turning it into a prescription or data. To streamline the telling and prove impact, we often season with shoulds and pureé our experiences into data. Neither work. Telling people what to do brings up resistance. Data, alone and out of context, can fall flat or be manipulated. Overzealous promises can underdeliver. Telling people how to feel about something might even incline them toward the opposite just out of stubbornness or status quo. Most frustratingly, the import of our innovation might be written off by people who don’t want to see the looming trouble. > This is where story comes in. Story is a technology as old as humanity. Either our brains were formed by it or we created it based on how our brains work, making it the most well adapted technology for sharing complex change information. Story helped people find plants and animals they needed to survive, it was used to explain natural cycles so that people could cultivate food and thrive, it created community, and we still crave it. There is such a strong human pull toward sitting around a fire and sharing stories that we still do it. But now the “firelight” comes from a screen and the stories are transmitted digitally. > Story also functions to help us learn things we don’t want to or need to learn firsthand. This is called surrogate scenario building. Stories provide the opportunity for individuals to understand scenarios we just can’t afford to try out on our own. Should each person try to figure out which mushrooms are poisonous, or would it be better to receive hard-won lessons from others? If we don’t create our stories as a gift to each other and to our system, our experience stays isolated and withers instead of propagating like wild strawberries. Wild strawberries reproduce with runners coming out of the mother plant, allowing daughter plants to spring up in new locations. These connections don’t last forever but they certainly spread the sweet red berries efficiently. The mother plant can photosynthesize for the daughter plants while they are growing but eventually they don’t need the mother. Wild strawberries also produce seeds so they can reproduce in more than one way. That about sums up how stories diffuse change. > Change does not last if there is no diffusion of innovation. It needs to move from a place where it worked to new places where it’s needed, either via runners or seeds, from community to community. When we expand on our ideas about cosmolocalism and targeted universalism in a later chapter, you will shake your head yes. The idea that we shape change, then share it and spark both interest and possibility in others just feels so right – it is how we change becomes possible in systems that feel huge and unwieldy (because they are). > Story is simple. You need a character with whom you will develop an emotional attachment (empathy), a plot (trouble happening to the character that they will work through), and a resolution (that helps you learn individually). When we have those three simple components, our brains are sucked in. Research has shown that people will give more money, believe new things, change opinions, feel connected, keep the changes for weeks if not years, when we learn through story.⁸ We need the parts of our brain that story activates for making decisions, for understanding other people, and for seeing possibilities. > A very simple example is the rat in the movie Ratatouille. Never before have so many people felt so good about knowing there was a rat interacting with their food than after watching that movie. It doesn’t matter that our logic tells us vermin are touching the food, our empathic response is to **root for the rat**. Love this. How can we get people **to root for the rat**, could be one of the keys to human survival. In connection with this, I like this essay - https://amielhandelsman.medium.com/supplementing-white-fragility-3b5100362abe I like the term "change shaping" as opposed to "change making". Also, "change agillity" and "change competence". > Stories from the past come to us from all kinds of disciplines: faith and wisdom stories, anthropology, history, family tales, and cultural narratives. They reveal deep ancestral truths that we really must remember if we are to **break the spell of the current overculture**. > Thomas Hobbes’ dismal insistence that we never cooperate unless compelled against our will and our natural state results inevitably in war is more assertion than evidence. The anthropological and historical records – along with plenty of stories from diverse wisdom traditions – reveal that we were not always primarily preoccupied with the self to the detriment of the community. Humans, by nature, crave kinship and find belonging in a band, a family, a tribe because we simply cannot survive for long outside a group. > Supremacy of the individual and competitive orientation are recent constructs that suit and serve extractive and neoliberal capitalism and the notion of nation states – constructs that evade examination and consolidate power when they are presented with an air of inevitability and accepted as “human nature.” Modern humans have grown so accustomed to seeing this funhouse mirror reflection of ourselves that we actually believe the distortion to be real. No wonder we move through the world with exaggerated senses of self. This leads some theorists to posit that humans are now products of the modern nation state and the economic systems that control them. > Throughout that entire process, story fosters relationship. We share, are vulnerable, and transmit feelings across space. We listen, are open and honest, we willingly take in another person. Those are the very relational skills we need to move from transaction (data, money, facts, if you do X, then I’ll do Y) to relationship (I understand you and what you experienced and have learned from it). > As we move forward through the book, please keep in mind both indigenous and diasporic sources of strength, information, change agility, and future building – we will need them to deal with the damage we see in the system and in the solutions we create. ### Chapter 2 - The Damaging - Not Broken - Global Food System > The ability to impact a small part of the local food system was immediate. Because the complexity was lower, the relationship was a leverage point. Now, relationality is Josh’s business model anyhow; he is always trying to lower the complexity and increase the relationality. > So what is the purpose of the current global food system? And you might reasonably assume the answer ought to be: to feed the world. By taking a look at how the system is behaving and what impacts it is having, we can get a sense of its purpose > For at least 95 percent of our species’ history, humans gathered, caught, trapped, and hunted for their food. Then, around 12,000 years ago, around the start of the Holocene epoch and its stable, supportive climate, women began farming. They started cultivating wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East and Mediterranean basin and tending the first rice paddies in China. > In Mesopotamia, pastoralism – a nomadic way of life centered around the grazing of livestock – developed alongside domestication of plantlife, and provided a broader, more stable resource base. > Three-quarters of the global food supply draws on just twelve crops and five livestock species. Just four crop species – maize/corn, wheat, rice and potatoes – dominate the industrial food system. Efforts to improve and support the production of these four species suck up the majority of agricultural research investment. Indeed, nearly half of all private sector agricultural research concentrates on one single crop – maize/corn. This may be the most compelling evidence of just how reductionist the industrial production system is. Presented with abundant life and abundant diversity, it favors these four crops. And then, through industrial processing, it often reduces them to white starches – the literal “white supremacy” of commodity food. > Globally, the food system contributes approximately 34 percent of greenhouse gas emissions through deforestation and land use, agricultural production and processing, plastics and aluminum packaging, long-distance transport and food waste. > Oxford University researchers concluded that “emissions from [unaltered] food systems alone would result in a world with more than 1.5C of warming by 2065, and 2C shortly after 2100.” > But beware of the single-solution peddlers – agrochemical companies that masquerade as seed sellers, equipment suppliers who have thrown in with surveillance technologists. They catastrophize GAPS predictions for the purpose of presenting their proprietary “sustainable intensification” strategies as our only hope. They’d have us all believe that intensive application of synthetic pesticides and heavier reliance on genetically modified or edited crops grown in bigger monocultures are the best way to boost food production. This is a classic case of letting the wolf guard the hen house. Promoting “sustainable intensification” to address an illusory food crisis will only intensify the climate and environmental conditions that pose the most imminent threats to a sufficient and secure food supply. > Solid figures on just how much of the total global food supply is produced on small farms are elusive – estimates range from 70 percent at the high end to around 30 percent on the low end. More reliably, we believe that small farms produce about 80 percent of the food consumed in both Asia and subSaharan Africa. > Without getting too hung up on the comparative virtues and flaws of various modeling methods, we are satisfied to simply say that a whole lot of the world isn’t being nourished by the likes of Cargill, ADM, Bunge, and Dreyfus, the titans of the global grain trade. And even if that model is presently making significant contributions to global supply, there is no reason to believe it is the only, or the best, way to meet that need. Indeed, in the words of environmental economist David Fleming, “The claim that industrial agriculture is the only way of feeding a large population is about as scientific as a belief in Creationism – and far more damaging.” ### Chapter 3 - Collapse and the Fall of Agricapitalism **the real purpose of the food system** > the global food system isn’t broken, it is functioning as intended. It is ruthlessly effective at commodifying land, consuming lives, and feeding profits to those who already have wealth, power, and control ensuring that they keep getting more of the same. By intention and design, it extracts value from the natural world and from the bodies of a lower subjugated class of laborers. It then converts that which has been extracted into cheap calories and profits. > > The purported purpose of the global food system may be to “feed the world,” but now that we’ve briefly reviewed its impacts, it sure seems like its actual priorities are efficiency, cost minimization, market success, profit, and growth. All short-term boons that come at too high a price. With agribusiness and industrial efficiency as its cultural touchstones, maximizing production for profit as its motivation, extraction as its modus operandi, and conglomeration as its form, the contemporary global food system is best described as a late-stage neoliberal agricapitalist food system or what we will call agricapitalism. **origin story of capitalism** Capitalism is not defined by trade and markets. Those have existed for millenia. Rather, it is defined by its need for perpetual growth. > The origin story of capitalism boils down to a campaign by elites to appropriate the labor of the masses so they could work less or not really at all and still accumulate wealth from its one true source: nature. To pull this off, they had to restrict people’s access to commons and locally interdependent subsistence and make wage labor the only way to survive. Once that was accomplished, the task turned to suppressing the costs associated with extraction – cheapening exerts pressure to depress wages and resist environmental protections, often by ensuring that the interests of capital are better represented in the halls of government than the interests of people or planet. This is, of course, in tension with the inspiring principles of democracy. Little wonder that this system co-produces inequality and ecological breakdown. > > Unless constrained by good governance – strong laws that impose limits on the exploitative methods by which profit is most easily generated, as well as laws that protect the working classes – the economic system’s logic and imperatives seep deep into our psyches. Once there, they whisper: You know, you could be rich, too. By dangling that possibility – however unlikely – the game prevents its losers from objecting to the rules of play. > It is unfair to pin the whole crime on capitalism, as it has always traveled with a rotating band of co-conspirators. Systems of socio-economic organization such as patriarchy, settler-colonialism, and chattel slavery, are among the accomplices that sharpened the blades, picked the locks, tied up the victims, and greased the wheels. > Women because of their procreative potential, indigenous peoples with societies and cultures that intrinsically value the more-than-human world, and darker skinned peoples conveniently considered less evolved were all cast as closer to nature and, therefore, appropriate to dominate. > After “new” lands to colonize were all grabbed up and slavery abolished, capitalism needed a new pal to help with growth-promoting. It found a fitting friend in industrialism, which reductively reorganized human life around mechanization, standardization, and process optimization. In the early industrial era, the Earth was still brimming with “resources” to extract and “sinks” – clean air and clean water – into which wastes could be pumped and absorbed. The rich got richer faster, growing their enterprises into continent and globe-spanning forces that literally reshaped the landscapes of the Earth and the mind. This is the story behind the Gilded Age in America – a brief period in which it really was possible for a few families to catapult themselves into the ranks of the super-rich. Then the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl happened. > Witnessing the market collapse of the Great Depression and ecological crisis of the Dust Bowl in tandem made a strong impression – quite obviously, people needed some protections to survive and maybe even thrive. It looked like the responsibility to take care and make care would have to sit with the state – not the market, after all. In writing The Great Transformation in 1944, scholar Karl Polanyi prophesied, “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment… would result in the demolition of society.” How right he was and how ignored he would be. **neoliberalism** > Desirous of a return to easy profits and rapid wealth creation and aware that transformations come from changing the goals and the culture of a system, economist Friedrich von Hayek and his students at the University of Chicago, including the now infamous Milton Friedman, got to the work of whispering a new notion: raw competition. To increase the virulence of their ideas, they not only published in scholarly literature and the popular press, but they also stood up foundations, deployed public relations strategists, and cozied up to congressmen. They stuck with the project without flagging for decades. Eventually, as this idea went viral, it created new goals, ways of looking at the world, and culture. Indeed, it may have been the primary accelerant of agricapitalism and the economic, political, and ecological disasters it has helped to advance – the very crises we’re all grappling with today. > Neoliberalism sets up winners and losers, and the losers lose big so the winners can have more. More than they need, more than they could possibly use, and more than the Earth can support. > > Most of us are the losers, who deserve what we get in a system where competition is all, and success is defined as taking what you want from others, if you can possibly pull it off. > > The Earth and its other inhabitants are eliminated entirely from consideration. > > Climate justice writer and activist Naomi Klein identifies destruction of our relational capacity as neoliberalism’s “single most damaging legacy,” noting that its “bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving.” > At its core, neo-liberalism insists that the economy should dictate its values and measures of success to society, not the other way around. When this happens, things like democracy, justice, care, equity, and even survival get in the way of the project. Probably not the arrangement we actually want. > If we want to get out from under these pernicious neoliberal lies, we need to start shaping change in economic and food systems. We must revive the culture of agriculture, which requires releasing it from the clutches of agricapitalism. In the next chapter we will go deep into systems change so for now, here is the quickie version. We need to point out to each other the failures and problems with the old paradigm; in this case, it is the current paradigm of neoliberal capitalism. Next, we need to create and operate with flamboyant visibility from the new paradigm. We need to support each other and everyone we find living this new paradigm, making relationships and kin in ways we could never have expected. Finally, we must prioritize sharing our message with folks who are receptive and refrain from worrying much about the criticism of those who benefit from the current system so much that they cannot or will entertain the possibility of transformation. > Perhaps relationships still feel a little too soft and squishy to you – especially as compared to the firm-yet-invisible hand of the markets. In that case, ask yourself, is the market providing any real choices, benefits, or even opportunities? If so, to whom? By our count, the winners seem to be a very select few: > > •The top ten food & beverage processors control 90 percent of the industry. > > •Despite a seemingly varied array of products on store shelves, four or fewer firms control at least 50 percent of the market for 79 percent of the groceries regularly purchased by Americans. > > •Following recent mergers and acquisitions – the Dow-Dupont merger, Bayer-Monsanto buyout, and the ChemChina (Syngenta)-Sinochem asset merger – about 70 percent of the agrochemical industry is in the hands of three entities. > > •As of 2016, the top ten fertilizer companies held 56 percent market share of an industry that saw $183 billion in revenue in 2014. > > •The top four companies hold 67 percent market share of the seed industry, an industry that generated about 63 billion in revenue in 2020 and is expected to grow to $100 billion by 2026. > > •Oddly (or perhaps predictably) Bill Gates is now the largest U.S. farmland owner holding at least 242,000 acres of mostly prime agricultural lands. **accumulation by dispossession** > Development scholar Philip McMichael observes that the globalization of food trade, the concentration of corporate power, and the debt-for-development model of international finance and foreign investment combine to drive “accumulation by dispossession” through a combination of structural adjustment and displacement of smallholder agriculture. > Let’s not mince words: Neoliberal global capitalism compels people into an abusive relationship with the planet. There can be no right relationship with an economic system as voracious as capitalism as practiced by enthusiasts of this theory. Nor can there be any truly sustainable agriculture under neoliberal and extractive capitalism. > In neoliberal and extractive capitalism, when we’re only counting dollars, we’re always discounting lives. > The global food system moves to the beat of economic systems set up to favor the business interests over the interests of people and communities and that actively support a multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy. **kyriarchy** > Just like a group of ravens is called a murder, the group of -isms and -phobias displayed in that hearing (plus some didn’t show up there) is called a kyriarchy – the social system that keeps many intersecting oppressions in place **colonialism** > The way activist and author Patty Krawec talks about colonialism lays its antirelational nature bare: “Colonialism works in all of us to destroy and replace: destroying relationships and replacing them with isolated identities we can move around the country. It tells us to be one thing or another and never gives any of us time to be at home with ourselves. It tells us to be ourselves but then clearly lets us know which selves are welcome and which selves are not. Whatever we are is not enough, so we grasp for something else, as if that will imbue us with meaning. And it’s empty because it isn’t truly ours. **unlearning inverse inferences in order to unwind a zero-sum game** > Attorney and inequality expert Heather McGhee explains that both the wide span of the U.S. economy and its agricultural sector have long “depended on systems of exploitation—on literally taking land and labor from racialized others to enrich white colonizers and slaveholders. This made it easy for the powerful to sell the idea that the inverse was also true: that liberation or justice for people of color would necessarily require taking something away from white people.” Until we unlearn the inverse inference and disabuse ourselves of the notion that everything from farmland access to food security are a zero-sum game, racial agricapitalism will continue to stunt any justice we might hope to grow. **sexism** > Gender roles and their oppressive and limiting force on our cultures will be very clear when you see who gets paid to do what and how much they are paid for it. Entirely devaluing – not paying for – the messy, ceaseless work of domestic caretaking, including making meals day in and day out, is one way that capitalism cooks its books. If women across the world were actually paid minimum wage for the cooking, cleaning, and caretaking work they do at home, the wages would have totaled $10,900,000,000,000.00 in 2019. Yes, that’s $10.9 trillion dollars (in case you had trouble with all those zeros) – and it is also more than the 50 largest companies in the world combined made around the same time. Capitalism relies on heteropatriarchy to disappear the essential carework that enables all other production. **class anxiety drives a wedge between us around food** > At the same time, the pursuit of “good food” – whether gourmet or organic – also lets those of us in the middle ease our crackling anxieties about class and status. Food and cultural studies researcher Margot Finn convincingly demonstrates that the recent good food revolution simultaneously stigmatized the foods and bodies associated with the lower class and encouraged the middle- and upper-middle classes to understand their dietary choices as a way to demonstrate that they “deserve” their status. In this context, many efforts to persuade other people to eat foods coded as “better” may even be a form of bigotry in disguise that deepens social divides.¹¹⁸ In other words, class anxiety may even have us using food – a potent material for creating connection – as a wedge. **healthism uses health as the only lens fo choice** > Healthism tills the landscape of our minds, tearing our instincts about how to nourish ourselves, destabilizing our ability to have a grateful relationship with food, and eroding our loving wonder and reverence for our bodies. It also takes a neoliberal approach to our health by situating all the factors of health in the choices of the individual. Healthism also creates a hierarchy of choices that use health as the only lens for choice. It ignores the social determinants of health, the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age that shape health, as well as the influence systemic oppression that comes with race, class, gender, age, ability level, and all the other usual suspects. > According to activist Isabel Foxen Duke, “people steadfastly cling to the belief that they can make themselves ‘pure’ or even immortal (outsmarting death, disease, etc.) by making ‘correct’ food choicesspending hours studying the literature, listening to gurus, or trying to find the golden key.” Agricapitalism is more than happy to produce whatever is the current golden key and sell it to us at exorbitant prices for to generate profit. > These structural -isms, -phobias, and -archies are not a side effect or an inadvertent outcome of the way the food system functions. They are the methods by which agricapitalism leverages unfair advantage to achieve the goal of creating surplus for a very small number of people instead of feeding us all. Most of us – including lots of wonderful, creative, well-intentioned people working within the global food system and trying to make it better – hoped and believed that the intention was still feeding people. But we’ve got to face the fact that this crazy complex and totally enveloping system does not have the best interests of people or planet as the desired outcome. **capitalism** > What comes to mind when you read the word “capitalism” printed on the page? If you are like most, your brain will quickly substitute “markets and trade.” But this is too simplistic a heuristic. As economic anthropologist Jason Hickel demonstrates in his book Less Is More, markets and trade existed for many thousands of years before capitalism and were, in and of themselves, pretty harmless. Instead, Hickel and others identify the distinguishing feature of capitalism as its organization around and dependence upon growth – and growth for the purpose of accumulation. **collapse is a process of contraction and simplification within complex systems** > Collapse is a kind of trouble. Think of it as the kind of trouble that advances the plot of a story, cracks things open, and reveals the futility of resistance to change. Collapse slices clean through the propaganda and exposes what has really been going on all the time. The word is being uttered more frequently and openly lately, but the prospect is not new. We’ve had an inkling that the patterns and dynamics of humans’ presence on Earth were angling in the direction of environmental and economic collapse since the publication of the book Limits to Growth fifty years ago, which sold 12 million copies, was translated into 37 languages, and continues to be the topselling environmental title of all time. > Collapse, at its most neutral and least terrifying, refers to processes of contraction and simplification within complex systems. This could look like a world where fuel is scarce, we use it sparingly, and we do not drive places unless it is absolutely necessary. It might mean a version of modern life where we buy and own far less stuff (David Fleming) It is a ... > “deep, interconnected, planetary tragedy.” > Renewables have been positioned as the silver bullet that will slay climate change, but the generation and storage technologies developed to date are reliant upon minerals and rare elements, which must be mined (extracted) and are in even shorter supply than fossil fuels. > If we don’t confront and prepare mentally and relationally, for collapse, we’ll find ourselves careening and crashing over a period of one to three centuries. We’d rather not do that. We’d rather move along the curves of decline, experiencing the crises and understanding that they are part of a process. It’s always worse when each individual event feels confusing and unrelated. It is exhausting to ask over and over again, “Why is this happening?” Those creeping feelings of unease that come when you hear about supply chain issues on the radio, when you can’t seem to find pasta in any of your grocery stores, or when we could not find dinner in Burlington are how we perceive the low rumblings of a destabilizing system. This is what some systems thinkers call weak signals. > > We can start listening and responding to the weak signals – and the collapse theorists – without constantly catastrophizing and fixating on worst-case scenarios > We may find ways to sensibly simplify some systems before they slip out of our control and we may not be able to salvage others. Either way, if we begin voluntarily simplifying our systems and our lives, we’ll be better able to keep our footing through the slips and slides of collapse. > Living inside late-stage complex systems involves a whole lot of the things that suck up our time and energy, attention and resources. As these distracting obligations and narcotic distractions die back, we will find more spaces and places to sow the seeds of relationality. And what we need will grow in that space, so long as we tend to it. After converting the energy of our spirits and the sun, there will be plenty enough pleasure, meaning, and joy. **food system is a secondary energy system** > The food system can, in some ways, be thought of as a secondary energy system. Its outputs are how we supply humans with energy and are even measured in calories, units of energy measurement. All agriculture is premised on harnessing and converting the energy of the sun into forms usable by living organisms. Plants are the real heroes because they photosynthesize – turning sunlight into substances that animals, including humans, can eat. ### Chapter 4 - Dispatches from a Relational Future > For local and regional food to have a fair chance, four conditions must exist. We need to: > > (1) Advance policies with relational goals; > > (2) structure public programs and spending in ways that encourage and reward relationships (that bridge, not break); > > (3) pull back on subsidies and arrangements that prop up the unsustainable and harm-causing “conventional” model; and > > (4) resource relational alternatives so that they can stand a chance in a sector where competition is still king. **cosmolocalism** > Cosmolocalism envisions radically different kinds of linkages between local and global communities than those that have formed – and strangled peoples and places – under global and neoliberal capitalism. The remix spun by cosmolocalism encourages us to make some sweet, sliding moves between locality and universality. Its rhythm drives a deep respect for the local as our most important social and ecological sphere; its melody sings of the potential for global networking beyond the logics and narrow incentives of capitalism. Its chorus proclaims its characteristics: small, local, open, and connected. We’ll dance to that! Farm Hack - https://farmhack.org/tools **community is the deliverable** > Skywoman is a place where communities can self-organize to build sovereign food systems. In fact, for Skywoman, “community is the deliverable” because “a foundation of healthy, deep, sustained, and reciprocal relationships among people can handle challenges with soil, plants, animals, air, water, ancestors, and the unborn. Weak communities will struggle on all these fronts.” They convene with principles of universal reciprocity and dedicate space for the organizers of food sovereignty to share stories. **pleasure as resistance** > According to financial journalist Eric J. Weiner, pleasure is a way to reclaim a modicum of power within an established geography of inequitable power relationships. Living well, whatever that looks and feels like in our own contexts, allows us to rise and fight another day. **the principles of relationality** > When future generations tell the story of what got us out of the mess we have made of the food system, some themes will emerge. Future students will analyze those themes in their research papers just as we wrote papers on the New Deal or the fall of the Berlin Wall. They will say that we learned from our mistakes, regrouped, and changed the trajectory. We realized that our changes had to be cosmolocal – they had to freely and openly exchange knowledge but be more discerning about how we traded materials. We practiced connected knowing, building bridges between people, cultures, organizations, and countries, finding ways to humanize each other. We understood deeply the need for communities to pursue change in their own way, even while the goals were universal (targeted universalism) and we trusted what they knew about where and how they live (ground truthing). We not only gave back to each other and the Earth; we also gave forward to the future in universal reciprocity. We allowed ourselves to find and really feel reverence and pleasure with food and in our relationships. Divesting from perfectionism stopped us from fighting each other, from eviscerating ourselves. A little humility brought back respect. And throughout all of our successes, we saw our very human selves as a part of nature, not apart from or in charge of it. From a place of membership and belonging, we were able to learn from and defer to nature’s patterns and wisdom, allowing ourselves to be guided by it even as we use our intellect and reason to do the really cool things that humans are capable of doing. ### Chapter 5 - Emergent Examples Emergent strategy was coined by Henry Mintzberg in 1985 as a business concept, picked up by Margaret Wheatley, and remixed (injecting metaphors from biology and wisdom from Grace Lee Boggs) by adrienne maree browne. **fermentation as metaphor** > Mara King, our personal fermentation mentor makes the connection for us between the jars on our counter and this book. While talking to Michelle about fermentation and food systems she dropped this wisdom: “Fermentation makes you ask ‘What’s the container?’” By container, Mara means a metaphor for both business practices and lifeways. “When you’re fermenting, you’re not thinking about making the lactobacillus do its work. They do their own work. But you’ll only get to the goal you desire if you create the right container and conditions for them to do that work. If the container is set up and filled correctly – anaerobic, with the right nutrients – then you just leave it up to everyone in the container to do their thing, you end up with something you want.” **Interdependence** > So, as Shaun Chamberlin, who you met in Chapter Three explains, financial independence is not only a myth but one of our most dangerous ones. First, it sets you up to be a winner or a loser, competing and using each other for personal gain. But it also just isn’t true. Even billionaires live in a house someone built and eat food someone grew and wear clothes someone made > Once we admit that financial independence is a pernicious myth, we’ve also got to give the same treatment to “food independence.” Resisting exploitative agricapitalist food systems by attempting to become “food independent” and grow everything yourself is not just difficult, self-defeating, and isolating – it can quickly trigger the same king of stockpiling and hoarding tendencies of doomsday preppers who respond to collapse by building themselves fortresses stocked with years of provisions. Such “independence,” whether stored in charming mason jars or buckets of powdered food with a century-long shelf-life is a false idol. If you recognize and even revere the lives, agency, and kinship of plants, animals, and microbes, food always reveals the truth of interdependence. This alone is reason enough to recognize that relational is the right paradigm. > Agrelationality can liberate us. It can free us from chains we don’t even know we are bound by. It prizes and pursues a form of collective liberation that follows the unashamed embrace of interdependence. Liberation of the people who work in the food system, the land, our bodies, and our minds. In its depths, relationality has the potential to recompose and recast our humanity, allowing us to reclaim our rightful role as part of – not apart from – nature. But before we plunge into the depths, we must (re)learn how to swim in the shallows, and sometimes we will retreat to the safety of the shore. > > What follows are stories that splash and say: Come on in, the water is fine. You can trust this message because we are connected to each of the stories – our own collaborations with communities, businesses that drew us in as they put their values into practice, and an example from another country that is richly informing work we’re plotting next. In other words, these are the emergent signals in our world that show us the patterns that could be. This is a bit of how we live together with our extended communities (and networks of change shapers) in rather beautiful ways. None of these examples are things done the easy way – each took a lot of creative, deliberate and sustained effort. All were worth it. **Farming is hard work** > Though rewarding, the work of abolition and new creation is hard. Farming, even when it is a labor of love, isn’t easy. The prevailing insistence that growing food should be as easy as possible is, in fact, part of what makes extractive, transactional, and appealing and accepted than relational, agroecological ones. **waste is a social construct** > Waste, like weeds, is a social construct. Food becomes waste when we stop seeing its potential. **mind swag** > Even though he owns some of the coolest places in Denver and Boulder, Kelly jokes that he hates restaurant swag. You won’t catch him in a branded T-shirt or baseball cap. What he wants is “mind swag” he wants someone to walk away with an experience that stays with them, a last mile connection to the food, inspired by the ideas that created it. **erotic value of work** > Diaspora Co.’s staff steeped themselves in the wisdom of Audre Lorde when developing their manifesto: “The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need – the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love." **ecogather** > For several years, Nicole taught food systems at Sterling College, a tiny school perched on a hilltop in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom that has been a haven for people moved to care for a wounded world with nature-based wisdom and practical skills. When she began working with undergraduates, she always started by helping them realize that no one of them would be able to end environmental degradation, repair the cruel legacies of genocide and racism, or fix the food system on their own – but they could all be shiny, colorful parts of the change-mosaic they wanted to see in the world. She also inculcated a healthy skepticism about the notion that the ideologies and corporations that devastated the planet for profit would be the ones to foster restoration. To find purpose, belonging, and meaning in a changed and changing world, she and her colleagues focused on helping students come into right relationship with the land and our kin. Her students had the rare chance to bring their study of heady topics like systems, economics, policy, culture, ethics, and sovereignty to life by spending lots of time outdoors, working on the farm and in the kitchen to nourish their community, collecting and sharing stories, and trying to tend each other’s hearts as carefully as they’d tend to new lambs and seedlings. > > Without question, facilitated learning in such an embodied and deeply relational manner is transformative for both teacher and student. But when she lay awake at night, Nicole would often wonder if it was enough to reach so few students when so many people deserved to know about the breaking aspects of the agricapitalist food system and to build the skills that would allow bridging alternatives to take shape. E.F. Schumacher had certainly persuaded her that “Small is Beautiful.” But was “small” enough in the twenty-first century? > > Uncertainty prompted her to try teaching in a different program that was rapidly scaling up – but she quickly found her impact diluted as she stretched attention across too many students and operated in too rigid an institutional bureaucracy. David Fleming’s system-scale rule gave her a way around the Goldilocks problem at the heart of her teaching career: “Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.” With the generous support from an anonymous foundation that accepts the reality of collapse, supports communities of practice, and sees emergence as nature’s way of scaling, Nicole returned to Sterling to manifest EcoGather. > The preamble to the “EcoGather Story Ethics” reads: > > We seek wisdom from experiences, elders, and ancestors. > > We make sense of our experiences in the retelling. > > We learn from each other by listening openly. > > Meaning making, then, is born of both experience and expression, which can be either solitary or shared. > > Choosing to invite others into our experiences and reflections is an act of vulnerability. > > Safely releasing our defenses and opening to possibility can only happen when there is trust. > > To foster trust, support co-creation, and respectful exchange of knowledges, EcoGather commits to a set of storytelling ethics that center intentionality and ongoing consent. First EcoGather course was Surviving the Future! > The best way we had seen change education described was in the work of Octavia E. Butler. So we named our certificate program to honor her notion that change can be shaped by humans but not made. She wrote: “All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.” Michelle came to work on the program, acting as the consulting scholar for the Change Shaping: Connection-based Training for Good Trouble Makers certificate program and it became another opportunity for building relationships and connections. > EcoGather’s Change Shaping program starts with the self as the most intimate and smallest unit of change. We need to show up for ourselves and learn the skills necessary to be with trouble. We need a trauma informed stance in the world of change so that we can keep showing up over time – this is how we stay whole as we stay with the trouble. After we have developed the internal skills we can turn outward and build communities where the value of care is the gravitational center. Shared care is a powerful force for both connection and change. Then we dive into activist history and strategy, which helps change shapers to understand the frameworks in which they live and work for a more relational system. Empathy is at the heart of any coalition building between people, groups, communities, and even across the digital world. Empathy is a way to show up, keep showing up, and understand the needs of others so we can show up for their communities too. Finally, we shape change through a story-based framework and build skills for narrative transformation. ### Chapter 6 - Murmurations > Food systems have the potential to reform as dense, supple and sustaining webs of connections – social connections among humans, eco-spiritual connections between humans and more-than-human kin. These connections will, first and foremost, reassemble within place-based communities at scales that are readily discernible. But they will also sometimes stretch across the globe, among those who merit trust. Plant, animal, fungi, and mineral material – the stuff of food – will be able to move through these webs and their remnants returned for re-substantiation. > > This relational approach is not a quick fix for anything – it is the work of generations. We may not, as one of Michelle’s favorite sayings goes, finish the work, but we are obligated to start it. > Make moves toward relationship, away from transactional arrangements, especially extractive ones. But don’t obsess over every bite of food you put into your mouth. Binary thinking and perfectionist tendencies reduce the complexity of our contexts and the nuances of all our relationships. This kind of thinking can also drive us mad either by convincing us that the options available are never good enough and making us feel perpetually inadequate. Let’s see this in action: Is buying fruit from a local orchardist who sometimes sprays his heirloom apple, pear, and cherry trees with synthetic fungicides to avoid the loss of many trees relational or transactional? Is that question even worth asking? Is it more or less relational than buying apples from a biodynamic orchard across the country? What about the wax and pesticide coated Red Delicious from Walmart that the elderly widow across the street offers your child: is it relational to accept or reject her gift? There is never just one right answer. Binary mental models and norms are themselves anti-relational – so ditch them. Instead, do the work to figure out what kinds of relationships you most want to have with the Earth, with other people, and with morethan-human kin through food and move toward them.   | Transactional & Extractive Orientation | Relational & Empathic Orientation | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Takes whatever it can get without damaging reputation | Gives whatever it can offer without imperiling itself | | Gives only when it can take something specific in return | Gives (or gifts) without expecting something specific in return | | Quantifies & focuses on how much | Qualifies & focuses on impacts | | Focuses on the short to mid-term gains and losses | Balances needs across time | | Limits long-term thinking to less than one lifetime | Extends long-term thinking across generations | | Keeps receipts and tallies | Offers gratitude and trust | | Primarily motivated by self- and corporate-Interest | Typically motivated by mutual thriving and planetary well-being | | Demands attention be stretched and splintered | Purposefully directs and opens attention | | Judges and accepts or rejects firmly | Remains receptive | | Broader interests limited to living humans or use value of nature | Broader interests include past and future humans, intrinsic value of nature | | Careful and Calculating | Care-full and Cultivating | | Adds up enjoyments | Experiences enchantment | | Draws tight circles of care, encompassing self, family, and affinity groups | Widens circles of care across difference, location, time, and species | > Ross Gay, our champion of delight, tells us that joy is inextricably connected to both loss and labor – internal excavations, physical exertion, relational exchanges, and deep carework. We must open our bridging selves to the pain and stay with the trouble of grief and loss to get to the joys that wait beyond. Ross has a hunch “that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on… [J]oy, emerging from our common sorrow… might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love." > We are not yet at the place where we are having wild-yet-serious public and political conversations about common love. But also the signals for love, care, relationship, and connection are getting louder and harder to ignore. When you want to retreat, which is a reasonable response to overwhelm, remember that there are so many others who wish to respond to our current and coming crises with kindness, connection and courage. > We have a place in this world that is ours, it is small, but we can be powerful when we work together for good. You are in the company of the tallest peaks and the most verdant valleys, with elders and wise people from places you may never have heard of, you keep company with the mushrooms, the aspen trees, the sheep and the salmon, and with a growing number of people who feel and see the world as you do. You are an essential part of the community of the future and you are not alone. # Quotes Jason Hickel: > “It [capitalism] is the first and only economic system in human history that requires constant expansion, at an exponential rate. The goal of capitalist growth is not to satisfy specific human needs. The goal is to generate and accumulate more capital every year than in the previous year, which requires the constant search for new ‘borders’ and their exceeding.” > Provocative anthropologist David Graeber argued in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years that “financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money – and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money.” > As abolitionist and transformative justice activist Mariame Kaba says, “let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair." > Charles Eisenstein lays it bare: “Financial security is not true independence, but merely dependence on strangers, who will only do the things necessary for your survival if you pay them.”¹ (Ascent of Humanity) > The only way to survive is by taking care of one another. > — Grace Lee Boggs > Abolition is not merely a negative strategy. Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” We are creating not destroying – this is true in abolition, agroecology, and agrelational moves of all sorts.