A Book of Longings.

Memories of a wildly abundant Squash season. Photo by Annie Bingham.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

This is the Peasantry School Newsletter, a string of stories that emerge from the real, on-the-ground work at Sand River Community Farm. After a quiet winter, we will creak the doors back open this Sunday with our first public work day of the season, called a Farm Frolic. We’ll be preparing the barn for shearing, setting up the lambing yard, and helping a neighbor clean out the greenhouse where we have been offered bench space for our trays of seedlings. For details about in-person events and food offerings, please subscribe to the Friday Sand River News by clicking the button below:

In lieu of stories from the Farm this week, I send along one draft version of a book summary for your review. I welcome your comments and questions. Writing such synopses for publishers’ eyes can feel like making a marketing pitch—always a bit sensational and oversimplified. If any of these words end up on a jacket cover some day, I’ll be amazed.

It may be foolhardy to say that I’m writing a book on food gifting, but I now have a hunch as to why I keep doing it: to guard against losing my nerve. I have been deeply influenced by the books I’ve read, each one penned by an author who bore the intense vulnerability of sending something so trembling and naked out into the world. Until I set out to do the same, I couldn’t have imagined the courage it must have taken them to write on behalf of the culture. So, I raise my glass to the artists and storytellers—to the culture workers. May that they be fed in turn by news from afar that their labors have provided nourishment in places they will never know.

Many thanks for your interest,

Adam

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A book summary:

This Food is a Gift: Experiments in Neighborly, Non-Market, Farming and Feeding.

This is a book of longings. To long is to be ‘made long by’ a love that refuses to be silenced—for a web of yet-unrealized relationships, for a quality of trust and generosity, for an imagined homecoming. Longing isn’t deterred by the knowledge that its object may remain out of reach. Rather, longing is the act of reaching.

The movement for sustainable agriculture began like this, with a radical vision of healed relationships between people and land. But now, after decades of playing by the rules of the market, land prices continue to skyrocket, young people see little opportunity beyond endless hours of low-paid wage labor, small farm owners stay afloat by leaping from one grant to the next, and organic farmer training programs struggle to keep their doors open.

This book wonders whether we might do a better job sustaining one another and the land without buying and selling food—by disentangling farming and feeding from the market.

A string of lively stories trace the author’s unplanned journey from market farming to multi-species neighboring—growing and gleaning food to be offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. Absent a price tag, those who eat food were invited to ‘sustain’ rather than ‘pay’ and ‘consume.’ Miraculous acts of generosity ensued.

But this is so much more than a how-to-guide to starting your own agricultural gift economy; this book amounts to a litany of on-the-ground learnings and humbling reminders that agriculture has the word culture in it. As one of the author’s early mentors suggested, “Tend to the culture as you would the soil under your feet. Perhaps it is the soil under your feet.” To be humbled means, quite literally, to be brought back in contact with the ground.

Through the lens of food that isn’t for sale, the book ponders a host of questions: What is the market? What is money? What is property? What lies outside of the market? What is the difference between neighboring and charity? What is a healthy culture and how is such a thing maintained? Farmer-poet Wendell Berry writes, “A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity.”

A sober assessment of the current state of affairs—the steady loss of farmers, a threadbare social fabric, epidemic loneliness, and alarming rates of ecological decline—finds calamity in spades. This isn’t a collection of hopeful techno-tweaks aimed at shoring up business as usual. You will find a deeper form of reassurance in these pages.

If the market serves as a set of crutches that ensures us access our daily bread, it has left our neighboring muscles badly atrophied. That’s the first bit of good news—that we actually have the muscles we will need to begin walking back toward one another and the landscapes that sustain us. But setting down the crutches and bearing weight again won’t be easy or painless. We are likely to fall down. As we fall, we might remember how to catch one another. We might remember how to be caught. We might fall back into practice. At its core, this book offers a set of gift-based neighboring practices as seeds for the work ahead.

What will we do on the day the grocery stores stop having food on the shelves? When the industrial supply chains default on their promise of a limit-free life? Will we build taller fences and gather our munitions, or set the table with everything we’ve got left and invite the whole neighborhood over for supper?

On that day, we are likely to do whatever we practice now.

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I’ve been inspired over the past weeks by agri-cultural writings from the following farmers:

Winter

and:

Feeling It All