A note from Sam.

Week 2 in the book team intro series.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Soft soil makes for easy digging. A hardy crew planted tomatoes and peppers, onions and leeks at yesterday’s Farm Frolic. We weeded garlic and dribbled lines of many-colored dry beans into the dark earth of the Farm’s main garden. A steady rain has arrived this morning to settle that newly-stirred soil around a transplanted root and a swelling seed coat.

This week’s book team intro comes from my friend Sam. The conversation we struck up a few years back has deeply informed my work. The book wouldn’t have found its way without his persistent, not-always-so-gentle nudges. He asks me to labor on behalf of these beautiful ideas and stories. He isn’t afraid to point out the weak spots. He teases out the deeper telling.

If you missed last week’s note, that one came from the remarkable Eleanor Robins from How to Go Home, including her personal stipend request of $4000 to complete the manuscript editing. Thus far, twenty of you have already chipped in nearly half of that amount, with $2055 left to raise. Would you consider voting ‘yes’ to Ellie’s labors on behalf of this book by clicking over to the book’s website and joining the conversation?

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Peasant planting followed by modern crow exclusion. The black winged tricksters love to pull out corn seedlings.

Now onto this week’s note from Sam Bliss. I strongly encourage you to read his note to the end, and especially to listen to the song he wrote about the archetypal neighbor I call Old Sally.

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In the part of the world that Americans now call “the northeast,” the descendants of Europeans used to keep account books in which they wrote down everything neighbors owed each other. This practice was prevalent in the early 1800s. I learned about it from Jack Larkin’s fascinating history of early America, The Reshaping of Everyday Life.[i]

Account books were a ledger of labors and goods exchanged between households. Every item was assigned a precise monetary value. But money was often too scarce to actually settle up. Neighbors would track their transactions for years without ever closing out their tab, so to speak. They knew where to find each other if they needed anything.

Reading about these “account books” popped a beautiful bubble I had conjured in my mind. I had been sure that before greedy businessmen commodified just about everything sacred and infected us all with the disease of calculative self-regard, our ancestors had engaged in untracked reciprocity. I thought the commerce of quaint New England villages must have resembled what we might now call a gift economy.

After all, pretty much every household in rural New England was a subsistence farm at that time. Nobody could make a full-time living practicing crafts like carpentry or milling when all their neighbors were jack-of-all-trades peasants. And since everybody farmed, there was not much of a market for selling one’s produce.

Many men would make one weeklong trek to Boston or New York City each year, driving fatted cattle to sell there and spending the resultant cash on the few goods they consumed but couldn’t produce. They would load their carts with their annual grocery haul—salt, spices, coffee, tea, cod, molasses, and rum—and head homeward on rutted roads through fields and woods.

Where there was a country store in the rural northeast of the early nineteenth century, farmers would keep a tab rather than exchange money every time they purchased or sold things there.

But even with so little money in circulation, people would basically pretend to be buying and selling each other things instead of just giving gifts and doing favors.

Why keep track at all? Didn’t people trust their neighbors? Has friendship really consisted of sending each other the same $20 back and forth on Venmo for centuries?

I was working on a doctoral dissertation on non-market food practices in Vermont when I learned, disappointedly, about these account books. Their existence messed up the narrative I was trying to construct: that neighbors generally do not start selling each other their daily bread until some authority forces them to, by taxing their land or privatizing shared resources or making them repay debts with interest or extinguishing the old institutions of charity and solidarity that kept villages fed and cared for before some imagined fall from pre-capitalist grace.

The world seldom lets itself be theorized so neatly.

I thought my friend Adam Wilson might want to know about this. It was partly his influence that had led me to believe in this primordial gift economy. Plus, my role in Adam’s writing and thinking is to provide something of a scholarly fact check. The trusting, generous villagers we fantasized about turned out to be tightfistedly quantifying and dollarizing every neighborly exchange, I told him.

I have been contributing this naysaying editorial service to draft after draft of the book Adam and company are now birthing.

I find the project that this work serves—building an agricultural gift economy, to put it bluntly—to be of immense importance, for all the reasons readers of Adam’s newsletter know well. When food is not for sale, our relationships with each other, with the beings that become our food, and with the landscapes they inhabit are all stronger, more intimate, than when food is a market commodity. That’s what I found in my Ph.D. research on the topic.

As the global climate system goes haywire and the American empire lashes out against its own impending end, we are going to need to get in the habit of helping each other out with no expectation of direct return. We need to start paying attention to each other’s needs, keeping each other in mind, sharing food and other necessities with those who are unable to pay for it, person to person, not counting on crumbling bureaucracies to do this for us.

We don’t actually have to pretend that the people who came before us were perfect at these things to learn from what they did know. They managed to scrape their shared livings from this soil with little money and no oil or gas. That we are here today is evidence that our ancestors did in fact get by.

One of my favorite lessons from the old ones is a story with which you might be familiar, about Old Sally. She broke her leg and had to watch her neighbors milk her cows for six weeks while it healed, knowing they would not let her pay them a cent for the favor. “Don’t mention it,” they probably told her when she tried to thank them.

This story is, among other things, Adam’s response when others give him too much credit for coming up with all these ideas about gift economies. He says he learned everything he knows about the gift economy listening to ninety-year-old dairy farmers. Deep enough into a conversation, they would always bring up that time Old Sally broke her leg.

A couple years ago, Adam let slip to me that Old Sally was made up. She was a mythical amalgamation of real-life people, a composite character.

I was crushed. It was like when your older cousin told you about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

Adam then told me about a different conception of truth than the empirically verifiable facts my work as a social scientist had taught me to pursue. It took me some time to understand it.

In essence, stories have consequences. They “do work” in the world. Adam quoted a teacher of his who thinks of “true” as a verb, not an adjective. “Our stories should true us, the way a mechanic trues a bicycle wheel, aligning its spokes so that the disc can spin around its axel with no wobble. A fictional story can be true if it helps us to see something that is true, something that we otherwise might miss,” he said.

At first, I wondered if Old Sally’s neighbors had actually just recorded all the work they did on her farm in their account books. Maybe there was no money exchanged when they did her chores while her leg healed simply because nobody had any money to exchange, not because the work was really a gift.

Then I came to understand. Stories are alive. The Old Sally story was a fairy-tale blend of events that did happen, many times over. Since the story was never strictly factual anyway, I was free to adapt it to other purposes that are of service. I expanded this two-sentence story into a six-minute song called The Ballad of Old Sally, inventing the details as I imagined them.

Now the story is doing even more work in the world. Crusty punks in sweaty basements yell, “That’s what the neighborhood is for! What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is fucking yours!” They get it.

My position in the team of wonderful companions bringing this book into the world still consists mostly of pointing out when a claim Adam makes does not hold up close to the light of academic knowledge. I pore over the text pretending I’m not already persuaded by the work of Sand River Community Farm and the ideas that underlie it. I jump on every possible logical inconsistency, question every claim that isn’t fiercely defended.

I think that is worthwhile. I would not want any smart person to cast aside the book because of intellectual sloppiness, or playing fast and loose with facts. If the ideas contained within This Food is a Gift cause one discomfort, I want them to stick with it. Cleverly identifying a passage that lacks rigor and using it to discredit the entire project is a move with which some highly educated individual might let himself off the hook. I have been working with Adam on these ideas for five years in part to foreclose that possibility.

But seeing beyond the “truth” of facts and data has changed my own perspective on what is worth believing in, too.

Back in the 1800s some Southerners, accustomed to their famous norms of hospitality, thought that Northerners’ careful record-keeping demonstrated distrust of their neighbors. But Jack Larkin, the author of the book from which I learned of these account books, suggested that the practice may have arisen simply because rural New Englanders were likely to have learned arithmetic in school, unlike their counterparts in Dixie.

In fact, it is likely that neighbors did each other favors and gifted each other food without writing it down in their account books all the time. There is much less evidence of these untracked transfers and services for the very reason that they were not recorded!

But we do know that some exchange operated outside of the account books. Neighbors in the 1800s would often take turns slaughtering animals and split the resultant meat among households, since a family could only reasonably eat around a quarter beef or half mutton before it spoiled.

Neighbors also regularly came together for tasks of mutual assistance, called “bees” or “frolics,” which they did not charge on their account books. Barn raisings and quilting bees are the classic examples, but communities also gathered to husk corn, spread manure, pick rocks from fields, or even harvest a crop belonging to someone who was sick or short on hands—or someone who had broken their leg, like Old Sally. Questions like whether bee participants could expect help in return at a later date or whether they were merely compensated with a meal were resolved according to unwritten, flexible, context-specific rules that everyone involved understood.[ii]

Northeasterners of yore were clearly not coldly calculating with each other in all contexts. European American settlers probably tracked exchange in monetary terms, even with little money around, at least in part because they had immigrated from places where the economy was already quite commercial. The norms of the market were what they knew.

There’s no evidence, to my knowledge, that the indigenous inhabitants of this land were ever in the habit of buying and selling prior to colonization. Natives of what is now northern New England sent furs southward to where furbearing creatures were less abundant, and in return received corn and beans, since the growing season was longer down there. But these exchanges were articulated entirely in the language of gifts, not trade.[iii]

Maybe I can resuscitate the thesis that gift economy is the typical human default that must be forcibly extinguished before a market economy can truly take hold. The case for experimenting with agricultural gift economics in this age and place does not hinge on any rhetorical claim about its “naturalness” or logic-based argument about its “goodness,” though.

Rather, it is a tingling that you feel when you read stories of reckless generosity. It is a fullness in my heart when a sheep forgives me immediately for killing her brother in front of her, a radical forgiveness I cannot imagine imitating. It is the tears that I cannot blink back when my homeless friend Gina tells me how much she loves me, and shows me, too, by giving her own labor to the daily lunch project that runs out of the house I live at.

I practice this stuff, too. It’s hard to put into words. I am in awe of the book that Adam is finally close to finalizing. I first read it when it was a jumble of good stories, bad metaphors, and overly abstract ideas. I thought it was in fine shape then. Others saw its potential to mature into a properly gorgeous ode to trying to be a good neighbor to the humans and nonhumans one shares the landscape with.

I am grateful to get to share these words with you, grateful for your attention. Especially if you’re reading on a device designed to distract you, to shorten your attention span. Most of all, I am honored to take part in the team of doulas overseeing this book’s entrance into the realm of the living.

With love, Sam

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[i] Larkin, Jack. 1989. The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840. Harper Perennial.

[ii] Wilson, Catharine Anne. 2022. Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830–1960. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

[iii] Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Hill and Wang.