A Request for Sustenance

Some exciting news about the book project.

Photo by Nikita.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

I began this piece thinking it was a newsletter, and then realized it was destined for the book I am writing, which bears the provisional title: This Food is a Gift: Experiments in Non-Market, Neighborly Farming and Feeding.

It’s an odd thing to tell people about the project of writing a book before it’s finished, odder still to imagine any book that I pen sitting on the shelf at Barnes and Noble with a price tag on it. So I have devised a proposal for prospective publishers, which I call ‘an experiment in non-market book distribution.’ It’s less a scheme than a prayer for humans, wherein the publisher still gets paid for each copy ordered and everyone who reads the book is invited to participate in the labor of putting money into the Gift Fund. The opening page of the book would read, “Wait! You don’t have to buy this book. You can request a gift copy at the following website, where you can also join in a neighborly conversation about how such efforts might be sustained financially.” In order for a book to move through the world as a gift it needs a village council rather than a customer base.

The gift was never meant to be free. As my friend Sam likes to say, the category we call “free stuff” was created by first transforming gifts into commodities, then crossing out the price and writing $0 in its place.

The gift isn’t free, but it will take a whole book to describe what the heck that four-word statement could actually look like in the modern world. In excerpt below, the gift serves as a starting point from which we might stumble our way back into relationships good enough to trust.¹

I do have one request for you: Would you be willing to encourage the possibility of such a book finding its way into the world? For now, the best way to sustain me and the book I am incubating is not to send money, but to forward this email to a few friends, or share it publicly by clicking the button below:

The Class Chasm: How does the gift differ from charity?

(an excerpt from Chapter 11)

A marked cop car sits watch during the midday hours at the back of the parking garage in Burlington, VT, where an eclectic collection of neighbors has been hosting a picnic potluck every day at 1pm for almost 5 years now. Why the need for police presence? Well, some of the neighbors who stop by can get a bit unruly.

I drove a borrowed car across the ferry and around the lake to the city where I used to sell bread and farm products to meet up with my friends Sam and Petra, with whom I would offer a talk the next day at the Vermont Organic Farm Conference. Our talk was titled: Agricultural Gift Economics: Could we grow food without having to sell our wares?

Sam suggested we meet at the Food Not Bombs lunch, to which street folks refer fondly as “bum feed.” Stepping outside of our class bubble might inform our talk preparations, to begin once we’d gratefully filled our bellies for zero dollars at the back of the parking garage.

As a student of neighborliness, I felt honored for an invitation to bring my bone-deep hunger for meaningful cross-class relationships—as well as my distrust of rules and laws—along with me when I arrived at the potluck empty-handed. I hadn’t eaten since the evening prior, so my belly was indeed grumbling. The food was filling and delicious, including the potato chips that I sprinkled as a crunchy topping on my bowl of stew. Day-old sourdough donuts offered strong medicine for my hunger pangs, as did the unruly conviviality I encountered there.

Law can be understood this way: we need law to precisely the extent that we lack relationships good enough to trust. Every law that ever had any legitimacy existed to make up for an unfortunate deficit in good relations. Where good relations grow, the realm of law recedes.²

I am calling the Food Not Bombs lunch a potluck in the older, more unruly and relationally demanding form of the word: the verb potlatch.

The modern potluck relies on contributions from everyone in attendance, suggesting at least some semblance of preexisting equality. If you don’t make time to cook a dish from scratch you won’t be looked down upon if you simply use a few of the dollars you presumably have to pick up chips and salsa on your way—in the car that you also presumably have. Since everyone has contributed, the state of social equilibrium remains unchanged; no participants in the ritual have been asked to occupy the undignified position of standing on the receiving end of another’s generosity. Communing—the verb form of community—begins and ends with no material dependence. Gratitude becomes a recreational activity rather than the glue of social and ecological cohesion.

In no way do I mean to suggest that we should stop having modern potlucks. Rather, we might acknowledge the limit of such rituals to enact cultural repair in a time and place where human neighbors freeze to death huddled in the back entryway of dead-bolted vacation rental properties. For epidemic homelessness among nonhumans, we use the term species extinction.

Culturally speaking, potlatches couldn’t have been more different. Anthropologist Marcel Mauss defined the verb potlatch as ‘to nourish, feed, satiate, or consume.’ Diverse potlatch practices among first nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast centered around food, but also included non-food items such as blankets and ceremonial copper plates, which were sometimes thrown into the sea. The Haida described the function of their feasts with the evocative phrase “killing wealth.”³

The host of a potlatch might labor for years to accumulate the provisions for a major feast; the expectation was that they would walk away nearly destitute. Before serving, the host might say to the group, “This food is the goodwill of our forebears. It is all given away.” The statement doesn’t make a metaphor. The food exists because the preceding generations found the fortitude to refrain from overdrawing the wild’s savings accounts—especially the sea that ongoingly afforded life to their people.

The gift-giving ritual described as “killing wealth” was at once an act of cultural renewal and ecological repair. Some gave and others received, just as the sea gave and the people received. Lest they forget the humility—or ‘grounding’—required to become a human being in the face of a love that vast. Lest they forget where any and all of their generosity came from.

At the Food Not Bombs potlatch, a woman named Flower Child asked me for money to buy tampons. I looked in my wallet and found just enough for the ferry ticket home, but then I remembered I would be surrounded by people at the conference from whom I could request a few dollars. I handed her a twenty-dollar bill. She said, “Remember that you can always say no. I am always going to ask, and trust that you will say no if you don’t have it to give.”

I looked back at her, stunned. I use nearly the exact same words to describe how the Farm ‘works’ to the middle-class neighbors upon whom I rely for lawn mowing, help with gardening, and the personal stipend money I used to pay for the ferry pass. On this day, some of those gifted dollars would buy tampons for Flower Child.

Whenever I find myself staring into the inky black abyss on the far side of a gift threshold, I repeat Lewis Hyde’s phrase as if I were fingering a rosary: “Our generosity may leave us empty but it is our emptiness that tugs gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.” To my ear, the statement describes healthy relations between humans and the ground—or sea—of their begetting.

Tugging gently at the whole takes the form of verbal requests for sustenance. In our time, asking to be sustained might be the most profound and courageous act of generosity—the starting point from which we will stumble back into relationships good enough to trust. Thank you for the reminder, Flower Child.

With love,

Adam

1. See the note below.

2. David Benjamin Blower suggests that ‘relationships good enough trust’ makes a better translation for the Greek word pistis—more commonly written as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’—that offered to render the rule of law obsolete in the New Testament. Find David’s remarkable essay here:

There is No Law Among the Wild Fruit Trees

3. There’s a lot more that could be said about the potlach tradition. I have drawn here from Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the potlatch existed within stratified societies that practiced the keeping of slaves. To hold up the potlatch isn’t to offer an example of an idealized egalitarian societal model, but rather to consider human forgetfulness and the function of gift rituals as reminders, or wayfinding aids. The potlach was eventually outlawed by European colonizers schooled in the doctrine of material accumulation.