Profit and Other Profanities.

Amaryllis, one of the flock matriarchs, awaiting the shearer. Photo by Lindsey Eberhart.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

South and North Winds have been arguing this week about the timing of the turning of the season. As such, freshly-shorn sheep shiver in the shed. Geese fly headlong into a northerly gale, seemingly hellbent. Grass points green fingers skyward, undeterred by the frigid nights. Songbirds sing whenever they’re not frozen solid, their voices symphonic. Trance-breaking. Spring-calling. We are alive. This is a miracle. We would like you to know that we are incredibly grateful. And SO ready for the coming warmth. Please and thank you, oh powerful ones.

I had two conversations with men in their twenties this week that left me thinking about the recent discrediting of their lot. I have been thinking about the profoundly incoherent set of instructions that they’ve been handed. Instructions that have set them up to fail so spectacularly.

From provision to profit.

One of these young men is trying to start his own food truck. As with any small-business venture, this involves an outlay of cash for infrastructure and an eye towards sourcing. The difference between the cost of purchased ingredients and the ticket price to the customer will determine his profit margin. He tells me that he wants to use as many local and sustainably grown ingredients as he can, but, you know, people will only pay so much for a plate, and there’s rent to cover. If he’d like to provide for a family someday, he’d better find some cheap ingredients and park his truck in the vicinity of people who have money. I operated food and farm businesses for years. I built the house I live in with the fruits of those same moral calculations. I know the bind well.

For the overwhelming majority of human history, our kind lived without profit or prices. How on earth did we do it? Wendell Berry, elder spokesman on questions cultural and agricultural responds: “Provision is the sum of our ways of securing from the earth our food, clothing and shelter—and of taking proper care of the sources of these things in nature and in culture.”¹ If the labor of provisioning the household was historically placed on men’s shoulders, their primary responsibility would have been to ensure the health of the relationships underwriting every bit of food or clothing entering the household, not to mention the moral integrity of the walls and roof of the house itself.

The verb provision denotes a quality of vision, or witness. A quality of relationship. It is closely related to the word subsist. What Ivan Illich calls ‘the war on subsistence’ began by converting people involved in the labor of provision into peasants by charging them a fee to continue living on the land that had formerly been entrusted to them through ancestral generosity. You could say that humans went from ‘living in the land that was their given home’ to ‘taking from the land in order to support their conquerors, or landlords.’

The word peasant means, literally, a person whose life prospects are bound to a particular patch of ground, a person whose health can be no better that that of his home place. Such a person profits only at his own expense. As such, he is unlikely to continue profiting for long. I am using male pronouns here only to follow a thread of story. Please substitute others as you see fit. The requirement to extract profit from one’s interactions is no longer limited to one set of gender roles, if it ever was.

When I speak at organic farming conferences on this topic, I often share the surprising etymology of the word ‘farm.’ In early usage, ‘farm’ described a fixed annual rental payment the landowning class could expect from their tenants. Only by association did it refer to the land itself or the labor undertaken by human bodies to generate the surpluses that allowed material comfort for the rich.

After telling that story in one of those farming conference rooms, a thirty-something European-American man dressed in flannel and work pants raised his hand. He said, “I run a small, organic vegetable CSA farm. On my better days I feel like I’m doing something useful for a hurting world. On all the other days I feel like I am breaking my body and my land to subsidize the lifestyles of rich people.” The silence that followed was thick with collective acknowledgment. He wasn’t blaming. He was asking for witness. He was pleading for provision. Pleading to be allowed to tend his relationships. His story is hundreds, if not thousands of years old.

The root of the word profit is the same as in fashion and fiction. It means ‘to make.’ The requirement to secure profit, or ‘make money through buying and selling at advantage,’ will not be brought into alignment with the aspirations of the local food movement, because it was the very force that set in motion the dislocation of human life. Profit describes a fiction of surplus enabled by distancing human life from its sources and then converting a landscape of miraculous gifts and weighty responsibilities into a set of commodities.

If you live in a forest and cut down trees to build a house, you live within the empty space left by your taking. Your act of provision, and its attendant obligations to care, remains squarely in your sights. If asked, you might say that the forest ‘made’ or ‘entrusted you with’ the house in which you and your family live. You might even say that the forest is your home. You will contribute to the collective homemaking efforts with the strength granted to your hands and heart by the deer or sheep or corn plant you killed and ate last week, an animal or plant, who, like you, emerged through the miraculous alchemy of the greening land.

Remembering how to grow and eat local food amounts to a process of imaginal reclamation, not clever business planning. Profitability is its undoing.

Etymologically speaking, profit tells a story that humans ‘make’ and then ‘own’ Life. As such, it will be a short-lived experiment in human storytelling. But the pursuit of self-made-ness has left a considerable mark upon the landscapes and bodies that give rise to human hands and hearts. Many have been broken over the course of the telling.

Other stories make room for the possibility that things haven’t always been as they are now. Such generous stories open doorways to healing, and homemaking. Please let us not ask the few remaining farmers to spearhead that storytelling effort. More on what the effort looks like in the weeks ahead.

Thanks for your interest,

Adam

1. From an essay titled Leaving The Future Behind in The Art of Loading Brush.