Redux: What happened AFTER the grocery store stopped having food on the shelves?
The debut of the Sand River Community Farm Gift Stand.
Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,
Glitter-frost adorns the morning meadow, sweetening stiff garden greens. Oak and Aspen carry the final torch of summer. Soon they will join their neighbors who have already stored their gathered sunlight in the ground at their feet. We collect some of those sunlight packages before the ground absorbs them; yesterday, at the Farm Frolic a spirited group gleaned six bins of groundling apples from beneath the neighbors’ trees. Quartered and cored, we slid them into the oven to begin their transformation into sauce. Those ruby-skinned sugar packets will pass through the bodies of the folks who gather to tend the Farm this winter. Trees make excellent teachers in the project of remembering how to feed the ground. But these aren’t easy lessons to learn as a modern person, let me tell you. To be humbled is to be brought back down to ground. Humiliation could be re-imagined as the process by which life is transformed into the soil-gold we call humus.
Last Tuesday at a talk titled In Search of a Remedy for Ingratitude, I told the story I call The Day the Grocery Stores Stopped Having Food on the Shelves. My co-conspirator Sam, sitting next to me on the stage, continued:
Adam called me a couple of days after he published that newsletter story to say, “Sam, it just dawned on me that the grocery stores already did stop having food on the shelves for people who don’t have money.” Adam hasn’t been to a grocery store in years, which results in a different set of blind spots from other middle-class people.
How we tell the story of our time depends on who is speaking and who we imagine is listening. It also depends on what we can see from where we stand. It depends on who we are in conversation with.
The eco-social condition we call affluence, or privilege, are remarkably self-insulating—a sturdy set of blinders to the lived experience of others. Hence, I needed a firm but loving reminder from a friend who works closely with homeless people. Trusted companions who offer us reports from beyond the visible horizon—of class, species, or geography—carry invaluable, if unwelcome, news. The discomfort of humiliation might alert us that the humus-making process has begun.
Saturday morning Allison, Marion and I set up the Sand River Community Farm Gift Stand at the Keeseville Community Garden, a handful of raised beds set on a gravel yard behind a parking lot on main street. I learned just the night prior that the garden was constructed on the site of the town’s demolished grocery store. A rising phoenix, of sorts.
Hence, the title of this newsletter has been changed from the future to the present tense: after the grocery store stopped having food on the shelf.
The story isn’t hypothetical. In this town, the list of people for whom the grocery store already stopped having food on the shelves includes those without cars to drive to the store in the next town. Researchers use the term “food desert” for such areas. Tragically, this “food desert” sports ample rainfall and fertile soils—but no trespassing signs and rising property values function like no-shoplifting laws.
We lit a fire in a cutoff steel barrel, pitched a pop-up tent and unfolded a table for the many boxes of grass-fed beef we’d brought to distribute before driving back to the Farm to fetch seven gallons of warming soup. We returned at ten minutes before noon to find a crowd already gathered there in that gravel lot in the cold misting rain. Over the following two hours, neighbors of all stripes stopped by to pick up beef and sit for lunch on damp metal folding chairs around the warming fire.
The socio-spatial arrangement at the Gift Stand—fire in the middle, humans gathered ‘round, a warm bowl of tomato-squash soup gifted by the land—drew people out from their haunts and the stories out from their mouths. One person admitted to me, “I’ve been reading the newsletter for a year, nodding in recognition the whole time. Coming here today helped me realize that I was a bit socially intimidated to show up at the Farm. Thank you for holding an event in a public space in town.” Once a quorum of Barn Choir folks had joined the circle, a spontaneous round of song broke out: Shenandoah in 3-part harmony.
People offered all sorts of gifts to sustain the work of the Farm. “We will bring our long splitter to next week’s Farm Frolic to ready the Farm’s firewood.” “I am a graphic designer. I would love to help in any way I can.” “My old lady friends are incredible bakers. Watch out—we might start covering the Frolic Supper table with cakes and pies. Are you ready for that?”
“Born ready,” I replied.
Humans can be remarkable creatures when given even half a chance.
Fire in the middle, humans gathered ‘round, bellies filling with warm food gifted by the surrounding landscape, throats and tongues like tuning forks1 for the mysterious goodwill we call being alive. It appears that this ancient arrangement still works, even in the thick of the collapsing promise of modernity (for many this would be the past tense—collapsed).
I offer my deepest thanks to everyone who found the courage to show up on Saturday. The event was, in a profound way, the coming-to-fullness of two years of neighborly preparations.
People seemed to enjoy the soup, made with loads of smoky beef stock, garlic and herbs. When they asked me if I “made” it, I noticed that the language at hand wasn’t well suited to the task of describing thousands of human hands and stories in contact with animals, plants, soil, sunlight and rainfall. “I count myself lucky to have been alive long enough to help assemble this pot of soup,” I tried. A bit awkward, yes, but more faithful to the feeling-tone.
“Making” and “earning,” “mine” and “yours”—the language at hand doesn’t seem well suited to the task of remembering how to be human together in a time of cascading ecological and social troubles.
Last Tuesday, during the talk at the Grange Hall, I tried to describe the essential difference between consuming, or buying food, and receiving it as a gift. In a grocery store story-world, all of the work takes place ahead of the interaction. Your primary job as a food consumer is to go get the dollars. Once you’ve paid for the food, nothing further is expected of you. You’re free to do as you’d like with what is yours. Humans become money- and freedom-seeking missiles.
The ancient practice of sharing gifts has always helped humans remember that it was never “yours” or “mine” to begin with.
When the landscape is viewed as a gift, no work is required ahead of the moment someone hands you a bowl of soup. You were born, which means you are not only worthy, but downright necessary. The cost of receiving the gift of life—in the case of food this might be incurred several times each day—amounts to a set of un-prescribed relational responsibilities in whose direction we crudely point with the word gratitude.
Gratitude isn’t a feeling. It is a cultivated, cultural capacity to sustain the eco-social field of goodwill—the thousands of hands, paws, hooves and claws, trunks, roots, leaves and shoots—that sustained the person who happened to place the gift of food in your hands on this particular day. Tomorrow it will be someone else.
Within a grocery store story-world, this intricate, creative work of eco-social sustaining atrophies into “getting a job” and “affording food.” In earlier usage, the word “afford” meant “to provide or extend,” as in, “the window affords us a view of the meadow.” Maybe we could describe modernity in these terms: a society-wide abandonment of the older, more deeply human meaning of the word afford—to extend, or grant life to others.
We look forward to sharing lunch with you this Saturday at the Gift Stand. You might consider picking up some beef for your family or to take as a gift for your neighbor.
With great care,
Adam
I’ve gleaned this tuning fork image from the remarkable
’s exciting new offering by the same name:
Adam, your work with language is just as important as your work with the land. Language shapes perception and experience. Your written words are speaking to the deeper layers of transformation at the same time as describing experiential possibilities. Blessings on the social growth node you are tending so faithfully.
I really love watching this community unfold from a-ways away…and dreaming about how it might manifest in my neighborhood.