Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
Soaking Rains bookend the first true kiss of Summer heat, and suddenly sluggish garden plants spill out into the walking paths. Chervil, Savory, Thyme, Oregano, Mint, Chives, Fennel, Coriander and Rosemary elongate aromatically. Mustards unfurl in ruffled greens. Cabbages spread in veined purples and blues. Radicchio begs to be admired, colorfully. Pole Beans break the Soil surface with bent necks, like pale-green Swans waking from slumber. Poison Ivy re-sprouts in the midst of all of this, undeterred by the hay mulch, and so I bend down to pull the glossy red shoots with gloved fingers, to ensure they don’t end up in the salad bowl by accident. I walked into this riot after four days away, driving South down the wide, congested highways of the East Coast to gather with extended family for the first time since the arrival of the Virus. I’ve been to the beach and back. The land and the broad, brackish River there carry a memory of the original, now-displaced human inhabitants: Delaware. The Dutch settlers applied their names to the place, and the point of land that guards Old River’s mouth remembers their arrival: Cape Henlopen. But invasion might be a more accurate word for the way of living Europeans brought to that sandy shore where Oak and Pine still stretch their limbs into the salt air and Turtle, undeterred, digs a hole for her cache of eggs beside the gravel bike path through the salt marsh/state park where I’d come to greet the day. And to find a bit of reprieve from the human hubbub of an affluent beach resort town open for business on the first weekend of Summer.
To my country eyes, the human presence there struck me as an invasion. We have a curious term to describe the extracurricular activities of the workplace-afflicted: weekend warriorship. Well, it seemed that those who could afford to flee the nearby cities had done so—piling into the largest luxury vehicles they had at their disposal and braving the formidable Friday beach traffic—to lay siege on the coast. And the local businesses had readied themselves to feed and clothe and entertain the warriors for the duration of their stay. Every good or service one could possibly desire was on offer, for those who could afford it. And a lot of money was changing hands. Weekly beach house rentals in that town go for upwards of ten thousand dollars. Call me naïve, but I just had no idea there was so much money to go around. The hum of unbridled consumption was deafening to someone with my sensitivities—read: someone who hasn’t left the Farm in a long while.
It's been a week since I returned from the beach, and that hot fire of shock and awe has died down to coals. And North Wind blows this morning, pushing a cooling breeze over the hill. And so I will stretch out my hands to see if there’s still warmth rising from those coals and try to write something about money and Americanism that carries more sorrow than sting. Fourth of July draws the largest beach crowds of the whole year to that shore, where our current president keeps a summer mansion, and so it seems appropriate to embark on this writing on a cool Independence Day morning. What does it mean to be an American anyway? To move through the world in pursuit of a particular dream born from a particular set of foundational stories? How do we differentiate a dream from a fantasy? Or a nightmare?
A few days after my return from the beach, I attended a Town Hall meeting hosted by a food hub whose founder has worked tirelessly for years to promote a healthy local food system. As you might imagine, that work is close to my heart and so I was touched to receive an invitation as a newcomer in the area. Farmers, eaters, and leaders from several local organizations, including the mayor of the town, arrived to participate in the conversation. The question on the table: Where do we go from here? The organizers began by sharing one of their conundrums. They have been operating a delivery service for several years aimed at facilitating and efficientizing the movement of locally grown food to markets throughout a region which extends as far as New York City, and after several years of this work they have realized that the project will continue to lose money unless they are able to fill the existing trucks, to increase revenues without raising the rates to the farmers. How do we sell more locally-grown food? Do we want to? Why are we driving food grown in the Adirondacks all the way to New York City? Could we convince people in the area to pay more for food? Or focus on grants aimed at subsidizing local food for those designated as low-income? Should our work as a food hub continue to operate within the parameters of business or transition to a non-profit model? These were some of the questions in the room. And the conversation was lively, and at times emotional. I was moved to be a silent witness to such a conversation, a first of its kind here and something I have known to be deeply needed.
There was one word that jumped out at me because of the frequency of its appearance in the conversation—the word afford. As in, “We need to get the food to the cities where people can afford it.” or “As farmers we can’t afford to grow food with integrity at the price most people are willing to pay.” I heard can’t afford with much greater frequency than I heard can afford, and that may have offered a window into the problem at hand. In this region you don’t have to look very far back in history—maybe three or four generations—to find a time where everyone afforded local food. That was all the food there was. And all of it organic, because that’s all there was. Fresh beef, pork and lamb from your farm or your neighbor’s. Golden yellow, grass-fed butter churned fresh from the two Jersey Cows that you hand-milked each morning and night. Try to write a business plan to produce butter of that quality today and you’ll find that you would need to charge at least $30/lb. Gold, indeed. In addition to high quality meat and dairy, you would have known where to harvest wild Greens and Berries, and in which streams you could catch the largest Trout. And by mid-Summer you would have found freshly baked Zucchini bread on your doorstep more often than you could bear, or a dozen ears of Sweet Corn, or a head of Cauliflower large enough to feed the whole family for supper. So, what happened to that world? To those neighborhoods? Those farms and homesteads and gardens and Jersey Cows? And, most importantly, what happened to all of that butter?
The question I kept wanting to ask during the Town Hall meeting was, “Might it be worthwhile to describe what we have decided to afford instead of a healthy local food system?” But the conversation was looking for a way forward, for solutions, and so an inquiry into how we got here from there was best kept for another day, and so I stayed quiet as I soaked in the beautiful beginnings of something like a local counsel that was germinating in the room.
But that term can’t afford kept nipping at my heels over the days following, how commonplace and unnoticed it was there in that room and everywhere else for that matter. Several years ago, I spoke on a panel of farmers asked to present legislators with their perspectives. I listened as another panelist described that their biggest challenge was that they couldn’t afford to pay their employees a livable wage in the town where they operated, which led to high employee turnover. This sounded simple enough, a problem that the legislators might be able to solve with a subsidy or two. I happened to know, however, that those farmers spent several weeks each Winter on a Western ski vacation. It is so complicated, is it not? How we decide what we can and can’t afford?
I looked into the etymology of the word in question, and what I found might offer a gentler path through this delicate and fraught territory where one misstep will land you waist-deep in a pothole of blame, accusation and virtue-signaling. From the Middle English aforth, the word means “to put forth, contribute, further or carry out.” The sense of “having enough money, or time, to do something,” only arrived more recently, around the time Europe was gathering towards the colonial project. The older meaning of the word—to provide or contribute—survives in antique phrases such as, “The window affords a view of the ocean,” or “The sea affords an abundant supply of fish.” Which begs the question, “What do I afford, and to whom?”
In modern usage, the word afford usually follows an expression of ability, such as can or cannot. Is it honest to say that we do not have the ability to contribute or provide? Given the current conditions and conditioning, perhaps it is honest. But imagine for a moment how our conversations would change in tenor if we admitted, “I am not willing to afford” the contribution in question. There’s a reclamation of agency in the turn of phrase, a surrender of innocence. It’s beautiful and painful at once.
In that Town Hall conversation, as I have noticed elsewhere, there was a subtle positing of consumers against the environment and those who tend to it—in this case farmers. Cheaper food, and more of it, helps humans while expensive food helps the environment and the farmers. Simplified, I know, but you can probably recognize the assumption of separability in the statement. These days what we can’t afford is a personal choice, and the statement carries a sense of finality—self-reflexive, separate, bounded, end of conversation. “Well, it’s his life after all,” you might say in confusion or consternation about someone whose consumer choices differ from yours. But the older meaning of the word afford describes an interaction with another who isn’t necessarily human. The window is not affording itself or its fellow windows a view of the ocean. By virtue of being a window it offers the privilege of viewing to those who have eyes to see. The sea is not itself hungry for fish. Instead, you could say that the Sea knows how to be itself by extending, or affording, the abundance of fish to those who have hunger.
So what about humans? What do our current ways of living afford and to whom? Under the glassy surface of modernity, we shudder at the answer we would hear if we asked that question of Old Sea struggling to provide a home for Fish under the current regime of pollution and industrial fishing. Is it more honest to say that we can’t afford to live in ways that causes less harm—a statement that admits the intractability of our current predicament—or to acknowledge our agency by saying that we are not willing to afford the world otherwise? On this sunny Independence Day morning, I’ll leave you with a third possibility. Maybe we could say: As Americans we seem to have lost our capacity to afford the world a culture of restraint, a culture of less rather than more. And there would be some real sorrow in those words. The statement acknowledges, without blame, that much of this diminished capacity has been inherited from the generations before us. And it wonders whether the generosity of our bequest will be born from our honest grief as much as it will be built by our problem solving.
How shall we be on a day set aside for celebrating a country and a way of living informed by a dream of ever-more-everything? Maybe we could shed a tear, not so much for Old Sea and its dwindling Fishes, but for ourselves and the work we have no idea how to begin. And then another tear as we acknowledge that we long so deeply to live in ways that create beauty and health and that the pain of living otherwise is more than we know how to bear. And so we rely on coping strategies, which harden into identities and political affiliations and the blame starts flying around like a food fight in the mess hall. But maybe, if we’re lucky, we catch the eye of the neighbor whose behavior most enrages us and we notice that their eyes are wet as well. And then we could shed a tear together as we turn to look at the children, knowing that they are the ones who won’t be able afford our way of living. Or is it already us who can scarcely bear the weight of it? I know this doesn’t seem like a promising beginning, this type of utter desolation and heartbreak. But I can tell you that it is a lot less lonely than pretending everything is just a subsidy or two away from being fixed.
It is a real privilege to bend your ear for a few minutes. I don’t take the responsibility lightly, not in the least. Please don’t hesitate to reach out. It would be a pleasure to hear from you. May we gather ‘round a well-laid table before the season is out.
With great care,
Adam
I am so glad that we are neighbors and I will help in anyway possible to share your mission and nurture the soil for a stronger more resilient community!
So much wisdom and generosity here.