On the 23 September I went along to LandAlive, a regenerative farming and food conference for the South West. The second day was themed around food. Caroline Grindrod opened the plenary with a beautiful talk about our ‘story of separation’ – how our fear, driven by from separation from land and nature, drove us to seek security in science, taming nature, de-wilding indigenous peoples and developing a materialistic and mechanistic approach to life. World views evolve in response to crisis and catastrophe, she said, and our current crises were creating the conditions for a new world view, a paradigm shift where we can use living systems thinking to address wicked problems. Blow-your-socks-off stuff when your coffee is still cooling.
I enjoyed a breakout session on accessing affordable ‘real’ food. The word ‘real’ has been sweated over by a committee of people and means seasonal, local (from less than 50km away) or regional, organic or low-input, grown for flavour, with an appropriate level of processing, and frozen, pickled or fermented to be eaten out of season. We’ve been looking at ethical consumption and alternative food networks recently on my Masters. Local food came in for analysis; it’s not without issues such as oversimplification and potential for reactionary and exclusionary defensiveness. It’s also not necessarily the case that eating locally means eating more sustainably. A panellist spoke to the criticism that by describing foods meeting those criteria as ‘real’, other food was seen as ‘fake’ – including, potentially, foods produced intensively by a local farmer. It was another good example of so much of the clumsiness that we stumble across when we talk about food. A valuable session, though, which introduced me to the term ‘food citizenship’, the idea that we are not as consumers at the end of the food chain, but participants in the food system as a whole.
I’ll be at Rootstock in February.
Devon Community Foundation just shared this video about Food for Thought, a project engaging young people in North Devon with where their food comes from, connecting them with farmers and food producers and supporting them to build their own research skills. It’s brilliant.
There’s more about the Food for Thought project here.
My first term at Exeter is coming to an end fast, and I have plenty of assignment work to get on with. A video and a conference poster already submitted for Global Systems Thinking. It was a bit odd submitting a conference poster to summarise research I haven’t done, that could be used to summarise an essay I’ve yet to write, but I suppose the usefulness of the exercise was in fitting a succinct summary of an idea on one A2 sheet of paper, and I hadn’t previously understood that posters act as a shop window to research at scientific conferences.
Bluesky definitely reached a tipping point into the mainstream sometime in the last month. It isn’t the be all end all, nothing should be, but it’s good to go on there and see something different each time, see more interesting people starting to engage and see some of the quick-fire wit that made early Twitter so enjoyable. I’ve been asking organisations I follow to start posting there, and sharing a link to my starter pack in food and farming-related accounts in webinars recently. In many ways, I’m getting more out of Bluesky now than I had on Twitter for a very long time, connecting with some brilliant people. I’m here if you want to say hi.
At Land Alive, Caroline Grindrod used a quotation attributed to Charles Eisenstein, that “we are in the space between stories”. He writes about witnessing the crumbling of a familiar world, a coming collapse. Dougald Hine speaks about navigating collapse in this interview with Ffinlo Costain for the Farm Gate podcast. It’s an incredible listen. Hine puts into words a lot of what has been floating around in my head for some time. I recommend giving it a listen. It’s not as depressing as it sounds.