on food

discussion post

Hello and welcome to new readers, and thank you to those who’ve upgraded.

I thought I would do something different this week, and ask all you wonderful people who read this little blog for your input. Maybe we can get a little conversation going. I’m putting it out on a regular post instead of Substack’s chat feature because I know not all of you will access the chat, and for anyone, like myself, who does not have nor want the Substack app on our phones, the chat is a bit awkward to use. So, please give your thoughts right down below in the comments. (I might not be able to reply right away because my internet connection is unreliable and requires standing out on the road or driving up to the farm—but I will read and get back to every comment as soon as I can.)

A couple of weeks back I shared a personal story on health, healing, and living with the seasons which brought up a few potential points of discussion (thank you, Gwyn, for your comment). One of those points was the accessibility of good, nutritious, real food, of the kind that grows from the soil under our feet, the kind that’s made of mud and sunlight and green grass, the kind that comes with soil still stuck to it, naturally nutrient-dense and un-mucked-around-with, as food should be.

I’m aware that I’m living in a little bubble over here where good, nutritious, real food grows from the ground, and all we have to do is sweat and toil with our hands in the soil to access it. We grow our own food because it is just about impossible to buy food as good, or food that hasn’t been transported halfway across the world, and because I’m one of those freaks who needs to know exactly where, how, with what and by whom my food and what my food eats was grown. I grew up on my grandparent’s smallholding and parent’s market garden, I was raised on homegrown, to a certain degree, but there have also been periods through my life when I didn’t have the capacity to give too much thought to how my food was grown or fed or how far it had been shipped or what it might have been sprayed with or washed in or anything else. When my son was small and I scraped by week-to-week on a single income, moving from rental to shoddy rental, I didn’t have the stability to start a garden or keep chickens and I couldn’t afford to stock my freezer with pasture-raised meat, shop at the farmer’s market or buy organic—I shopped in the cheapest supermarket and did the best I could with what I could afford. My husband grew up on a small town housing estate, but his family managed to liven up their fare with homegrown fruit and veg and reduce their grocery bill by renting an allotment. Over the years we’ve worked hard (and still do) to make it a priority in our lives to have good, nutritious, real food, and to be in a position where we’re largely insulated from market prices and the whims of a precarious, monopolised food system. But I’m also all too aware that it’s getting harder to find (or afford) the things we don’t grow ourselves, and that for the majority of people who don’t have access to land, access to good, real food grown from local soil or raised on pasture is increasingly difficult.

Coming at it from the other side, I also know first hand, and from the many local producers I know, the costs of producing good food—small producers are caught between a rock and a hard place, working with impossibly tight margins and impossibly tight restrictions. Those who do manage to keep producing are often forced to hike their prices and/or make compromises on quality and ethics to stay in business and keep meat on their own tables. (As a side, we know sheep and beef farmers locally who don’t eat their own meat because they can’t afford it—they’re caught in a spiral, having to sell the produce of their land and labour to the processors to then buy cheap, supermarket meat from someone else’s farm for their own plates—and the question begs, who’s sitting at the top of the spiral?).

And I feel, more and more so, that those of us with access to land and the ability to grow our own food, no matter how hard we might have worked to earn the privilege, have a duty to share it, to feed our communities with the bounty of the land as well as ourselves—preferably outside of the established routes of commerce (not suggesting anything illegal, of course)—even by simple acts like sharing a glut of summer squash with neighbours or giving surplus produce to the local food bank. I am deeply inspired by Adam Wilson’s “stories about disentangling food and feeding from the market”¹ and I have some thoughts as to how this little farm might go in a more community focused, gift based direction (we don’t farm for profit anyway, and I’ve written about how and why we do farm over here), but more on that another time.

So, dear readers, whoever you are and wherever you are in the world, how do you access good, nutritious, real food? I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who don’t have access to land or the option to grow or raise your own, or maybe just limited access. Do you have access to an allotment, community garden, meat or milk shares, or CSA? Are there farms near you that you buy from directly? Do you shop at farmer’s markets, farm stands, butcher shops, or are those out of reach to you? Do you buy bulk, stock your freezer, or shop week by week or day to day? Is affordability or availability a limiting factor in how you shop and feed yourself and how do you get around it? People with more limited choices, what are your options and how do you navigate them to feed yourself/your family the best you can? What are your thoughts on how good, real food might be made more accessible? Farmers, growers, producers, home-growers, please chime in, too.

Alright that’s quite a lot of questions, but I’m genuinely curious to hear your thoughts, how you do it, and maybe others can benefit from ideas and resources shared.

1. If you don’t yet subscribe to Adam’s weekly musings on what it really means to live in community, please take a look on The Peasantry School Newsletter and allow yourself to be moved by the stories of generosity and heartfulness he so eloquently shares.