Potluck Picnic: Convivial Food Systems in Late Capitalism
Commissioned for WeedsFeed! by Sandra Kosorotova
Very pleased to share my first commissioned essay, for WEEDsFEED! by artist and amateur gardener Sandra Kosorotova, and Director of NART Ann Mirjam Vaikla. I was approached while on residency at Rupert in Vilnius during August 2020 and compared my experiences of neoliberal food systems in both UK and Lithuania, and took the opportunity to pull together my practical fermentation research and experience with food justice projects.
Only 100 physical copies of the beautiful publication were made, and sent out with fermented fireweed flowers and dandelion roots processed by Sandra over the summer.
WEEDS FEED! by Sandra Kosorotova is a commissioned work for NART – Narva Art Residency and PUBLICS, Helsinki.
The booklet includes artworks by Narva-local artists union Vestervalli members Olga Tjurina, Vera Lantsova and Lena Sabinina, that were inspired by – and inspiring – the texts in the publication.
Format A4, 24 pages, printed on 100% recycled paper with a risoprinter.
Find more info and images at https://weedsfeed.info/
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There is something powerful and grounding about making a huge mess in the kitchen then clearing it up. It’s tidal, circular, regenerative. I’m thankful for having access to fine local ingredients, some time to cook for myself daily, and an experimental spirit. In all honesty, the only thing that’s got me through the past year in London is eating well. I know not everyone has this luxury, so I consider myself very lucky and have tried to convert this feeling of gratefulness into the way I feed myself.
Our global food system is energy intensive. Harvesting crops aggressively for speed, refrigerating them incessantly for freshness, and transporting resources around the world via the extraction of fossil fuels releases carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere, irreparably damaging the soil and ozone layer. In an article entitled “The Impact of Food on Global Warming” on planete-energies.com, it’s stated:
“According to 2014 estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), these activities are responsible for 24% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions worldwide… The food supply chain – which encompasses farming, ranching, fishing, processing, distribution and consumption – consumes energy and releases greenhouse gas emissions, thereby contributing to global warming... If one considers the entire food chain, it’s also necessary to include emissions from the food industry, transportation, packaging and distribution. Emissions vary widely from one continent and country to another, depending on their level of development and societal attitudes.”1
Two years ago, in light of this, I committed to practising diet decarbonisation: reducing as much as possible or completely removing unnecessary processes and ingredients that require carbon to supply my food. In supporting local organic farmers, obtaining surplus from bins, fermenting my leftovers and harvesting wild food I am aiming to cut road, air and sea miles out of my pantry, and minimizing greenhouse gases from waste.
On top of this, I want to hear less about old White landowners and more about young Black and Brown farmers and the political implications of who has access to land. I want my vegetables to be grown without synthetic pesticides. I want my fruit to be picked by someone on a fair wage in a safe environment. I want to buy from shorter supply loops who have relationships with producers. I want to see less food rotting in landfill and I want more being preserved. I want my food scraps to return to the land as compost. I want that compost to become nutrient-rich soil. I want my food to be alive, really ALIVE.
The fight for food sovereignty – how communities are primary stakeholders in the production, trading and consumption of their food – is the fight for people andthe environment, and against corporate monopoly. By virtue, all of my desires and all of yours are interconnected. Our fragmented ideas are weak when separated, and strong when collectivised. This engenders both communal thinking, and shared accountability; it’s on all of us to think about who produces, transports and sells us our food. We must take responsibility for the inequalities we perpetuate, and search out more equitable models that protect our most vulnerable workers.
Food Capitalism
Access to nutritious food is a basic human right. Proof of how deeply unequal our current system has become is evident in the stark figures. According to the WRAP (Waste and Resource Action Plan) 2015 report 4.4 million tonnes of “avoidable household food waste”, with a value of £13 billion, was thrown away in the UK that year.2 Meanwhile a 2018 End Hunger UK report, ascertains “8% of adults have gone a whole day without eating because of lack of money in the last 12 months.”3
We have to ask: Is the system broken or was it designed this way?
The proliferation of foodbanks normalises the dehumanisation of those forced into hunger by the current system, and casts shame on those who suffer from food poverty. In her essay on social eating, I Dream of Canteens, Rebecca May Johnson states “The government allows effective starvation to proliferate without lifting a finger.”4 An ever-shrinking state increasing their public’s reliance on foodbanks is insidious; a false necessity.
Worryingly, food waste has also become an accepted part of everyday life because we have seemingly-infinite choice and absolutely no punitive measures for offenders. The severance of human connection to edible plants and their provenance has led to their commodification as yet another abstract consumable. It’s a global issue, sponsored and perpetuated by an unethical market system which depresses the labour of essential workers (farmers, pickers, drivers) in favour of low-cost, environmentally destructive, carbon expensive practices.5
While on a summer art research residency at Rupert in Vilnius, Lithuania, I was quietly surprised by, in fact a little nostalgic for, a more positive attitude towards food acquisition that I found. The supermarkets reminded me of British versions in the 90s, subdued in their aesthetic, marketing and vibe. An occasional half-unpacked crate blocking an aisle, some tinned tomatoes discarded by a shopper next to toothpaste. Muzak floats past the whirring refrigerators, a tannoy announcing some deals.
I noticed there are fewer institutions (although IKI, Maxima, Lidl are prolific) and most carry locally-produced fresh produce like fruit and veg, cheese, meat, pickles. Lithuanian food sovereignty is prevalent and imported contenders are less common. Baltic-born friends inform me homesteading is a huge part of national identity; traditional ferments such as yoghurt, kefir, half-sour pickles and sauerkraut are all abundant at farmers’ markets and in domestic fridges. Although things do appear to be changing; the desire to grow and cook one’s own food seems to be fading, and with it, education, seasonality and autonomy will be eroded by corporations looking to complicate and fragment the market. Moveover, some of the telltale signs of neoliberal food capitalism that I’ve grown numb to in London are creeping into the new metropolitan cities on the other side of Europe. Food shopping becomes a leisure activity, rather than a necessity to exist.
It is here I can see the self-sufficiency that is at the core of Lithuanian heritage, but it’s being forgotten by newer generations, blinded by the metropolitan aspiration of a country trying to rapidly update.
Community self-sufficiency, an innate skill lost in the industrialisation of agriculture, surged after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Unfulfilled supply chains and increased financial hardship not only forced families to revert to cheap, unhealthy-but-filling foods, but also to finding or growing their own as means of survival. This difficult time in Eastern Europe political history has left psychological scars across multiple generations, which might explain the welcoming of neoliberal ideas of a smooth and abundant food system.
In her 2018 essay, The uncomfortable truth about post-Soviet comfort foods, Darya Malyutina asks whether negative feelings about some diet staples are “reminiscent of the dismal living conditions during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1990s?... Food and images of food consumption are also connected to bleak outcomes for societies, individuals and the environment.”6
This current feeling is heavy and ugly and beige. I wanted to process it quickly: chop it up, force the words through a mincer, boil them within an inch of their life, vacuum-pack and push them to the back of the cupboard, to use only in emergencies.
Outside the angular, glass supermarkets, wisened elders perch on short stools proudly arranging their bounty in glass jars, buckets and wicker baskets atop traditional woven blankets: mounds of bilberries and raspberries, stacks of girolles and porcini, bouquets of fennel and oregano. They still spend long, back-breaking hours harvesting hedges, exploring forest floors and cultivating verges as a means of survival. Accrued expertise and lived experience is deemed unfashionable by the tech-driven metropolis. It prefers an unsustainable, untraceable, unaccountable diet.
The further we stray from wild fruits, mushrooms and herbs the less likely we are to find our way back. We need to reignite our connection with the land our food grows on (and the hands that move the dirt) to begin the decommodification process.
Potluck Picnic
Imagine it’s a late summer evening and I arrange a potluck picnic with you and some friends on Hampstead Heath as the sun wanes. The concept is that everyone brings a dish to share; here an opportunity to exhibit your speciality, try those of others, and to consider the feast as a sum of its parts. We congregate, arms full, bags overflowing, cutlery clinking. Some early arrivals have laid out blankets, overlapping with patterns and threads and blemishes and stories. The spread is almost unbelievable:
windfall apples (natural abundance)
gluten-free spongecake (considering allergies and intolerances)
biscuits made with foraged hazelnuts (wild food)
an enormous cheeseboard with pickles and chutneys (supporting local business)
fair-trade coffee, including decaf (better working conditions)
lentil chili (normalising veganism)
potato salad with elderberry capers (community garden)
homemade limoncello (DIY projects)
sourdough crackers (homebaking)
poached rhubarb (allotments)
sauerkraut (other-than-human collaboration)
organic rye kvass (second-life experiments)
slavery-free chocolate (post-colonial industry)
biodynamic wine (regenerative agriculture)
We spend hours eating and drinking, talking between mouthfuls about everyone’s recipes, the techniques, the timing. We are trying things for the first time, sharing secrets and paying compliments. A multiverse of flavours, textures, transparencies, smells, processes, containers, layers, compositions, tools, ingredients, emotions, vehicles, languages, histories, failures. I say I didn’t know you made vodka with a friend’s grain (interdependence) and you offer to give me a bottle for a jar of sauerkraut (scarcity and abundance). I also swap some kombucha for a bag of flour (alternative currencies). Even though not everyone was able to bring something (non-judgement), there’s absolutely more than enough to go around (peer-to-peer care). We share out the leftovers (resource redistribution) and you take them back in your plastic cake container (thrift and generosity).
This decentralised, interdependent approach to food, platforming collaborative care strategies for humans and non-humans, emphasises the importance of seeing food as a finite material. Without creating the right environment to educate, communicate, and proliferate these radical ideas, the current models of destructive agribusiness will continue to deplete soil, depress communities and dump plastic in our seas.
tightly-controlled
veritcally-organised
one-size-fits-all
to
d i e t - d i v e r s e s h a r e d - r e s p o n s i b i l i t y f r e e - f o r m
In the summer of 2019, Synchronise Witches Press, an independent, radical and queer publishing house run by Cherry Styles, produced a batch of bright orange pin badges bearing the words, “NO ONE WAY WORKS. It will take all of us shoving the thing from all sides to bring it down. Diane di Prima”. Although I’ve never managed to grab one, the quote lives in my head rent-free. The late American poet and social justice activist manages to catch a swirling and turgid moment in a supreme turn of phrase, one of a constellation across their Revolutionary Letter series. In my eyes, this pulled quote creatively provides a vehicle for considering post-Capitalist food futures.
In ruling out a singular resolution to Capitalism, di Prima acknowledges the multifaceted nature of struggle, and platforms all anti-structural work as being equally valuable. This elemental overview, embracing many fractured experiences of oppression, calls for collectivity that transcends the personal. Like any good team game, we all play a part, acting within our means and resources. We are convinced there will be a positive outcome to this tussle, and we’re all invited to participate.
Also, food justice can not be achieved without sexual, racial, environmental, labour, gender and disability justice.
Land stewardship
Perhaps it’s so easy to feel detached from our food systems because we as humans have become cultured to see ourselves as separate from nature? As a result of decades of environmental capitalism (increased private land ownership, decimated support for farmers, destruction of historic woodland for industrial gentrification), we are outside looking in. In being removed from an ecological narrative, we now occupy the role of passive consumers. This transactional relationship is a hotbed for interspecies abuse under the guise of convenience and luxury.
Google Maps shows how an encyclopedia of biodiversity has been made flat and homogenous, reduced to monosyllabic names. Park or farm or field or lake. You can leave a Tripadvisor review of a forest; you can rank organically and spiritually disparate spaces while presenting basic opinions as fact.
The capitalist idea of nature serves humans only as an image to project onto, a separate entity to us. This “nature-human dichotomy”, as Bram Buscher and Robert Fletcher explain in their excellent book The Conservation Revolution, “...historically rested on a conceptual distinction between opposing realms of nature and culture that conservation practice has, in a sense, sought to render material through the creation of protected areas from which human inhabitants were often forcibly removed.”7
In the middle of the city, densely grey and unspectacularly vast, this is embroidered by the obsession with owning houses with gardens and paying someone to lock us out of parks after dusk. As greenspaces are increasingly sought after, built on, traded and protected, their prescribed purpose moves closer to that of traditional property: only to be borrowed by your eyes or rented in full. They have been designed for easy maintenance and manipulation, a carefully-curated duplicate of the original.
Initiated in the 19th century and nationally established in the aftermath of WWI, allotments were originally plots of disused land bought by the council and given to urban peasants so as to then feed themselves without reliance on the state. My friend Max took on an allotment when he moved to Eltham, south east London, a few years ago. A total novice, he integrated himself into the community and assumed the role, much to the delight of his plot-neighbours. He’d always tell me of their generosity while trying to mask envy of their yield. He would often invite me down to weed, dig over beds, pick fruits, water thirsty seedlings, or to sit and read and drink ale. His pride was infectious and his harvest prolific.
Knowing he’d only be there temporarily – half a year or half a century – created this culture of custody and care. He took personal responsibility to regenerate the land for himself and his successors to enjoy and yield from. Rebecca May Johnson describes this wonderfully in her allotment journaling Qualities of Earth:
“...each plot is only separated from those around it by a narrow strip of grass which as well as being a boundary, is a shared path. It is the kind of division that reminds you of your responsibility to common space and the ultimate indivisibility of the earth. Unlike private land which can be owned absolutely, allotments cannot be bought by plot holders; we will only ever be tenants. Our presence is tentative and contingent on those with whom we share paths.”8
Allotments host a healthy web of intergenerational support: circular economies, skill-sharing, surplus redistribution, tool-lending and transparent communication pull communities tight as though with thread. Self-reliance is anti-capitalist (people before profit). This mutually-beneficial relationship between land and landworkers makes me think of the CoolŪkis project based in Vilnius. Rural elders with unruly yards are matched with energetic, gardenless city dwellers by an app. The beauty of this idea is in its simplicity, which provides a framework for new friendships and knowledge exchange, while framing a perpendicular food future.9
Similarly, community gardens and city farms are unexpected havens that serve communities with less access to greenspace. Often situated on old carparks and other generic municipal wastelands, these are utopias to build, maintain and admire, together. Those that are literally constructed on top of concrete will need to be shaped by the ingenuity, resourcefulness and physical strength of a hivemind.
I am so thankful for finding my local community garden – Glengall Wharf Garden in Peckham, South London. It was started ten years ago on an abandoned brownsite. I have seen the original plan drawings and photos of its inception. Back then there was little life, but – like a lasagne of time, love and energy – now it homes an incredible array of activities and biodiversity. Knowledgeable organic growers teach locals from a range of backgrounds how to sprout, tend and harvest seasonal vegetables for the local food bank. Using low-impact, agroecological methods and donated tools, the plot is cared for year-round by a bank of volunteers, and core funding is supported by plant sales, workshops and music events. The lead gardeners create, mature and process our own compost (a fascinating microbial story in itself) and harvest rainwater for refilling man-made ponds.
There’s a forest garden (semi-wild area designed for multi-tiered shade and water retention) which is home to perennial greens and bountiful fruit trees. Five (soon to be eight) ex-battery chickens have been rescued and housed in a secure, makeshift apartment, while worker bees pollinate the flora and produce honey throughout the seasons. Both species provide a grounding constant in an ever-changing environment and are doted on by visitors. Who doesn’t love hugging a chicken?
In gardens like this, a web of interconnected and interdependent lifeforms are working seamlessly in a harmonious ecosystem with support from humans – the kernel of understanding of Permaculture. Working through the elements, working in the earth, working across the seasons, working alongside the microbes.
Community farming projects can animate, communicate and demonstrate the dormant idea of interspecies co-existence to a wide range of audiences. They bring people together over a common goal. They turn nothing into something and give it all away. But is this really a holistic approach to food justice if we still see ourselves as distinct players, as conduits?
Are we not also the growing medium? Are we not soil the seed the fork the mulch the sprout the rain the pest the flower the pollen the spade the root the fruit?
Fermental Health
One effective (and fascinating) way to tackle food waste is fermentation. Unlike other preservation techniques such as dehydrating, pickling and freezing, fermentation has the ability to transform the flavour, molecular structure and bio-availability of foods while retaining and enhancing their essences. No expensive tools, speciality knowledge or electrical refrigeration are needed. To me this renders it the most important skill we can learn in the search for affordability, diet diversity and resource sovereignty. Using thousand-year-old techniques, communities around the world have survived illness, battles, and severe weather. British naval ships would store barrels of vitamin-C rich foods like sauerkraut and fermented lemons to stave off scurvy. Koreans traditionally make kim-chi with their abundant harvest to transform and mature slowly over the winter and provide sustenance through the hungry gap (late winter through early spring before crops fully develop).
Despite its historical legacy, even a mention of the word “fermentation” can draw out bodily reactions; faces screw up, tongues creep out, shoulders hunch over. A common misconception is that it means something is rancid, expired, or mouldy (sometimes it is mouldy on purpose, maybe I’ll explain later), but it is staggering how many things we consume regularly are actually fermented – wine, beer, chocolate, coffee, cheese, yoghurt, salami.
Bacteria lives with us. It’s alive with us; our microbiome is inhabited by trillions of beneficial bacteria. It is us.
Basic lacto-fermentation works by submerging vegetables into a salt brine to inhibit the growth of any pathogenic bacteria, while conveniently creating the perfect environment for a strand of benevolent bacteria called Lactobacillus. The dominant microorganisms then begin converting sugars naturally present in plants to lactic acid and carbon dioxide, which safely preserves the vegetables and creates an extra barrier in the container from oxygen. The resulting conditions give lacto-fermented veg a funky tang and fizzy mouthfeel.
In essence, a wild collaboration takes place between several other-than-human agents: plants, bacteria, atmospheric gases, time. We, humans, can only facilitate the transformation and provide substrates or containers to exercise a small degree of control.
Plenty of fermentation naturally occurs without intervention: the other day I noticed a plum in my fruit bowl had yeast colonies patterning its skin, attacking the sugars underneath. After removing and composting the blemishes, I took a bite and oh wow it was an intense pleasure, a knockout sweet flesh flanked by saliva-quenching sourness. An overripe plum is a precious resource of potential, we need to decouple its value from capital.
Regular servings are proven to aid digestion and increase natural defense barriers against illness, proving critical to maintaining our physical and mental health. Sandor Katz illustrates in his book Wild Fermentation:
“Bacteria are essential to life’s most basic processes. Organisms of every description rely upon them and other microorganisms to accomplish many aspects of self-maintenance and self-protection. We humans are in a symbiotic relationship with these single-cell life forms and could not possibly live without them... There is widespread agreement that all life on earth came from bacterial origins. Microorganisms are our ancestors and our allies. They keep our soil fertile and are an indispensable part of the cycle of life.. Without them there could be no other life.” 10
The potential for interspecies collaboration turns my previous understanding of food as a dead object inside out. There is a prismatic joy I have found in knowing that I am the result of an ongoing collaboration. I am alive because they are living. My skin is home to unique yeasts, my gut is floral, my blood is blessed with bodies.
Like I am always wearing clothes I am always carrying microbes.
Slow cooking, fermenting and working with food is to embody a space that has become increasingly rare in modern consumer culture: deep time. An hour waiting for a fast-food delivery is not the same hour you spend collecting wild herbs. Why is one more valuable than the other?
Teaching myself how to scavenge for wild food is an ongoing process of observing. This abundant resource completely surrounds us, even in the most dense, lifeless spaces. Carpeting river banks, tucked in car parks, bolting from cracks. They thrive in the edges and, conveniently, cities are mostly edges. As councils cut back on public spending, greenspaces become overgrown, and undisturbed land invites self-seeders to establish. Lush vegetation encroaches on the flat park, replenishing the encyclopedia of biodiversity.
When collecting a bounty of free food, you must remember to leave something in return. Circular economies need to be maintained, else risk collapse. Bringing my consciousness to the now, I dig my digits in, lifting roots caked in earth. I thank the rain and the sun. I thank the worms and the dogs. Since I’m either in the plants, or have them inside me, we are one and the same.
Wild food enthusiast Pascal Baudar writes often about terroir, which relates the unique flavour profile of foraged ingredients to their specific ecological origin.11 Different soil types, neighbouring plants, weathersphere, human and other-than-human activity, water sources, and seasonal times affect the chemical make-up and palate of all edible native and non-native plant species. Wild food creates an entirely new spectrum of taste, one that our domesticated vegetables don’t even feature on. The extreme engineering of modern cropping panders to (and perpetuates) a narrowing palate.
We must reconnect our bodies with greenspaces through eating them. What could be more intimate than tasting our parks? Can we get closer to our gut by munching weeds? Isn’t this where all food came from anyway?
Q. Why buy spinach picked over a week ago in a different country, flown over in a refrigerated console and wrapped in plastic when we have
bittercress
watercress
garlic mustard
shepherd’s purse
horseradish
stinging nettles
dead-nettle
sow-thistle
lambs-tongue plantain
ribwort plantain
wall lettuce
wild rocket
alexanders
nasturtium
cleavers
dandelion
chickweed
wild chervil
hollyhock
mallow
sorrel
clover
dock
growing directly out of the ground within a mile of us right now?
A. a slow, purposeful degradation of education and collective shift towards increased dependency on supermarkets.
I get asked often to teach people how to forage wild food, as if a skill transferable in a few hours. I think about how the Vilnius elders understand their landscape so deeply and intimately; some gifted with an in-built compass and discerning eye, others blessed with hand-me-down wisdom and perseverance. The locating, harvesting, and sharing of berries, mushrooms and herbs is a selfless task steeped in tradition. Modern day extractive agriculture and institutional supermarkets would not exist without our predecessors’ exploration of edible native plants. So I say I’ll share some basic lifesaving rules and common snacks but the rest is on you.
The overt pressures of career capitalism expect us to be specialists in any field before we've started. We are utterly convinced that if we don’t over-professionalise our hobbies they are meaningless. With increasingly-blurred boundaries between labour and leisure, free time is never really free, which doesn’t bode well for slow-yielding activities. We must be slow in our quest for knowledge. Be bad at things for a long time. Be radical amateurs.
Feed each other
Once we have learnt how to grow dynamic crops on shared land, preserve abundances with microbes, and decarbonise our diet, who then will distribute the meals?
The increasingly expansive meal-for-one culture prevalent in cities – typified by our reliance on supermarkets, takeaways and restaurants – dictates portioning, creates extra food and plastic waste, and perpetuates eating alone. Time poverty has incubated our search for luxury and convenience, while bulk cooking is deemed 'unfashionable' and 'cheap'. For centuries peasant communities and healing congregations have been bulk cooking precisely because it is practical and cost-efficient. It engages all members, whether in organisation, preparation or just being present to share grace, food and stories.
Feeding people has been a central part of religious cultures that prioritise equity, integrity and respect. Many Sikhs still share food from their Gurdwaras as daily practise, while Hare Krishnas distribute thousands of free meals to the homeless community in cities across the UK. Their non-discriminatory operations nourish and support as a basic human right. New-Old social eating models are the engine of the incoming food revolution, with low-cost, inclusive canteens popping up on high-streets just like the kavinė and valgylka of Lithuania. Sometimes we must look backwards to move forwards.
A burgeoning network of community kitchens, meals-on-wheels services, cafe hatches and chef-cum-couriers has been bubbling under the surface for some time, and is now sustaining the country through unprecedented times with emergency food provision. Inspired by National Kitchens set up after the First World War, and British Restaurants following the Second, the National Food Service (NFS) is an updated vision for a holistic, decentralised food system.12 Founded in 2018 by the team behind Foodhall Sheffield, the NFS is realising (almost out of thin air) a resilient public-driven plan on a hyper-local and country-wide scale. ‘Local Contacts’ in over 15 cities support new projects with practical skills, legal advice and online learning resources. Volunteers, food activists and strategists use dynamic governance and consent-based decision making to write national campaigns, collaborate with partner programmes and contribute to progressive policy-writing.
This web of projects holds plentiful innovative approaches to food justice, which create local solutions for local issues, for example:
Pay-what-you-can cafes remove financial barriers to eating healthily with donation-based dining. They disrupt the faceless transactions we experience everyday, and include low- or no-income patrons in a non-judgemental approach. They encourage alternative currencies such as labour exchange and pay-it-forward in order to expand the accepted definition of value.13
Social supermarkets and community pantries redistribute fresh commercial surplus and household essentials to struggling families for a membership fee. Some receive donations of local organic produce from community gardens, allotments and small businesses to solidify short supply loops and reduce waste.
Community supported agriculture (CSA) is perhaps the most direct model, often just a few miles farm-to-fork. Seasonal sponsorship connects farmers directly with patrons who support their work in return for top grade crops, local specialities and experimental strains.
NFS is a glowing dodecahedron, floating and spinning, absorbing and reflecting, catching and releasing. As a tactic for disproving the operation in theory, many like to ask how it would scale up. I quickly recognise this as the language of infinite growth, and therefore an irrelevant question. As a post-capitalist concept it relies on the breakdown of traditional oppressive models to prove their own inadequacies. The idea that a large, singular system should replace the existing one (Global Food) is a trap! A multicellular organism which grows, shifts and cushions its users eradicates the need for one rigged method, and nurtures an environment where care and abundance are primary currencies.
The most significant pledge I’ve made for personal food sovereignty is to detach myself from some of the systems we seem addicted to. For a decade I’ve avoided using supermarkets at all costs – it’s not convenient or inexpensive – and for five years I’ve been experimenting with alternative currencies. I began swapping artworks with friends when it made no sense to buy from each other with money that we didn’t have. I then traded artworks for other forms of labour: haberdashery, graphic design, washing up or fresh cooking. Of course this saves money and admin, but I was totally struck with the debased notion of worth.
The exchanges have become detached from capital like my fermenting plum. Traditional colonial laws of debt no longer apply. The value of my goods are slippery, fluctuating wildly, sometimes disappearing completely. Art objects become jars of pickles or soda bread, I conspire with chefs, bakers, homebrewers and merchants in a dark web that spans beyond city limits. There is no competition, only cooperation. Our circular economy has no guest list, entrance criteria or rules; your combination of practical, aesthetic and negotiating skills are your currency.
My fridge is often ill-stocked but always contains half-jars of homemade pickles, DIY oat milk (so easy I’m never buying it again), some sort of sweet treat like brownies or flapjack that my flatmate makes, and a drawer full of wild greens. Occasionally I request specific swaps from my network like kombucha or kefir, and other products of processes I don’t have space, equipment or patience for. I have an implausible amount of empty jars in my airing cupboard, the door of which I’ve plastered with a chaotic archive of labels and recipes, and I know that once I fill them with kim-chi, sauerkraut or pesto, they will enter a marketplace that rejects capital in favour of care.
November 2020
Publication rights remain with the author.
tinyletter.com/waysofeating/letters/i-dream-of-canteens – This is probably my absolute favourite prose piece about food and society, it just keeps on giving.
In my opinion, supermarkets are beacons of gentrification that perpetuate wealth inequality, social isolation and food capitalism. Since they have been allowed to create a perfect triplex for contemporary food attitudes – Choice, Convenience and Luxury – we are experiencing Supermarket Stockholm Syndrome; trapped in an abusive system that we have been forced to love. The vast power that these organisations wield is a skilful manipulation of our perceptions and the constant threat of restricting access to our basic needs.
This learned dependency has created a public tolerance, in some cases a demand, for low-cost, processed foods that are often devoid of nutritional value. Bleached bread, reconstituted meats and microwave meals, all containing countless chemicals and preservatives to prolong the shelf-life while retaining the aesthetic appearance of edibility. The difficulty in writing about this is that for many it’s an inescapable lived reality. I despise the superstructures, not those who have been trapped in them.
The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene (Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher), 2020
Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods (Sandor Katz), 2016
There is no particular breakdown of this term but his most recent book Wildcrafted Fermentation (2019) goes into some depth on the sustainability of using local materials and their dietary effects
nationalfoodservice.uk – I volunteer with NFS on their national strategy and occasionally design learning resources.
From January 2018 until April 2020, I ran Brixton Pound Cafe, a pay-what-you-can project in South London. With a small team of both living-wage staff and incredible volunteers, we turned surplus fresh food into vegan and vegetarian meals that were affordable, nutritious and vibrant six days a week. In a gentrified area such as Brixton, where Black and Brown, low-income and neurodiverse communities are disproportionately affected by social cleansing and the ravaging of free or low-cost services, we ensured that our cafe was a place to eat well, build connections and show solidarity in action.
By platforming creative freedom and other-than-financial motivation, we were able to implement more equitable methods in our model that reflected some of the social issues in our neighbourhood. Working with specialist schools, we took on volunteers with Autism and Learning Disabilities for weekly kitchen shifts, some for their first work experience. We partnered with local mental health organisations to signpost service users and provide practical help with writing CVs.
It was such a wild ride; we had very few resources (not even an oven), brought enthusiasm over any expertise, and a mandate to break even every month. I learnt how to cook on the job with tuition from a very patient and righteous vegan chef called Iga. Every week for 18 months, we unwrapped, washed, chopped, cooked, preserved and froze 65 kilos of fresh fruit and veg that was destined for landfill. It seems absolutely ridiculous when I look back, one of the most significant periods of my life to date.