To complement yesterday’s post on creating a solidarity economy and corresponding responsible consumer culture here in Recife, I really enjoyed the reflections from fellow Fulbrighter Gustavo on his blog, Dinner-Bell.

It’s amazing and in some ways puzzling to me to watch how food markets are developing in the U.S. It seems like more and more energy is being put into reconstructing the diversity, quality, and geography of traditional food systems and that there is more and more interest in consuming local produce and learning (or relearning) to consume in post-industrial (pre-industrial?) ways… I’ve often thought that, in addition to ecological ways of producing food–i.e. farming methods that mimic ecological processes so that food production is environmentally sound and sustainable–there are also ecological ways of consuming food that mirror or parallel the process of growing food. After all, food is made up of living things, which are limited by their nature and their relationship to the seasons, the soil, the weather, and their relationship to other living things. I think one of the reasons that I love cooking and that am so fascinated by the world’s different cuisines is because of all of the almost ecological knowledge encoded into traditional cooking.

As I become more familar with agroecological farming systems in this part of Brazil, ie those that take into account natural, diverse ecological growing systems along with the people that sustain them (that’s a shoddy, quick definition), I too have been thinking about the way that farmers are re-capturning ‘pre-industrial’ knowledge of farming systems, the farming systems of their ancestors, and correspondingly developing their own local sales outlets via farmers markets and direct farm-to-consumer sales, in a new iteration of traditional trade systems.  It’s like they’re forming ‘novo-traditional’ market outlets- that’s not an academic term, but my own way of trying to coin what I am seeing.  It’s particularly fascinating in an era of rapid supply chain consolidation, where large chains own just about everything (supermarkets, sales outlets, transportation mechanisms, and sometimes even the farms themselves.  Chiquita is a prime example.)  Gustavo captures this:

From Monsanto’s patenting of plant genetic material and the legal system’s support for the privatization of life to Walmart’s tremendous share in the supermarket industry, private companies have never had so much power to impose their values and profit motive on the way we eat and the way we produce our food. This has led to an illusion of diversity and a reality of stark agricultural and gastronomic monotony.

The northeastern region of Brazil could be poised to defy these global market trends… given the proximity to the land, social technologies which make an adequate water supply avaliable all year round, farmer-led seed diversity banks, close relationships (sometimes even family ties) between farmer and consumers in small and medium sized cities.  And, as Gustavo mentions in his blog, “knowledge and this infrastructure exists (however precariously) in developing countries…” Challenges are of course financing, access to knowledge & technology, will power, climate change & effects on soil, water, production cycles.  But despite the challenges, farmers in Afogados and Umarizal seem committed to trying it out, to making agroecology and direct local sales a viable way to support their families’ livelihoods.

Jumping from concepts of ecology/agroecology to a larger vision of our earth as a living, breathing system… just yesterday a German friend living in Brazil passed along a link to the work of Joanna Macy.  Macy is a self-described eco-philosopher living in northern California, who has pioneered “The Work that Reconnects.” On the homepage of Macy’s sight, she says that The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world—we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.

So I guess this is my moment to share with you the continuation of thoughts that have been running through different currents of my life. Food, nature, farming, spirituality, my roots: Grandma Gussie’s dill pickles and Jewish food heritage and Grandpa Joe’s young life on a Gernam farm, exploring yoga, learning to breath.  With the hectic and endless life of an organizer over the past 5 years I had no time to really stop.  To think & reflect on what this all means.  How trade, poverty, the earth, and our relationships to one another are really interconnected, my role within it, where I am most ‘strategically’ placed to support the ‘great awakening’ and work towards some semblance of sanity in this world.  I’m still not sure.

For your own exploration.  Joanna Macy’s site //  Gustavo’s food and food politics blog // More on agroecology here and here.