LEADER⁵SHIP

So what is this "different way of being in the world"?  And how do we become the kind of people who practice it?  What are the habits and practices of body and soul, both for individuals and for groups, that can help us move beyond mere good intentions and into "a way of being centered on connection, beauty, health, and wholeness"?  To borrow a phrase from the contemporary social philosopher Charles Eisenstein, how do we live into "the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible"?

In my own journey, I have often wished for a roadmap of some sort, some step-by-step guide for making integrity food, and all that integrity food entails, a reality for my family and my community.  But what I've realized, as I suggested yesterday, is that there is no roadmap. There is no step-by-step guide.  There is no program for this work.  Programs are but poor substitutes for people who are learning to come into right relationship with one another and with their place, the literal land that surrounds them. And the way in which a particular set of people live into right relationship with each other and their particular place is just that: particular.

That said, there are, I believe, certain criteria or guiding principles for moving in this direction.  They are less "how to" and more "how to tell" if you're on the right track – the right track for your particular circle of concern, that is. 

There are many different articulations of these principles out there already, in books and through various social media outlets.  This is just one version, which I have distilled from a combination of my own practical experience – an ongoing dance with trial and error – and the wide array of reading, listening, and watching I've done in this space over the last five years and even back further into my undergraduate reading in the comparative study of religion.  There is nothing especially magical about this particular version of the principles, but it does have the advantage (if I can venture to say that), of being organized into the form of a mnemonic, in the hope that memorability will facilitate implementation.

I will just introduce the principles here, and then delve into each one of them in turn in coming days and weeks.  LEADER⁵SHIP:

Local

Ecological

Artisanal

Diversified

Experimental / Entrepreneurial

R⁵ – Regenerative, Recreational, Recursive, Redundant, Resilient

Sacred

Holistic

Integrity-focused

Permaculture-based

Beyond Good Intentions 

The problem with good intentions, of course, is that they're never enough.  They're necessary, but often (usually?) woefully insufficient.  And what's more, they tend to obscure any practical results that are out of joint with their noble character, thereby often (usually?) leading to even further perverse real-world outcomes.

For example, it is unquestionably good and noble to aim to eliminate hunger and food scarcity, to "feed the world" as the so-called Green Revolution of the post-World War II era promised to do in the United States – and delivered, with nothing short of spectacular success.  It was a success, that is, only if you completely ignore the devastating impact of all those "miraculous" wartime chemicals on soil health, and therefore ultimately on human health.*  Similarly, it is undeniably good to try to help farmers stay in the business of farming by providing economic supports, since Mother Nature cares not a whit for the rules of free-market economics.  But when those economic supports come in the form of government-guaranteed crop subsidies and government-backed crop insurance, and those subsidies and insurance, in turn, underwrite production of only a handful of so-called "commodity" crops (corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, and rice), they in fact drive the trends toward monoculture cropping and farm consolidation that end up making farms and farmers – and therefore the rest of us – even more vulnerable to disease and long-term environmental and economic ruin.  The ironies of our food system are both palpable and legion.

So good intentions, when divorced from careful analysis of their practical effects, are basically indistinguishable from bad intentions.  I know there are others who take the argument to the next level, positing that the perversities of our food system must actually be the result of the bad intentions – or at least the greedy intentions – of the giant agro-chemical companies and the elected officials who do their bidding in the realms of policy, legislation, and regulation.  And sure, some dynamic along those lines is operative.  But I think any narrative that relies exclusively, or even just heavily, on that kind of conspiratorial explanation for our food predicament misses the larger point.  We can manage to get ourselves in this kind of pickle without any consciously bad actors pulling the strings. 

The truth is, we can manage to get – and keep – ourselves in this kind of pickle simply by failing to continually question our assumptions, chief among them the assumption that there is some grand program, some "scalable" model (there's that word again), that can be devised by so-called experts and then applied, more or less uniformly, everywhere.  But here's the reality:  there is no program.  There are sound principles for farming practices that are conducive to long-term human and environmental health (human and environmental health being so intertwined as to be basically indistinguishable).  But how these principles and practices play out on a given farm in a given community in a given region must necessarily vary according the character of the land and other particularities of that place. 

So what we need are not programs but people, people who know their place – not in the sense of acquiescing to some pre-ordained social hierarchy, but rather in the very literal sense of coming into intimate relationship with the land that surrounds and supports them.  It is through such intimate relationship that we guard against the potential perversities of mere good intentions.  It is not a panacea, this intimate relationship – that would be synonymous with "program".  But it is a start of a different way of being in the world, a way of being centered on connection, beauty, health, and wholeness; a way of being that is wary of, if not thoroughly allergic to, shortcuts and cheap substitutes.   

* Here, I'm talking about the dizzying array of fertilizers, fungicides, pesticides, and herbicides that most farmers came to depend on after World War II, almost all of which are petroleum derived and many of which are simply repurposed explosives ingredients and agents of chemical warfare.

Community Feast

It doesn't really happen in isolation.  Food, I mean.  Food is the paradigmatic communal good.  At all points along the trajectory of its existence – from the planting of seed to the breaking of bread – food is meant to be shared.  The bread and the wine, they make for communion long before the hungry arrive at the table.  The bounty of hunt and harvest, they literally make the community, and the work of building starts long before anyone comes to the feast.  The feast is, in truth, the celebration of what has come to exist in the very process of its making:  community itself.  No feast, no community.  And no community, no feast.

The breathtaking tragedy of the modern industrial food system is that it breaks this bond.  From the single-cockpit crop duster spraying glyphosate and destroying the microbial bonds that make for healthy soil, to the drive-through burger consumed alone on the highway, the system by which the vast majority of North Americans obtain "food" (one can argue it barely meets a proper definition) severs our ties with each other and with the earth in a bewildering number and variety of ways.

How did we arrive here? This story has been well documented by a small army of journalists, historians, economists, health professionals, and others – not to mention a good number of farmers and ranchers themselves* – over a period of decades now.  And there is little, if anything, of value I can add to their body of work, except to observe one particular unifying theme: that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  I hazard this cliché as one summary of this body of work – notwithstanding the usually sound editorial bias against clichés (due to their tendency to obscure more than they reveal) – because it is precisely the cautionary nugget I need to bear in mind as I take the next logical question as the organizing principle of my life:  So where do we go from here?  How do we get ourselves out of this mess?  What does the work of redemption look like, in practice, on the ground, in the ground?

These questions are worth inhabiting.  Their answers are worth living toward.  And even from the wilderness into which we have unwittingly wandered, we can make out the essential contours of the land of promise, where we gather around the table to feast, to celebrate the ties that have been formed to make the feast possible.

*In addition to the resources mentioned yesterday, I would also recommend – again, merely as a starting point, because the body of work has burgeoned in recent years – Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture (2018), by North Dakota farmer and rancher Gabe Brown. 

Mama Don't Preach

And, lest anyone think this is taking a turn toward the preachy, let me make one thing absolutely clear from the get-go:  I am not in right relationship with food, despite going to relatively drastic lengths to get there.  I'm nowhere close – which means, by my own terms, I am not in right relationship with love.  I am not in right relationship with my family, my neighbors, my community, the world.

I am not writing these reflections from some vantage point where I've "figured it out" or somehow gotten my act together when it comes to food (and therefore love).  Not by a long shot.  In fact, the truth is very nearly the opposite: I feel compelled to write, in large part, precisely because I'm so far off the mark, still, despite the forty chickens in the coop and another dozen in the freezer with the butchered beef steer; despite the three dozen eggs on the counter and the few dozen winter squash curing in the sun for winter storage; and despite the goat cheese in the fridge and the dairy cow – the blessed, friggin' dairy cow – about to pop with her next calf, and all those gallons of milk that will come as a result. 

Yes, we've come a long way in a pretty short amount of time.  And yes, I'm proud of all the work we've put in, what we've learned, what we've built.  But I'm no doomsday prepper.  I harbor no illusions that my farm is going to "save me" and my family if society falls apart tomorrow.  Spoiler alert: it won't save us.  But that's not why I'm doing this. 

I'm doing this because it makes me feel alive now, and because I've read and listened to enough of the scientific and economic analyses of our current food system to understand that the way we produce and consume food "at scale" (I've come to hate that phrase) in North America is fundamentally not aligned with feeling alive – truly alive – in the present.  It is designed to give us a calorie-dense, synthetically-flavored series of dopamine hits, at the expense of a wide variety nutrients conducive to our health.  Nor is it designed to support our long-term well-being.  And forget the well-being of our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their grandchildren.  Our current petrochemical-dependent food system has profoundly sickened our existing society and also threatens to sterilize the earth (where it hasn't already), greatly diminishing the ability of future generations to produce food for themselves.*

Okay, that got a little preachy. Sorry.  

But hopefully you can hear my heart through the preachy tone.  I care about eating, and I care about food, all aspects of food, because I care deeply about quality of life, both now and deep into the future. 

But don't most people care about quality of life, both now and deep into the future?  I believe they do, and I sure as hell don't want to give the impression that I think people have to have a big garden, raise their own chickens, or buy a gosh-darned dairy cow to prove that they care.  That said, I do think the world would be a better place if a few more people did these kinds of things – like, if everyone who felt internally drawn to this kind of life could have the courage and the economic support to venture into it.  But I'm not on a mission to turn our society back to the days of Little House on the Prairie.  (Although there's a good deal to learn from those books, like how to capture cheese culture from the rumen of a slaughtered calf. Pro tip.) 

What I am on a mission to do is to issue an invitation, an invitation for my friends and my community to experience real food – or, as real as we can make it in our current circumstances – and then to pay attention to what that experience prompts them to do next.  Maybe it's trying to grow something yourself.  That would be awesome.  Or maybe it's simply forging a relationship – or several of them – with people who are growing some food themselves using methods that require little to no petrochemical or otherwise energy-intensive inputs in the process, what Joel Salatin calls "integrity food".  That is also awesome. 

I want people to find their own way to join in on this journey, and I don't want anyone to hold back because they think they have to "get it together" on some level before they can really start.  Hogwash.  None of us has got it together.  But I have a pretty good inkling, from my own experience on this journey, of how we can start to get it together: together.  Join us.

I promise I won't get preachy on you.  Or, maybe just a little . . . . (Wink.)  

*There are many resources available to begin examining this claim. Three that have had the biggest impact on me are the Kiss the Ground documentary film from 2020, Michael Pollan's 2006 bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Wendell Berry's 1977 opus, The Unsettling of America. 

Work of a Lifetime

But who doesn't love to eat?  I mean, seriously.  It is the essential experience of our waking lives, all of us.  We don't eat, we don't live, at least not for long.  The need, the want, the desire to eat impels us all to action, and is with us, from the moment we leave our mothers' wombs.  Why do newborns cry?  Ninety-nine percent of the time, it's for one of three reasons:  they're sleepy, they're poopy, or they're hungry.  Okay, cold; maybe sometimes they're cold.  But the point is eating – receiving the comfort of food, relief from hunger – is one of the most fundamental experiences of our whole lives.  And it is fundamentally about pleasure: the pleasure of connecting with other humans and with the good of the earth, the pleasure of receiving care, the pleasure of having our needs satisfied.  It is the pleasure, in other words, of love.

So why should it seem like such a "radical" thing to say that food is worth the devotion of my life?  Or, maybe it's not such a "radical" thing merely to say that.  Words are cheap these days.  Verging on worthless.  What's more genuinely jarring, from the perspective of the implicit norms of our modern techno-infatuated, money-obsessed (enslaved?) society, is to actually devote one's life – one's time, one's physical and mental energy and well-being, etc. – to food.  And not just to its (hopefully) pleasurable consumption, but likewise to the pleasures – and the perils – of its production and preparation.

If all of us must, and do, eat, and if, as I am asserting, food is a (the?) quintessential expression of love, then why does the unspoken script in our society relegate food production and preparation to the "lowly" bin?  Why is there so little legitimate social prestige, as opposed to patronizing lip service, accorded to farmers? Why would it constitute a status risk for an Ivy-league educated attorney, like myself, to turn to farming, at least long before I have the "financial freedom" to do so by any conventional standard of financial security?  Why would it seem like a "sacrifice" for me, at the outset of the most promising years of income-generation in my profession, to turn my law practice into a side gig so that I can put the practices of soil health, animal husbandry, and gardening – of cheesemaking, for Pete's sake – at the center of my life?  

There are many reasons for this dynamic, which have been explored and explicated well and at length by cultural historians, sociologists, economists, and others.  These reasons are beyond the scope of this immediate reflection. But they all converge around a basic theme:  that the culture that both crystallized in and grew out of the European "enlightenment" – the culture that, for anyone living in North America and Europe (and Australia), is as unavoidable as the water in which fish swim (and is almost as invisible . . . almost) – holds a certain disdain for bodies and everything related to care for bodies.

To put it simply:  we in the cultural "West" have a dysfunctional relationship with bodies – our bodies, other peoples' bodies, animal bodies, etc.  This dysfunctional relationship is one instance of our dysfunctional relationship with the material world more generally.  And nowhere are the dysfunctions of that relationship, as well as the potentially devastating consequences of those dysfunctions, more apparent than in our habits and attitudes and assumptions and practices around food and eating.  These warrant further examination.

But to cut to the chase for the time being: if food is love, but our relationship with food is dysfunctional, this means our relationship with love is dysfunctional.  To put it bluntly:  when we are not in right relationship with food, we are not in right relationship with one another.  I aim to do whatever is within my power to rectify this state of affairs.  I have begun with my own household, but the journey is already beckoning me outward, to reach beyond my immediate circle even as I seek to deepen these labors of love within and for and with my own family.  This is work worthy of a lifetime . . . and more.

Confession 

It comes down to this: I love to eat.  If you want to know my why in the world, you don't have to look much further than this:  food is how I experience love in the world, how I give love, and how I receive love. So what I'm really doing when I orient my whole life around food – which is what I seem to have done over the last few years (or have actually done, to the detriment of other pursuits) – is orienting my whole life around love. If I have shared food with you, particularly food that I had a significant hand in preparing or producing, what I've really done is shown my love for you. Food is my love language.

I could say much more.  I could take a stab at exploring why and how this came to be, this state of affairs where food, for me, is synonymous with love. I could do that, and perhaps I will in coming weeks and months.  But for now, it is enough to put this stake in the ground and just come out and say the truth that I have lived into over the last several years – and will continue to live into "Lord willin' and the creek don't rise": Food is love, and love is worth the devotion of my life, so food is worth the devotion of my life.

There. I said it.

Eat well today, friends.  Feed your people well today.  Love well today.