Something About Food
When I reflect on my time at Schumacher College I often find it hard to quantify, at least in words. My experience was deep, slippery, illuminating, confusing, unravelling. Still unravelling.
But food? I certainly wasn’t thinking about food when I applied to the College. I was thinking about land. I was thinking about the human mind, about my own mind, about why I could only sometimes see the land around me as if it was actually real. The best thing I can say about Schumacher College is that it confirmed my suspicion that the land was (no, is) definitely, in fact, real. Not real like the halogen warmness of the city. Out there, here, real.
But what is the land anyway? Is it reservoirs, conifer plantations, smooth contour grain fields? Small things. Or is it a bee pollinating a flower, the dangling branch of an ancient yew weighed down by rain, a group of people playing music around a fire. Vast things.
On the train to Schumacher College I look out of the window and everything seems small. Things always look small when you’re moving quickly.
On our course we learned about people for whom the world was more vast and real than we could ever imagine. But they mostly don’t exist anymore. They were uprooted by those uprooting forces that push violently outwards as they shrink inwards.
On our course we also learned that nature has no edges, at least not any real ones. Just patterns. And that the land speaks in verbs and not nouns. And the land does speak.
But what about food? Food is the convenient membrane we placed between ourselves and the land – an opaque medium holding the memory of a long-forgotten pact with Mother Earth. Something about taking...? Those uprooted people. They knew about the pact.
What to do?
Writing my dissertation, I learned about a vast union of landworkers (and more) called La Via Campesina. They carry a message from the rainforest – the oldest of places – from Pachamama. They say food is the tentative, sacred point of contact between humans and the land. They say our sprawling swollen machine of a food system is an abstraction made by people who can only see what they can quantify. A world full of edges.
They say food can be the solution.
Agroecology; Food Sovereignty; words containing the imagined vision of a possible future. A Third way. Food fulfills, community fulfills, vitality fulfills the needs and wants of the land. A quiet revolution. Decentralised but wholly centered, held together only by its diversity, it can be called fractal.
For now still underground, individual tendrils of hyphae rooting around in the blackness for connections. Network expanding. Still too dark to see fruiting bodies, maybe. Better to find light in the darkness than darkness in the light.
Before leaving the College we made sure to walk the labyrinth one last time.
Mycorrhizal Symbiosis, Feral Practice research image, **mycelium around the roots of a pine seedling, photo by Professor David Read
Source: https://haarlemartspace.co.uk/periodicals/feral-practice