The Localist Manifesto
section 8
food and farm
The inauguration of free housing would create promising opportunities for the production and marketing of fresh, healthy food. First, the cost of running a small business would fall precipitously, as small farmers and independent restaurant owners and grocers would be relieved of the burden of mortgages and rent. The protection granted to individual households in the wake of Robin 99’s electoral victory would just be extended to non-corporate entrepreneurs. Second, some of the buildings vacated by defunct real estate companies could be “localized” by the neighborhood assembly and put to use in the preparation and distribution of food. Finally, a lot of folks could quit their jobs in the corporate economy and get involved in the local food economy. Families that once needed two incomes to make ends meet might now need only one. Young people could delay, or avoid altogether, their entry into the job/career squirrel cage. Instead of flipping burgers or stocking shelves for minimum wage or holding down some trifling sales or delivery job, people could involve themselves in figuring out how to assemble and then operate a system of local food production. They would not have a job but something far better – meaningful work that calls on every individual’s capacity for innovative planning, democratic decision-making, and shared physical exertion.
These three developments would create new options for neighborhood restaurants and local-market farmers. Taking the issue of restaurants first, neighborhood residents could determine together which of the newly available buildings are most appropriate for an eatery of some sort. They would create a working group – people with an interest and/or experience in preparing food – to remodel and run it. Two options suggest themselves. The eatery might be turned over to a local resident who loves to cook and is good at it. The working group would procure supplies and figure out how they want to staff it (paid employees, people who work for free food, or some combination). Or, residents might opt for some sort of rotating chef arrangement. Locals could volunteer their services for a week or two and cook their specialties for their friends and neighbors. The working group in charge of running the place would take care of scheduling the chefs and doing all the legwork. In either case, a vast reservoir of energy and talent would become available to local residents. The food would be local, inexpensive, and cooperatively prepared and enjoyed by people who work together and share a neighborhood. There would be many ways, none of them onerous or oppressive, for inserting yourself into such an economy. If you want to run a small business there will be new opportunities for doing so, especially for people who otherwise would not have the money up front to start one. If you just want to contribute part-time to a shared endeavor, you could do that. So Eddie, after grilling ribs and making slaw and corn bread for a week or two in a setting where doing that is a whole lot of fun (plenty of help, plenty of friends, plenty of music and brew), could count on being able to walk into the same place next week and, for a couple of dollars, eat Ramona’s venison stew made with local vegetables and neighborhood deer and accompanied by Rita’s homemade bread and pie. Al, who has concocted a suite of tasty vegetarian and vegan recipes, could show them off in the week following. And so on.
A people feeding themselves like this and paying nothing for housing could live quite well without a corporate job – without, that is, being ordered around and overworked by some absentee multinational. The growth of a vibrant local food economy would cause another kind of trouble for the multinationals in the food business: well-prepared, nutritious food would now be cheaper than burgers and fries, thanks to the money collected by the working group from community members eager and honored to subsidize such a restaurant in their neighborhood. People who want to eat at McDonald’s would be free to do so, but it is hard to imagine very many people wanting to do that very often when a constantly varying menu of good food is readily available for less just down the street in an establishment where people might actually have some fun together. Hard times for the fast food conglomerates will mean good times for everybody else, including those restaurant owners who want to continue to operate in the old way – as small businesses that provide a good living for a family and several employees. Altogether, every kind of small restaurant, grocery, or bakery – family- or cooperatively-owned – would operate in a situation where the odds are suddenly stacked in their favor. Only the corporate chains would suffer. The dying back of corporate commerce in this arena would do far more than fervent protests or government regulations for the humans, cows, rainforests, oceans, and every other biological being or ecological system currently being sickened by the spread of fast food agriculture.
The sequence of events set in motion by the inauguration of free housing would create an equally favorable situation for small farmers and local market farming. The curse of agriculture has always been labor: in nearly every place and time, it has been hard to put enough people to work growing food and tending animals while providing a decent living for everyone involved. In times past, small farmers tried to solve this dilemma by having big families. We now tackle it with machines and chemicals. This solution, like slavery and peonage, only works for the big landowners and big operators. The industrialization of agriculture has driven most family farmers into debt and, eventually, off their land.
After the abolition of real estate, no one will lose their land because of indebtedness. There will be no such thing as foreclosure. Instead, both land and labor will be freed up to participate in all manner of experiments in rural development. Working groups dedicated to land stewardship and farming could raise money to purchase land or find existing farmers happy to try something new if they get some help – hands and dollars. The whole idea of farming could be transformed and revitalized. Architects and designers might be called in to draw up plans for structures and spaces. Existing structures would be repaired and upgraded; new ones would be built for people who want to work there. These latter would not be grim workers’ barracks but lively community centers – places that people would be happy to live in for as long as they have a mind to work on the land. The working groups would secure the money and whatever expertise might be needed. Everyone involved would plan together how to run the place productively without borrowing money from a bank, using tons of chemicals or huge machines, and mistreating animals. They would also figure out how to prosper on the land without everyone working themselves to death. With no fees of any kind to pay for the use of land and plenty of hands and heads available to do the work, there would be time for leisure, for doing whatever you please by yourself or with whomever is around. You could also pack up and leave at any time if such a life loses its appeal for any reason.
The non-stop drainage of people from the countryside to the city – an inevitable byproduct of the industrialization of agriculture and an underlying cause of many social ills – could at last be reversed. Small farmers, like small restaurant owners, would finally find the odds stacked in their favor. These changes would create difficulties for the big banks and corporations engaged in industrial agriculture but great opportunities for every other kind of farmer, including those who just want to be left alone to do things as they have always done and have no taste for social experiments. Such traditional farmers as are still hanging on would be respected for their success on the land and valued for the knowledge that allowed them to achieve it.
Finally, the transformation of food production and consumption from a corporate-owned, globally administered business into a local or (for some tasks, surely) regional undertaking would create optimal conditions for two developments already underway on the margins of the current economy. Farmers’ markets are immensely popular – many people want to support local farmers and like to engage personally with the people who grow what they eat. These markets would become the central commercial sites in a local agricultural system. As they eclipsed the big supermarket chains they would expand, become continuous (rather than one day a week), and take on the character of ongoing community fairs. Similarly, farm-to-table and CSA operations would flourish, as local farmers made connections with the many new restaurants and groceries that would open up as the local food system took root and matured. Food supplied in this way would be fresh and healthy. Since it would not have to be wrapped in plastic and styrofoam or transported across continents and seas, the costs – monetary and ecological – of getting it to the table would be greatly reduced.
These proposals are sturdily practical, conservative even. We are proposing to move currently functioning systems of food production from the margins of the economy to the center. We aim to subsidize the implementation of ideas about homesteading and small-scale farming that have been around for centuries. We propose to expand the domain for such experimentation as people who have dedicated themselves to sustainable agriculture see fit to undertake now. To make these things happen, however, we must invert the balance of power between big, centralized institutions and small, decentralized ones. To pursue time-tested and innovative options for producing nutritious food while minding the health of soil and waterways, the people at the grassroots must have the power to implement a vision of local self-determination and bioregional cooperation. The Occupy the Hearth/Robin 99 idea represents a practical means of securing that power for ourselves. If at first glance it appears fanciful, then perhaps the lens through which we view our present situation and future prospects needs adjusting. Given the way we are educated and kept informed of whatever is going on beyond our backyards, we might expect that lens to single out acquiescence as the clearest marker of common sense. Trust the authorities … go shopping … technology will save us … it’s all good – that is the realism of those who have resigned themselves to whatever comes. It is a conception of practicality designed to make those who are not resigned to the fate being prepared for them by the vandals at the helm look foolishly idealistic. During turbulent times – when hopes and allegiances come unmoored and drift erratically and full of menace on uncertain waters – conventional ideas about what it is sensible to hope and fight for become the most formidable obstacles to change. They are what make the wheels spin in their ruts. If we are to free ourselves to shape a livable future, we must accept the risk of pushing past what we now believe to be reasonable and then work calmly and proficiently to expose the insanity of those beliefs and the rapaciousness they legitimize. Crazytown is populated at the moment by those who believe that the problems of agriculture can be fixed by lobbying Democrats and Republicans for a farm bill sensitive to the needs of small farmers and the long-term health of soil and rivers.
Occupy the Hearth 