From Check Outs And Cooperatives, To Communities And Corn — We Explore The Commons Of Food
Written on 27th November 2019
Fittingly, I’m writing to you having just chomped my way through a veggie samosa. And it’s fitting because this week our focus is on the commons and FOOD. The other day I received an invitation to a workshop focussed on ‘Prototyping the food commons for algorithmic food justice’ taking place in London, UK. I must confess, I was more excited about exploring the food commons than the algorithms, but “prototyping new ways of implementing a food commons for thriving multispecies communities using algorithms and smart contracts’ sounds like an incredible way to spend a day.
Reading through Silke Helfrich and David Bollier’s Free, Fair and Alive, there are some wonderful examples of different ways of commoning food, whether through production and labour, or consumption. Here are just two examples from the USA:
Next Barn Over, Massachusetts, USA
“On any Saturday morning in the quiet Massachusetts town of Hadley, you will find families arriving at the Next Barn Over to pick beans and strawberries from the fields, cut fresh herbs and flowers, and gather their weekly shares of potatoes, kale, onions, radishes, tomatoes and other produce. Next Barn Over is a CSA farm — Community Supported Agriculture — which means that people buy shares in the farm’s seasonal harvest, and then receive fresh produce weekly from April to November. In other words, CSAs pool the money — before production — and divide up the harvest among all members. This practice, is used in thousands of CSAs around the world, inspired us to identify “Pool, Cap & Divide Up” as an important feature of a commons economy.”
- From Free Fair and Alive, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich Ch 8, p22
Find out more about Next Barn Over here.
Park Slope Food Coop, Brooklyn, New York, USA
“To visit the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, New York, is to experience a supermarket that has been transformed to live, breathe, and function instead as a social community. The Coop is a busy, well-organized and fully staffed operation like most any other supermarket. But this place, in the heart of New York City’s commercial culture (Manhattan is two miles away), feels very different. The Coop isn’t a business that seeks to pander, cajole, and flatter its customers to buy, buy, buy. There is no promotional signage or splashy displays designed to spur impulse purchases. The Coop has a rather simple goal, skillfully enacted: to let people obtain high-quality food inexpensively by “buying from themselves.”
It takes a moment to realize that all the cashiers ringing up groceries at the check-out counters are not employees. Everyone who works there is a coop member themselves — perhaps even a friend or neighbor. More than 17,000 members take care of everything, from unloading trucks and stocking shelves to serving up delicatessen meats and cleaning up — without pay.”
- From Free Fair and Alive, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich Ch 8, p238
Find out more about Park Slope Food Coop here.
When I read that community supported agriculture, where people purchase shares in the harvest at the beginning of the season (like at Next Barn Over), means that members give farmers the working capital they need and share the risks of production that farmers face in growing food (bad weather, crop diseases, equipment issues etc), I could feel my heart swell. It made so much sense to me to all be in it together — to support those who work to bring to our tables one of the very foundations of life, to honour and respect them and collaborate to manage food as the precious resource it is. Honestly, it astounded me that I had never considered farming in this way before and it has expanded my imagination in such a way that I cannot wait to envision and learn more about other ways that we might share in the risks and rewards of food production as commons.
I am so excited to know more about food commons and would love to hear from you about other projects and communities you know of that are modelling this way of bringing food to the table. Please do share them with us.
Commoning around the world
Cooperation Jackson
Cooperation Jackson, based in Jackson, Mississippi is a personal all-time favourite cooperative of mine. They are focussed on building a solidarity economy in the area, anchored by a network of cooperatives and worker-owned, democratically self-managed enterprises. Their theory of change is centered on organising and empowering the structurally under and unemployed sectors of the working class, particularly from Black and Latino communities and they believe that we can replace the current sociopath-economic system of exploitation, exclusion and the destruction of the environment with a proven democratic alternative. They do incredible things and everyone should know them. Check them out here.
Hacking agriculture
FarmHack is a worldwide community of farmers that love building and modifying their own tools. They share their hacks online and at meet ups because they believe they become better farmers when they work together. Take a look at their intro video and find out more about them on their website.
The Foundation for Ecological Security (FES)
The FES is a pioneering advocate of the commons in India, especially on behalf of the poor. From the “Seed-Sharing Solution” to “Crops of Truth”, this page is full of inspiring stories about how the commons is a vital resource for survival and ecosystem stability in India. Learn more here.
Common Good Food
We discovered Common Good Food via FarmHack, which we shared last week (check them out here.)
Originating in Scotland, Common Good Food helps communities build towards food commons right where they live, whether it’s training in new skills when they’re taking their first steps, or helping to make connections between already established projects so they can collaboratively start to make a meaningful contribution to the diet of the people who live nearby. Find out more about them on the Common Good Food website here.
This week, we are mostly reading…
Here are some of our favourite books, articles and long read articles on the commons. Let us know what you think or send us your own recommendations.
The Community Food Forest Handbook: How to Plan, Organize, and Nurture Edible Gathering Places
by Catherine Bukowski and John Munsell.
Permaculture and agroecology have acquired a fair amount of popularity recently, resulting in more and more people pouring their imagination in community food forests all across the United States. Community food forests, community gardens and farmers markets, community food forests work as a gateway to promote nutritious food environmental sustainability. Everybody is interested in having a community food forest in public spaces. People are its most vital component and with this book we can learn how to best organize and lead groups of people involved with these projects. Read the first chapter here.
Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons
Edited by Jose Luis Vivero-Pol, Tomaso Ferrando, Olivier De Schutter, Ugo Mattei.
This Handbook provides the first comprehensive review and synthesis of knowledge and new thinking on how food and food systems can be thought, interpreted and practiced around the old/new paradigms of commons and commoning. The overall aim is to investigate the multiple constraints that occur within and sustain the dominant food and nutrition regime and to explore how it can change when different elements of the current food systems are explored and re-imagined from a commons perspective. Read the first chapter here.
Commons Transition and P2P: a primer
This short primer, co-published with the Transnational Institute explains the Commons and P2P, how they interrelate, their movements and trends, and how a Commons transition is poised to reinvigorate work, politics, production, and care, both interpersonal and environment. We’d like to think of this as a foundational text, and it’s completely free. Read it here.
Cosmolocalism — How to reap the benefits of the ‘Digital Revolution’
Modularity and the Commons, by Vasilis Kostakis. This scholarly paper expresses the necessity of acknowledging the significant potential of the digital revolution, which has not been fully realized yet. A contextual shift has to take place to build institutions that would harness the power of a fundamental aspect of digital technologies: modularity. Vasilis Kostakis shows why modularity lies at the heart of digital technologies and describes its strengths and drawbacks. Further, he discusses an emerging mode of production premised on modularity, which may point towards a more sustainable and inclusive digital transformation yet to come. Read it here.
Omnia Sunt Communia — On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism, by Massimo De Angeli
This book reveals the potential for radical transformation contained in a conceptualisation of the commons as a set of social systems, rather than just common goods. Find out more here.
