Blessing the Hands that Feed Us

Your Money or Your Life

9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence

Coauthored with Joe Dominguez and Monique Tilford

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

Copyright © Vicki Robin, 2014

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Robin, Vicki.

Blessing the hands that feed us : what eating closer to home can teach us about food, community, and our place on earth / Vicki Robin.

p. cm.

Preface by Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-698-15144-4

1. Local foods—Washington (State)—Whidbey Island. 2. Community-supported agriculture—Washington (State)—Whidbey Island. 3. Self-reliant living—Washington (State)—Whidbey Island. 4. Whidbey Island (Wash.)—Social conditions. I. Lappé, Frances Moore. II. Lappé, Anna, 1973– III. Title.

HD9007.W2R63 2014

363.809797'75—dc23

2013018397

Frontispiece map illustration by Rosie Scott

I dedicate this book to all the children born just about now. May you have green growing things outside your door. May you flourish in a garden world. May you have plenty to eat. May our generations have done something simple and good for you through encouraging sustainable agriculture and thriving local communities.

Also by Vicki Robin

Map

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface by Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé

Epigraph

 

Introduction

Chapter One
Localize Me?

Chapter Two
Putting My Mouth Where My Mouth Is

Chapter Three
Yes! But How?

Chapter Four
Week One: Grounded!

Chapter Five
Week Two: Getting the Hang of It

Chapter Six
Week Three: The Week of My Discontent

Chapter Seven
Revelations of the Final Week

Chapter Eight
Relational Eating

Chapter Nine
Bringing Our Eating Closer to Home

Epilogue
Continued Blessing

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.

—Robert F. Kennedy

V
icki Robin takes the world personally and, because of that, passionately engages in questioning assumptions and searching for new ways of seeing the world that suggest new ways of being. And in this way, we see ourselves in her. Being this way in the world isn't always comfortable. It means finding yourself at cross purposes with the powers that be or at odds with received wisdom, but Vicki's writing, and this beautiful new book, allows us to experience the joy of a lifelong practice of asking questions.

When I wrote
Diet for a Small Planet
over forty years ago, I was a kid with a question:
Why are people still going hungry?
I believed that if I could figure that out, I'd have direction. At the time, the Vietnam War raged, the National Guard shot students for protesting, and discrimination was still rampant despite new civil rights laws. I was lost. I desperately wanted to help make things better, but I needed a theory of
why
, some notion of how we got into this mess, some idea of the root causes.

Then my twentysomething intuition kicked in. I suspected that since food is among our most basic human needs, grasping the whys and hows of hunger might unlock the whole mystery of economics and politics. So I set out on a quest, not to write a book, but to find the truth and share it with friends.

Soon I discovered that more than enough food was then being produced for each of us. And today it's even truer, with 2,800 calories produced for every person every year—at least a fifth more food per capita than in the late 60s. We are living in a
story
of scarcity, but not a
reality
of scarcity! I believed that once we released ourselves from the false fear of scarcity, we could get down to the real business: remaking the social and economic rules that concentrate wealth and power, making hunger inevitable no matter how much we grow.

Meanwhile, Vicki Robin was questioning another assumption:
Does stuff make us happy?
With her partner, Joe Dominguez, she scrutinized the link between money and fulfillment in the petri dish of her own life and noticed how unhooking money from happiness revealed the entrapment of “too-muchness” and the empowerment of “enoughness.” They understood money as one's “life energy” and saw how investing life energy in relationships, competencies, community, and spirituality produced real wealth. Eventually they taught their radical approach in
Your Money or Your Life
.

Needless to say, the ensuing four decades haven't seen the remaking of the human story we'd imagined. Today the number of hungry people worldwide is almost exactly where it was in the 1960s. And our fear-driven culture prods us to stay within the tribe through “common purchases” rather than bonding through common purposes.

The interlocking global challenges appear far more complex and contradictory than our younger minds anticipated. And it's easy to feel so overwhelmed with fear and loss that one wonders how new ideas and new connections can possibly break through. So as the decades have passed, I've come to ask myself just one question, How do I keep the channel within me open—the channel of life's incessant insistence on
more life
?

Vicki helps me stay focused on that question. She and I actually met face-to-face nearly fifteen years ago at that moment when we were both recognizing the immensity of the challenges and both seeking a deeper understanding of what holds the old systems in place—even when we can see what's wrong and solutions are everywhere.

Twelve years ago, I joined forces with my daughter, Anna, to pick up the questions raised three decades earlier in
Diet for a Small Planet
—and we join our voices here to share the rest of our story and how it relates to Vicki's new book. 

We wanted to know: Where in the world could we find communities showing new models for knitting together community, economics, and food systems so all were fed and nature's resources were treasured, not plundered. To answer this question, we traveled together to five continents and witnessed how behind the headlines and statistics about hunger and environmental devastation a globally grounded transformation is welling up. It is arising on every continent, from the neighborhood, village, town, city, and even some parliaments and global forums.

Our journey changed us forever.

Aldous Huxley wrote that “all that we are and will and do depends, in the last analysis, on what we believe the Nature of Things to be.” And we came to see that our collective understanding of the Nature of Things is shifting. We humans are shedding the failed and false view that we are isolated “atoms,” and with it the depressing idea that we're all essentially self-interested and selfish. We saw the evidence in community after community of the profoundly social nature of human beings.

On our journey, we met so many people starting from this experience-based—and also science-based—understanding of humanity: that our species' deepest needs are for connection, meaning, and efficacy (having a say and knowing we can make a difference). And that it is embedded in who we are to perceive our self-interest in the well-being of our communities.

Tapping these deep needs, and capacities, is just what's needed now to turn our planet toward life.

In this important new work, Vicki expresses this uplifting understanding of what it means to be human and our sense that food is a powerful avenue for engagement in a healthier and happier future.

Vicki's new work captures and furthers a movement grounded in what we think of as eyes-wide-open hope. She captures here one of our “aha” moments from our world journey. Whether expressed in Hindu farmers in India saving and saving seeds, Muslim farmers in Niger turning back the desert, or Christian farmers in the United States practicing biblically inspired Creation Care, the revolutionary power of the food is its capacity to upend a life-destroying belief system that's brought us power-concentrating corporatism.

Corporatism, after all, depends on our belief in the fairy tale that the market works on its own without us. The global, diverse, citizen-driven food movement breaks that spell—shifting our sense of self: from passive, disconnected consumers in a magical market to active, richly connected coproducers in societies we are ourselves creating—as share owners in a CSA farm or purchasers of fair trade products or actors in public life shaping the next farm bill.

Food's power is connection itself. Corporatism distances us from one another, from the earth—and even from our own bodies—while the food movement celebrates our reconnection. Years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, CSA farmer Barb Perkins said that her most rewarding moments are “like in town yesterday,” she said, “I saw this little kid, wide-eyed, grab his mom's arm and point at me. ‘Mommy,' he said, ‘look. There's our farmer!'”

To us, this story captures Vicki's great term, “relational eating.”

Food, making us aware of the power of our choices, encourages us to “think like an ecosystem,” enabling us to see a place for ourselves connected to all others. For in ecological systems, “there are no parts, only participants,” German physicist Hans Peter Duerr reminds us.

Blessing the Hands That Feed Us
suggests that it is possible for us all to be nourished by a regional diet by feeling the relationships embodied in our food. Of course, you may be familiar with the experts who pooh-pooh such ideas, dismissing as naïve the notion that organic, regional foods can feed the world. We like to remind those so-called experts that a food system increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations is doing a decidedly poor job of feeding us, and will only become less able to do so. Almost 870 million people are suffering severe and chronic undernourishment; and obesity and overweight, linked to corporate-propagated, addictive high-calorie-low-nutrition food is the fifth leading risk factor for global deaths. We know that in aligning food and farming with nature's genius, there can be more than enough for all.

As we have encountered—and as this book shares—another way of eating and being
is
working, opening the door to perhaps the most important lessons of all about hope.

For starters, it's not for wimps: Hope is not wishful thinking. Real hope lives in our whole bodies and that only happens when we put our whole bodies into it. This is what Vicki is showing us. Hope has become for us an action verb, not a state of being, but motion itself—moving one's life day by day ever more into alignment with the world we want, ever more into alignment with what we know can meet our truest, deepest needs. And that means taking risks, risking failure and frustration, and more . . . and yet not giving up. It means knowing that we are moving shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of millions of other risk takers, the planet over, in the most exhilarating and consequential walk our species has ever taken.

All of us are in very good company as we join Vicki in learning rich lessons from a simple experiment of eating closer to home.

Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California

Frances Moore Lappé is the author of
Diet for a Small Planet
and
EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Change the World We Want.
Anna Lappé is the author of
Diet for a Hot Planet
and the director of the Food MythBusters Initiative. Together, they wrote
Hope's Edge
and cofounded the Small Planet Institute.