the recipe that calls for whatever’s grown well in the garden or the local farms this year, foraged in the wild larder and preserved in our household and community kitchens, not just a recipe unconnected to the season and this place, this is the recipe for a resilient future.
the cookbook that focuses on ingredients found in the pantry stocked by the land we walk in, transformed into steady-state preserves with our own hands and those in our community, this is the cookbook for regenerating community and commons.
the farming that yields health deep in our microbial selves, those communities housed within us, fed by the communities all around us, deep in the soil that roots us, high on the leaves above us, breathed in on the air and drunk up, this farming will by definition be life affirming. there cannot be herbicide or pesticide without killing something essential and beloved within us. our permeable selves are wholly related to all that lives and so the way we grow food matters. practices that respect our lives are practices that respect all life. this is a regenerative agriculture.
the diet that gives us a future is ethical and moral, yet in complex ways that defy industrial definitions. there cannot be life without death, and so as we see that we eat life, we are grateful and we participate. the growing knowledge at last links hands with ancient knowledge that we are all kin. a perception of what is appropriate and enough, follows. then how we eat is premised not in the profit-industrial-advertised-packaged-delivery-complex, but in reciprocity and gratitude, and in place. relocalised, in community, home. we may take the apples from the tree, but we ask first, we do those apples the respect of using them well, we tend the tree, the soil, the plant and animal communities around. we cycle nutrients back to the tree and mind the tree’s health as our own. we become family. we collect and share the seeds of plants we sow and tend. we create the conditions for animals to thrive and accept our responsibility within the ecosystem, whether hunting as the wilder animals do or giving homes to the ones we long have shared domesticity with, to keep health and balance. some of that eating of life looks more like death to us than harvesting leafy greens or foraging berries or digging roots, but all of it is in exchange. it is our full participation in deep community that will make a future of collective thriving now, eating life in ways that make more life.
then the meal upon our table will be a friend and relation as much as those around it. what we prepared will have been determined by where we are and how our community tended this place, these soils and microbes and plants and animals and air and water, in weather that is itself influenced on a grand scale by our collective actions. this ecosystem, this living system, this larger life we live within. the flavours of the profoundly local and intensely seasonal and community-produced are the taste of a future that supports all life.
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