I grew up in a different time. Time literally was different. People had time for each other. Things happened slowly.
Growing up in a rural community, it wasn’t always easy to get the right part for the job. Parts for tractors and farm machinery were sometimes improvised; people weren’t so bothered about replacing original lights with original lights. Often, lights weren’t even replaced: I mean, who would be driving a tractor at night, anyway?
When I was young, my uncle and the neighbours clubbed together and bought silage-harvesting equipment, to cut and store the grass for winter animal feed. It was harking back to the ‘old days’ when neighbours shared the workload, saving the hay together and doing ‘big’ jobs, which many hands made a bit lighter.
This had been done for generations where I grew up, but in a different way. The hay was saved by hand, after the corncrake had fledged, and a natural cycle of community and nature working in harmony, continued. It was never perfect, but it worked. It involved hard labour and collaboration, both of which seem unpopular now.
I loved being part of that. For me, as a boy, the excitement and joy of being part of a team of workers who were doing an important job, was almost overwhelming, even if at the time I was just in the tractor with whoever was ‘drawing’ the silage. I was just there in the thick of it, relishing the whole experience. Sparse conversation: an odd word exchanged about some nuance of the experience.; a change in the weather, a heavier load, two birds fighting on the wing. The waft of oil, grease, diesel and fumes together – the essence of this recipe – slow-cooking on the lively, early summer, west Kerry landscape.
And after the work at dusk, the men would have drinks before setting off home, after dark. Sometimes Guinness and sometimes a ‘tin’ or a ‘mineral’, as soft drinks were called . I was allowed to take part in this too, handing out the bottles and tins, then having my own. The men talked about nothing I understood, but the air of excitement and ‘difference’ was inspiring.
Farming and outdoor work stayed with me, though and throughout my sustainable food ‘career’, in a city, 400 miles away, I spent much time either working outdoors or involved with food growing and farmers. I loved being able to buy farm fresh goods from producers I got to know personally and getting to know them a little gave me a sense of connection with the land I felt I didn’t have, in Manchester. When I got a job as a grower at 36 I was revisiting my childhood in a new and easy way. In those early days of going ‘back to the land’ I used the phrase ‘Farming Equals Freedom’, quite a lot.
Within the local food movement in Manchester I found something else very important: Community. That experience which I had lost touch with over the years but finally felt again, gave me a new hope. I felt that collaborative spirit, the buzz of people doing something together for a bigger, more tangible goal, and suddenly things clicked into place for me.
It was good for me, so what?
It’s not possible to convince everybody that being part of something which connects you to a bigger ideal or practical goal is the thing, but I can see how things have changed since I was young.
Take industrial agriculture, for example. The western need for efficiency in production has had a devastating effect on the landscape and culture of many countries. This top-down control of food production has led to monocultural farming practices, using vast swathes of land, blanket use of chemical sprays and often, eventual abandonment of the land due to erosion and degradation.
How does soil degradation happen?
In Brazil, land reform in the 1960’s led to millions of peasant tenant farmers (in Brazil, at least up until recently 45% of agricultural land was owned by 1% of the population) being displaced to cities as the ‘underused’, pesky tropical rainforests were cut down and replaced with useful soya bean plantations, for example. As the years passed, millions of tons of chemical-laden topsoil washed away into rivers, leaving waterways clogged and polluted and the land abandoned and degraded, through a combination of land being under cultivation all the time and rain. Bare soil and tropical rainstorms equals masses of polluted topsoil eroded.
This degradation is not only of the land but with the degrading practice of the enforced relocation of people, splitting up communities and diverse cultural heritage. This rarely gets a mention. This results in landless peasant movements such as MST Brazil, whose aim is to repopulate and ‘re-culture’ vast areas of land which were taken ownership of by powerful people, in colonial days when everything was ‘free’ for the taking.
“The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.” Eric Schlosser, Author of Fast Food Nation.
In relation to food, farming and culture, this quote marks the death of community and cultural cultivation as we knew it. Mainstream food cultivation and production has taken a back seat, now carried out mainly by those who have large, efficient farms and who use chemical sprays to ‘control’ weeds and insects. This, of course, frees up the population to be better, more efficient workers, for the benefit of the ‘free world’. The aspirational example America sets is enough to make one cringe in disbelief. Is this really the way the world is going? World leader or world-bleeder? Of course, every modern, industrialised country does things the same way. The question is, can we work together, or is it just going to be about sifting through the rubble, later?
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Are we heading towards a monocultural world?
It’s so hard to know what lies ahead. It’s so easy to become distracted by bad news culture and what to buy next. Things that keep us in our place, quietly confused and feeling bad about the state of things.
What do we stand to lose through monocultural, industrial and corporate takeover of culture? Are the ‘old ways’ dead and gone? Has rural culture gone the way of the corncrake, whose call is no longer heard in the fields where I grew up?
My uncle and a neighbour once made an entire tractor cab from scrap metal and bits of old PVC windows. I remember Uncle Tom telling me how quiet and rattle-free the finished cab was due to all the rubber seals and plastic joints they used. At the time I found it a bit amusing. I thought my uncle a bit naive, spending all that time bodging a tractor cab when he could have bought one. I had been living in England for a while – moved away from and in some ways rejected the ‘old ways’, probably thinking I knew better, and judging my uncle for his ‘simple’ ways. I kind of missed the point though, didn’t I?
I can’t deny what’s happening in the world and so I have to ask the questions: What can I do about it? How can I take action? Is it possible to make a difference? How do I reconcile being part of the problem, because, as far as I can see it, we all are?
Working together to create something new, especially something food-based – even survival-based – feels like a strong way to make alternatives to the corporate monoculture which deskills us, making us its dependents. We are disconnected from our food and therefore from each other. At one time not so long ago, we all depended on having the skills to produce our own food. Culture grew up around that and not much had changed for hundreds, or even thousands of years. Of course, there always has been some oppression, but it wasn’t so all pervasive as it now is. TV advertising, smartphone advertising, social pressure to have the latest tech, keeps us locked in. What’s actually happening to us as we’re all looking over there, blaming religion for the world’s problems?
We are now perfectly oppressed.
Monoculture is the ice age, a frozen landscape, covering all the potential underneath. Soon, we will have forgotten that trickle of water beneath the frozen river and the lakes, trees and dormant seeds which lie concealed by that numbing surface, awaiting release. It is always there, just under the surface. Monoculture masquerades as freedom and it does contain the seeds of freedom – we just need to see through its barren, uniform, transparent surface.
I helped my friend who is building a sauna, the other day. It was fun and we somewhat made it up as we went, neither of us experts in woodwork, nor having exactly the right tools. That was part of the experience – we listened to each other, planned and made it work. I want to find more of that kind of experience, because we have created a world where happiness is measured by what one owns, where achievement is about school grades, then pay grades and where we are in competition with each other and with ourselves to do ‘better’. We have developed a complex and unnecessary monoculture, far from the simplicity of what it takes to have a satisfying life.
We need to recreate community and diversity, we need to make time to recreate culture.
noticings 