Don’t get me wrong, having a vegetable garden is still a great thing and far better than buying the monoculture produce shipped from halfway around the world at the store, even if your garden is just for your own family. I don’t want to knock that. But to break our reliance on extractivist agriculture as a society requires more than just people with the resources to do it building private homesteads on their private property. Communities providing for each other through the commons is a foundational element of a solarpunk society.
How do we encourage this shift in thinking and doing? What would it take to break down the expectations of private property and that something you’ve grown is just for you, and create community mindsets where something you’ve grown can feed people who need it?
Where I live, there are a lot of (mostly retired, suburban, well-off) people with gardens, especially in the summer, but most of them are not involved in FNB or anything like it. It’s also not common to emphasize native species. We have a wonderful public market, but most of the people even with veggie gardens don’t sell there and only buy there on occasion. The way I’ve been trying to encourage the public market over grocery stores more has mostly been talking about how great the produce is, how many different things they have, and how convenient it is that the bus runs there. It’s still a market, but at least it’s small, local growers, and a local org recovers what doesn’t get sold for our FNB branch to use (and composts what isn’t good, for the local community garden to use) instead of throwing it away. But the only way I can think of to get the idea out there that people should share what they grow is to flat-out say, “you should share what you grow”, which doesn’t seem like it would win many people over.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot actually. I think one possibility is to build networks of people to help grow and distribute this food communally. In my area there are a lot of fruit trees but much of it goes unharvested, is wasted, and can even be a nuisance since it attracts rats. This is a problem to the extent that most public land managers won’t allow fruit trees to be planted. So the solution is to get some friends together and pick the fruit. Then it can be distributed to the community. I heard there is someone in my city doing this already but in a different neighborhood—I may reach out to them to see how they got the ball rolling.
I think that would be an easy way to start but the idea could be expanded to include foraged foods and gardens that people don’t have time to maintain. I think it’s important for people to first see the benefits of what you’re doing before going too far outside of what is considered normal. Once you have that reputation as helpers, you can push for more radical ideas like communal gardens, food forests, etc.
I think the best way is to grow a surplus of something yourself. Most people are shocked by how much of something can be grown in a few used plastic buckets.
I always get gifts of a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, preserves, venison and other hunted meats, etc when I’m out gifting fruits, vegetables, and preserves.
I’ve always got way more tomatoes, Nanking cherry jelly, raspberry jam (and fresh!), and crabapple jelly than we could possibly use. I just give it away, no strings attached. Most of it comes back in the form of string beans, cucumbers and pickles, Saskatoon berry jelly and pie, chokecherry jelly and syrup, salsa, onions, corn, etc. All of it comes back in the form of good will and general neighbourliness.
Over time, it’s evolved into a pretty big community of sharing that goes beyond mere produce. Pick something, grow a surplus, and spread it around.
If you’re in an area with a lot of gardeners, maybe a weekly food swap would work. A place where people can bring their excess harvest to give away or trade for someone else’s excess harvest. But you might end up with supply/demand problems (e.g. everyone showing up with too many zucchini and hoping to trade for tomatoes… and then leaving with too many zucchini and no tomatoes). Also, I feel like most excess produce is left unharvested, because harvesting it all would be too much work (especially fruit), or because it is kept around in the garden until it goes bad (I do this with radishes: I take a few every day until they become too pithy then in the compost the remainder goes), so people would have to be motivated and organized enough to harvest excess crops. And then you have the trade problem of making sure everyone feels they benefited from the swap and didn’t get taken advantage of (“I harvested my entire fig tree and Sharon shows up with five maggot-riddled beets and that’s supposed to be a fair exchange!?”)
What you describe is at its core society’s under-valuing land: a lack of recognition that arable land in particular is too valuable to society to be held by individual property owners to do whatever the fuck they want with it (including nothing, like using it for lawn, or worse yet degrading the land so it’s no longer arable, like paving it or poisoning it with Round-up, garbage, etc). But changing that requires a fundamental shift in our perception of property rights that would take either moving to a commune of like-minded folks who intentionally forgo front yards for a community garden or whatever, or a major crisis like a famine resulting in the government’s eminent-domain’ing of underutilized private property.
What is FNB?
But the only way I can think of to get the idea out there that people should share what they grow is to flat-out say, “you should share what you grow”
Have you tried the following?
“That would make great gift!”
“You don’t have to worry about finding present idea!”
“your [insert family member from a different household]/neighbour must love them!”
“I wish I had such a production. I could give some to [insert charity] they always need some.”
“Your friend must love you (^_-)” ~ Ok, that one is a bit rude, but you can reformulate.People don’t become in one day generous people that are open to give away and share there private property. It happened over time, starting with sharing within the most intimate circle and slowly spreading away until reaching strangers. Something like family>friend>neighbour>college>extended family> local community> anyone that could need it.
You could also mention how they could benefit from being part of community that share and how just a few people starting to share come make it possible.
Food Not Bombs, it’s an organization that takes surplus good that would go to waste and redistributes it. In my (urban) area they mostly take unsold items from grocery stores, including damaged produce and almost-out-of-date dairy and prepared food, but I know they work with CSAs too.
Lend out tools and ask in return for a share of the harvest?
I’m trying to shift away from transactional approaches. I don’t want to replicate markets and debt in my community, and I worry that asking for a share of the harvest as a “price” for lending out tools could perpetuate that instead of breaking away from it.
Interestingly I find that many of people around me who do start to engage in sharing activities still like holding on to some transactional approach - giving out tokens, noting down hours of work … It’s like people feel freaked out by just receiving something out of a void, or giving it away into a void, where the only thing between oneself and misery is the kindness of others. Even though a gift economy creates less overhang by not having to register transactions it might take one or two more generations of casual trade and barter and getting annoyed with token systems before people start feeling comfortable.
I like that you make a conscious effort to break that scheme, but it might ease some people into sharing their excess.
There are some ways to make it less obviously transactional. For example in the rural town where my parents live there is an annual event where people can bring apples and other fruits to make juice from (with a professional juice making machine) and it is encouraged to bring excess fruits and share them.
Sometimes it comes down to effort and people not knowing how to do things. We asked other market people how to run a stand on the farmer’s market, for most people it’s not common knowledge and there’s no info online. It’s not too expensive but not worth having the work, for the little surplus we have. Getting together with others to sell on the market is a solution we are studying, but that’s already beyond what most suburban retirees are willing to do.
In your case, maybe setting up or suggesting an easy way to share surplus produce (public or private sharing box) can help, or setting up a group willing to collect and redistribute it (and give your gardeners the good feeling that they are supporting a good project).
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