by Andrew Flax
My grandmother’s rural Pennsylvania garden was filled with cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers, each plant branching wildly into its neighbors. Grandma also kept bees and chickens, and when her energy began to dip, we grandkids gutted her chicken coop and turned it into a clubhouse. The forest on his doorstep was home to blackberry and jewelweed. Grandma knew where each lived and how to turn them into food and medicine. Her little garden may not have been more than twenty square feet, but the family ate fresh vegetables all summer and stored them well in winter. These foods were given as gifts and traded on cobblestone streets, as an excuse to visit neighbors or as a way to show gratitude for help given as grandmothers aged. Trade snacks and traded gossip were of equal weight: a chance to check in with friends, fix a broken door, see and meet.
Years later, I found myself exploring these informal relationships of chores and shared meals in another garden with someone far away from Pennsylvania. “We’ve been waiting months for this.” Dahlia laughed, picking up a deep red strawberry and handing it to me. My mouth watered. I could still feel the warmth of the sun as I held the perfectly firm berries in my hands. These strawberries were not destined for sale in the market or to wholesalers. They were shared with family and neighbors who stopped by for coffee, snacks and cigarettes as part of the endless exchange of social gifts and loans that defined Dalia’s agrarian world in central Bosnia.
Strawberry hired village kids to fix cracked sidewalks; Strawberry Jam pays a metal worker to fix her stove; An elderly neighbor saved calories by adding to his bread during the winter when his pension didn’t arrive. Strawberries are a wild variety in the region that shared space with wild thyme and the nourishing bees that provided rich honey for the community. Each berry brings a burst of pride and joy at Dahlia’s skills as a gardener and farmer, layered with gendered expectations that Dahlia offer food and hospitality to any neighbor or relative—or anthropologist—who stops by while her husband and son work in nearby towns. A lot depends on a perfectly ripe strawberry.
In wildly different contexts informed by geography, history, religion, language and ecology, these two women grow vegetables alongside their rural homes. Dalia’s time in the garden was shaped by her experiences with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, farming during the civil war, and witnessing genocide targeting her family. Her family wasn’t necessarily food insecure, but she relied on that garden as a buffer against inflated food prices and unstable supply chains. In contrast, my grandmother descended from white settlers in the Lenape lands of North America. He was fortunate to live free from state violence or war. His garden was much more a favorite choice than a necessity. He learned about gardening and medicinal wild plants from his local library, not from oral tradition.
But these women also share common ground, especially their experiences of caring and being cared for. Their gardens grow more than seeds. They provide pleasure and facilitate community exchange. Both women use their gardens as creative outlets that go beyond government or markets to create meaningful relationships with the plants, animals, and other people in their lives. Through these gardens, they reproduce life itself.
Our reactions to reading about a mutual farm or backyard garden reveal our biases about what we think the purpose of farming is. Exports do not accumulate goods or capital. But what if the purpose of farming is not to produce as many crops as possible, but to cultivate as humanly important? These gardens produce more than food.
Rather than thinking of agriculture like any other type of business producing a narrow set of products, this approach recognizes that agriculture is a living landscape produced through communities of practice. In doing so, it sustains a rich and diverse rural economy anchored by abundant farms that produce marketable goods as well as meaningful work and livable habitat. Agriculture is a fundamental social and environmental function. If we cannot value its social and ecological goods, we cannot hope to make good decisions about conserving, changing or restoring our shared world.
As leaves develop and flowers bloom, the seeds nourish bees and other pollinators in a web of life that transforms energy from the sun into a wonderful network of organisms. When we find their leaves, roots, stems and fruits ready, we transform them into the food we want to eat. We shell, husk, and grind them. We cook, ferment, pickle and salt these foods to make them palatable to our culturally changing tastes. Those tasks and skills require us to connect with a community that may include relatives, neighbors, and friends, supported by favors, gifts, promises of food, or cash.
None of this is well captured in the yields or profits that governments and markets use to judge success. Throughout 15 years of research in India, Bosnia, and the US Midwest, I have found that many small and local farmers have poor yields, do not maximize their productive potential, do not contribute much to national export earnings, and their work is labor-intensive. All fair criticism. But these are wrong criteria. Through this work, small farmers and gardeners nourish the earth. What is wrong is that we must argue that this reproductive act is valuable in the first place.
For millennia, seeds and people have shaped the landscape together. In some of these places, communities of all kinds of organisms can develop. Ponds and ditches irrigate crops but also provide waterways for rabbits and migratory birds. These in turn bring joy to bird-watchers and dinner to rabbit-eaters, an ecological diversity that makes economic diversification possible. At the opposite extreme, the endless expansion of monoculture insists that other life must be weeded out, uprooted, and poisoned in the hope that this monoculture will pay off the commercial bet. In the United States, cities dominated by industrial agriculture have seen their small businesses move away as those farms consolidate. In the process, schools, newspapers, and churches also merged. Meanwhile, farm ecosystems themselves have shifted to chemical-intensive monocultures. In limiting environmental potential, these landscapes also limit economic potential.
If I join economists in calling formal work “production,” then the significant informal effort that makes work possible in the first place is a form of “reproduction.” Although we don’t usually think of it as formal labor, the informal work of caring for children, tilling the soil, tidying the house, or teaching someone when to pick fruit is essential to running the economy. On small farms around the world, working families collectively own and manage their resources, and their decisions create a living landscape that is also their economic livelihood. You can’t go to work if you’re not ready or able to do the job, but you can’t go to work on a farm if that particular landscape can’t sustain life.
Reproduction is not the only process that creates groups of people who work in the world. It is itself a process of world-making. This reproduction includes human life, work and play, but it also includes the life of plants, animals and microbes that share the agricultural landscape with us. Farmers’ decisions create possibilities for many forms of life. To see this, we need to take seriously the cultural values of our growers, including taste, color, connection against loneliness, the joy of helping things grow, their hope for the next generation, and their frustration with the struggles of food and farming.
This critical, yet underpaid, job often falls to older women. Back in Bosnia, Dalia’s mother scoffed when I suggested this observation during her allotment trip. “Without Grandma, you’d be nothing,” she corrected me. Gardens and kitchens facilitate village life through the exchange of material things like food, work, and cigarettes, and equally important intangibles like gossip and sympathy. This mutual aid economy is sustained through regular caring and sharing. It is anchored by a garden that offers just enough and nothing superfluous. Yet it is the most practical economy in the daily lives of many villagers.
Asking whether the world grows enough food is the wrong kind of question. This leads to the wrong type of answer. We don’t have to produce more food. We need to create more farms: places where living animal communities can thrive. Creating more farms to sustain a greater diversity of life requires a broader sense of value and the purpose of farming itself: not as a means of profiting from life, but as a means of building meaningful relationships with people, plants, and landscapes that can nourish life in the face of epidemics, climate disasters, and authoritarian politics.
This article is an edited extract from Feeding the World as People Mattered by Andrew Flach, available for purchase through the University of Arizona Press.
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Previously published Reprinted on and with resilience permission
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