Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on April 6, 2023 | 22 Comments
Time to move on to a brief discussion of Chapter 19 of my book A Small Farm Future in this blog cycle.
The chapter is called ‘Reconstituted peasantries’, which derives from a chapter in another book, Caribbean Transformations, by the late Sidney Mintz, an anthropologist who was one of my teachers during my brief and ill-fated sojourn at graduate school in the US. I wrote an obituary of Sid a few years back, and what I said in it in some ways formed the basis of Chapter 19, so I’m kind of retracing old ground here. But I think it bears repeating, especially because it’s quite relevant to some of the discussion under recent posts.
I basically want to make two points in this post, maybe two and a half. The first is to note that some of Sid’s informants when he was a young anthropologist working in Puerto Rico in the 1940s had been born into slavery. That’s stayed with me – there’s only the bridge of a single lifetime between me and legal mass chattel slavery dedicated to a globalized commodity food system. I find much to ponder there in relation to food, farming and political futures. Not particularly that the return of Caribbean-style chattel slavery is imminent. In fact, I think that’s unlikely. Maybe more likely is the kind of industrial-manufacturing enslavement that occurred in Nazi Germany. Anyway, as I said, much to ponder here … some other time.
The second point is that Sid’s work and the Caribbean region in general are a rebuke to notions of purity and authenticity. Caribbean societies were forged violently out of African, American and European precursors, but they created their own unique syntheses from the encounter that weren’t simply derivative of or inferior to these antecedents. At a time when anthropologists were still seeking the authenticity of ‘primitive’ peoples as a mirror to modern society, Sid was among the early generation of anthropologists who found a different and perhaps better mirror in their own backyard that broke with such notions of purity.
This Caribbean rebuke has several dimensions. The one that I emphasise in my book chapter is that peasantries in the region had to pretty much invent themselves anew as best they could in difficult circumstances when, with emancipation, they often had callously dumped upon them the need to figure out how to make a livelihood. I’ve spent a fair bit of time on this blog over the years musing about the concept of peasantries and wondering how relevant historical peasant societies are to the small farm future that I believe is to come. Increasingly, I’ve come to think not very (or at least that the way scholars have analysed them isn’t very…)
But inasmuch as the small farm societies of the future will be peasant societies I think they’ll be ‘reconstituted’ peasant societies in a sense inspired very loosely by Sid, rebuilding themselves out of the declining structures of an earlier economic system in the absence of an ‘authentic’ prior peasant tradition – albeit, I confess, in a very different historical situation.
A second rebuke to authenticity I want to raise in relation to Caribbean peasantries is the tendency of most political traditions to dismiss peasantries as yesterday’s people, soon destined to be swept away by more authentic kinds of political identity such as proletarian, urbanite, modern or whatever. There is not, of course, some kind of unified global peasant experience, but the same is true of any other kind of political or economic identity. So no more pure political identities, please. And no more heralding the end of peasantries in the face of something more ‘modern’. Caribbean peasantries are an artefact of the modern global economic system, and political identities based around local land-based livelihood-making is no less authentic than any other. I’ve banged on enough over the years on this site about the case for (agrarian) populism, so I won’t belabour it here. It’s a common pastime across many political traditions to identify the category of people who are the ‘real’ agents of political change. Particular categories do come to the fore in given historical situations, but no single one is any more real than another.
A final rebuke to authenticity: the Caribbean region is fertile ground for questioning the notion of authentic culture. One example would be the shared and sampled musical forms of the kind celebrated in cultural theorist Dick Hebdige’s Cut ‘n’ Mix, as compared to the exaltation of the individual creative genius often preferred in modernist European culture. Another would be a religion like the much-maligned Haitian vodou (Haiti has received more than its fair share of maligning over the years – in part, I’m sure, because the first free revolutionary republic in the modern world wasn’t supposed to be engineered by enslaved plantation workers, according to standard modernist narratives). Anyway, with its mixture of African-origin deities, Christianity and its own distinctive characteristics, vodou is another cut ‘n’ mix but sui generis cultural melange. The old joke has it, given Haiti’s small educated elite, that the country is 90 per cent vodou and 100 per cent Catholic. Much to ponder in that one liner too…
Towards the end of my book chapter I try, with limited success I fear, to turn this cut ‘n’ mix sensibility into an account of how we might build new agrarian societies bottom-up. I hope to come back to this in my next project, and do it better. So small farm future, the politics, is to come – with a healthy dose of inspiration from the uprooted and inauthentic. But first there’s the small matter of another book to write about…
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Good one, Chris. To further complicate matters I would note that what the Caribbean places also have to address is the issue of sovereignty. They have started to formally cut ties with the monarchs/states which colonised them, which is a good step, but as readers of this blog will be aware there has also been (a lot of) corporate colonisation going on.
From the perspective of Aotearoa New Zealand, where the indigenous people were not eliminated as they were in most parts of the Caribbean, and where the colonisers were industrial rather than peasant farmers from the beginning, what it can or should mean to ‘reconstitute a peasantry’ is extremely problematic, since there was never a peasantry of any kind to start with. This does not mean that there should (and probably will) be a move towards more small-holder farms producing for local supply as global food systems become less and less viable, but how this will happen is something which I continue to puzzle over. I know it will involve a much greater diversity of farmers than the original British colonists, and the diversity of edible plants grown may even continue to increase, but at present NZ is still firmly in the grip of the global fossil-fuel based food system, and it is hard for alternatives to go to the necessary scale whether horizontally or vertically. Then NZ has its own sovereignty issues to deal with…
From the macro puzzles to the micro alternatives – I am about to bake Hot X Buns using mainly organic milk, eggs and flour produced by local small farmers. The dried fruit, sugar and spices, however, although purchased at an organic co-op store, came from far away. As I bake, I will muse a little more on the mess of contradictions which is life in the 21st century.
I imagine that spices will get more expensive, as will sugar and less refined sweeteners like honey and tree syrups. I’ve dried some of my own fruit before now, it’s hard for me to say whether that will turn into a locally produced food or an internationally traded commodity. It’ll depend on the fruit, I guess. Dates don’t grow so well here, grapes are possible, apples are plentiful.
I suspect a small farm future peasantry, whether reconstituted or built from scratch, will look different in every context. That’s part of what makes it so difficult to describe, and why it’s so hard to give a clear roadmap of how to get there.
I think iterative pathways toward community resilience might be part of the answer. Currently prevailing advice is to use any spare income or other resources to increase our capital in such a way as to increase our income, and devil take the hindmost. What if, instead, we put our spare income and other available resources towards increasing our ability to meet the needs of the people and creatures and ecosystems around us, even through times of change and turmoil?
Many of us (myself included) will need training out of the background assumption that more money is always safer, always good. There’s nothing like an economic crisis to remind us we can’t eat money.
Chris, I’m interested in how much purpose was involved in the creation of Carribbean cultures and even religions such as vodou. My grasp of the history is shamefully poor, but my impression is that these emerged as much as they were planned. I suspect that your comment on a previous post is quite relevant here: we cannot hope to plan the formation and shape of entire broad cultural movements, and yet cultures and movements do form and are shaped. Perhaps it’s due to my embedded white Western industrialist colonial patriarchy that my instinct is to take things apart and say “okay, what are the pieces of a successful cultural movement” (where we include some kind of ecologically balanced economics as one of the markers of success), as if we can simply assemble the ingredients and get the desired outcome. It’s probably not possible to guarantee any outcome, but perhaps outlining the ingredients is a start.
To bake hot cross buns you need flour, milk, eggs, fruit, sugar and spices (and probably yeast and salt, depending on your recipe). To bake some kind of bread you want starch, a binding agent, usually a leavening agent, and some optional flavours and fats. You may need to knead the dough to develop the gluten. You’ll also need a heat source. Mixes are available to which you can merely add water, but these are also not truly “reconstituted” in the same way as, say, dried mashed potato: they still require kneading and baking.
To build a successful peasant community in a small farm future, you need:
– soil, water, sunlight, cooking fuel, seeds and livestock, tools, fences, etc
– people with the skills to manage the soil, water, sunlight, etc
– some kind of governance for directing complex cooperative efforts, ensuring a fair and just distribution of resources that isn’t more extractive than the ecology can bear, and with appropriate safeguards against treating human beings as objects rather than subjects
– some kind of relationship with other communities for the mutual provision of goods that cannot be produced locally, which will probably include things like roads and long-range communications
– some way of passing all these on
– probably some stuff I’m missing
Unlike the baking of hot cross buns, the delineation of these ingredients might not always be entirely clear. Education, for example, can be a safeguard against exploitation and also a means of passing on culture, or it can be neither. But we do need most of the ingredients.
I think if we are in the business of consciously building a culture from scavenged parts, it might be an interesting exercise to take each of these ingredients (plus the ones I’ve missed) and ask what small changes could be made now to ensure it is more resilient to widespread material and economic upheaval.
And to step back a little further in time what about the Carib people’s ( the area was named after them ) that seem to have been wiped out by the Spanish
Interesting approach, Kathryn! A flexible recipe which can be adjusted for circumstances, rather than a one-size-fits-all plan of the sort which dominates the world at present (to such awful effect). I will be thinking this one over and trying to determine the universal essentials, if such there be.
My day of bun baking and eating – by myself and with my partner; with three girls from the neighbourhood and their parents and brother – is now over for another year, and we are all very content.
I think the “flexible recipe” approach is also one that is used in designing polyculture guilds, where you want to include some nitrogen fixers, some aromatic plants that attract predatory and pollinating insects, some ground cover plants, some shrubs, some upper story plants, and so on. When it works well it self-balances, but most polycultures still require some attention in the form of pruning and a bit of weeding to tweak the balance toward systems that produce a yield humans can use.
I didn’t establish ground cover properly by my fruit trees, so nature gave me creeping cinquefoil instead. Sigh. There’s absolutely no point pulling that up unless I put another ground cover in, though.
https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2023/04/02/empty-planet/
It will be interesting to see how this pans out , world population falling and energy shortages at the same time , small farms with no kids to hand it on too and the old curmudgeon’s like me working untill we drop , interesting times .
My understanding is that sharp population decline in pre-industrial agrarian societies (such as that around the time of the Black Death in Europe) meant a shift toward forms of food production that require more land but less labour per calorie: that is, more pasture and less arable farming. A small mixed farm that keeps some livestock but also has arable fields, orchards, a coppiced woodlot and some land for intensive annual horticulture can change the proportions of different types of food production to meet needs accordingly. My allotments are much less diverse than that (not allowed to plant a woodlot or keep livestock, not even hens) but I certainly employ a similar strategy, using herbaceous perennials like lovage, rhubarb and Jerusalem artichokes, as well as soft fruit, to reduce the amount of land I put to annuals. The rest of the space is balanced between high-value crops that need regular attention (pruning, weeding, tying back, feeding, harvesting etc) and things like potatoes and squashes that I treat a bit more like field crops: once they’re established, I don’t give them a lot of attention until it’s time to harvest them. At the allotment plot I can get to less often, my focus is almost entirely on the perennials and low-effort crops.
I’m not really too worried about a global population crash from a collapse in birth rates, for a number of reasons. Firstly, I’m not convinced a crash in birth rates is really on the horizon. I think a deadly pandemic, or some serious climate disaster affecting a densely-populated area, is far more likely. (We got off very lightly with COVID, all things considered.) Both of those have the potential to be a much faster change than birth rate decline. But even then, the difference between our current labour and our current fossil fuel use is so vast that the non-viability of fossil fuels seems likely to completely swamp our ability to keep up. Having five or six billion people instead of eight billion won’t make much difference to the magnitude of that change.
Where it will make a difference is that meeting the needs of fewer people will mean we don’t need as much labour. Again, this will be completely overshadowed by how much fossil energy we currently put toward meeting our needs and wants, so no matter how you calculate it, no more fossil energy (or even a large enough reduction) means we’ll probably all feel as if we’re working much harder for things like food and shelter.
But I rather suspect that much of the “work” done today, both by humans and fossil fuels, is for the increase of power through rent-seeking investments, rather than meeting basic needs. Strip that away and a small farm future could be quite pleasant. I am not very hopeful about our collective ability to do that kind of upending of corporate political power without massive violent conflict first — another potential source of population decrease.
To your point on population, I think fossil fuel availability and other population factors ( such as disease) are likely to cause spiralling failures in more dense areas.
For example, I’m quite north in central Canada, and even short black or brownouts in the wrong season can be extraodinarily dangerous. Which means it wouldn’t take much of a power loss to make a otherwise mild disaster much worse, or vice versa.
Much of our long term local planning is related to getting off the “heat grid” as it were, and I think that is part of your recipe metaphor, identifying those areas which have been most captured by modernity in your local area and then working your way out of that capture.
Yes, there’s a point at which infrastructure failure is its own disaster.
Thanks for these comments! Once again I’m a bit too stretched at the moment to comment significantly, but I’ll try to do so soon.
Lots of good discussion to be had on “ethnogenesis” here, something I ponder (given my largely culture-less “white” inheritance) but have little clarity about yet.
In light of the season, I’ll be drinking to not merely to ‘reconstituted’ peasantries, but even to Resurrected Peasantries! A blessed Easter to all: He is risen, alleluia!
He is risen indeed, Alleluia!
Think I now need to move onto the next and final post in this blog cycle. But I’ll try to pick up some of these points in the future – especially the one about the nature of cultural change and synthesis.
On the subject of cultural change, Chris, you might be interested in the article linked to below on how high-tech vertical farms are failing as the latest capitalist eco-modernist project.
I grow our winter salad greens (micro-green mixes) in troughs in our tiny unheated greenhouse. Anyone can do this at home – but I guess it would contribute to economic collapse…..
‘The vertical farming bubble is finally popping’
Climate change might make growing produce indoors a necessity. But despite taking in more than a billion dollars in venture capital investment, most companies in the industry seem to be withering, unable to turn a profit on lettuce.
By Adele Peters
https://www.fastcompany.com/90824702/vertical-farming-failing-profitable-appharvest-aerofarms-bowery
Lettuce is basically an expensive, crunchy way to move water from one place to another.
With you on the winter salad microgreens, though I use our windowsill.
I saw something the other day about Zero Acre Farms, which sells “cultured” oil made from bacterial fermentation. A bit of desultory poking around and it doesn’t look great: their feedstock is sugarcane, hardly the “zero acres” their company implies, and the resulting sludge has to be pressed and filtered to get oil out. I wonder how all of this interplays with changes in sugar prices; on an industrial scale, artificial sweeteners are cheaper than sugar, but I don’t know if their widespread use has had knock-on effects on sugar prices or how this all interplays with bioethanol (which I thought mostly came from corn).
Yeah, Zero Acre seems a name suggested by a click-bate warrior. The fermentation tanks have a footprint, and the externalities (as you point out) also take acres.
The failing of vertical farms shouldn’t be a head scratcher either. Though there are some metrics to suggest the tech has made some progress – just not enough to compete with the great outdoors.
I ran across a piece a few days ago that centered on a precision fermentation startup. One comment from the founder suggested that at the current state of the art only very high value end products (specialty ingredients) were economical to produce right now. He was very optimistic that further improvements in the tech and the advantage to scale would bring more and less expensive ingredients into the realm of possibility.
Beer and wine may no longer be considered products of “precision fermentation”… but their history stretches back many millennia. True, they’re don’t make for a balanced diet – and they really aren’t all that inexpensive (see Bruce’s comments earlier). But alcohol hungry humans over said millennia have tweaked and tweaked to bring us to a point where fermentation is scalable, reliable, and economic at some level.
I should be able to recover the piece I referred to above if anyone is curious.
This sounds like more ‘fake food’, Kathryn, which is neither environmentally positive nor healthy for humans. The FAO just released a report on ‘Food safety aspects of cell-based food’ which goes through all the potential hazards involved in producing this sort of gloop (or studge). These include what happens when you muck about with cell structures, as covered in this Observer article from last October https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/oct/16/ultra-processed-food-unhealthier-harder-to-avoid-than-you-thought
It is depressing to read that the scientist in the article who is researching the dangers of ultra-processed foods still feeds them to her kids, saying you ‘can’t avoid them’. I really don’t buy that line – what’s so hard about buying plain oats instead of highly processed sugary breakfast cereals, and doing the minimal cooking required?
If you don’t want to bake all your own bread or spend twice or three times as much buying fancy bread instead of an industrial square loaf, ultra-processed food is pretty hard to avoid. Similarly most flavoured yoghurt probably counts as UPF. Almost all frozen desserts such as ice cream are, too, and things like crackers, many sausages, and in some countries even basic products like soured cream or plain yoghurt will have added thickeners. And most non-oatmeal breakfast cereals, too, I think (maybe all of them). I’m not sure whether plain rolled oats count — they are certainly more processed than steel cut, which is why they cook so much faster. I can’t remember if tinned baked beans count as ultra-processed, but realistically most people who eat baked beans don’t make their own from scratch. (I do, but only sometimes — sometimes we eat store-bought ones.) It all adds up.
A researcher with a full time job and kids, either single parenting or with a spouse who also works full time (likely given how low pay is for academics in some places) is probably either going to be packing lunches for those kids to take to school, or having them eat school lunches which include ultra-processed foods. And those kids are going to see what their friends eat and want to eat similar things.
We also hand out a lot of UPF at the food bank, especially to people who don’t have any cooking or refrigeration facilities at all.
Access to whole, unprocessed foods and the time and energy to prepare them is very much a matter of economic justice.
Interesting discussion & links here, thanks. I’d certainly be interested in looking at the piece you mention, Clem.
Rather than pull several article links, I’ve listed here a link to the Ag Funder News site (which itself is searchable)… There is a relatively recent piece focused on Liberation Labs – a startup that if it’s built will be about an hour and a half from where I live. There are articles here about making cheese from plant proteins (sans the cow), and some meat manufacture (sans any salient critter)… but the one I had in mind from the comment above is:
Provectus Algae to expand ‘carbon negative’ biomanufacturing ingredients platform with new funding
Link:
https://agfundernews.com/?s=high+value+products+from+precision+fermentation
NB, most of the articles here concern startup businesses. There has been plenty of contraction in the plant based protein sphere in the last several months, evidence that the market is adept at weeding out hype from honest value proposition. Some startups do die for reasons beyond hype of course… but if we here at SFF want to cast aspersions about the relative food safety of ‘gloop’ or ‘studge’ without doing any homework… well.
Thanks Clem
https://climatechangedispatch.com/rep-lamalfa-stumps-entire-panel-of-climate-experts-with-a-simple-question/
How much CO2 .
experts 5 – 8 %
NOAA 0.04 %
Result , laughing stock .