I came back from NEFFA to a backlog of 173 articles in my RSS reader. Being a predictable person, my blogs pretty much cover two topics: Food and Economics.

Mostly it’s only a few depressing articles a day. I can generally handle them without much effect to my mood. But a five day backlog can be a bit sobering. I returned to discussions of unemployment and general recession chatter, and an utter outbreak of Swine Flu speculation. I hadn’t even heard of H1N1 when I left, and now it’s everywhere.

I try to remain optimistic. If nothing else, for my own sanity. I try to maintain some amount of faith in humanity to prevent me from settling in a depressive stupor, since that’s not at all functional. So I take joy in my immediate life and harbor strong hopes for the wider world.

But some days it’s harder than other.

The optimistic people talk about 9% unemployment is nowhere near as bad at the 25% during the great depression. But the 25% was from 1934. In the year after the 1929 crash, unemployment was 8.7% at the highest.

Granted, we know better this time. We recognize what’s going on, and we have an intelligent Keynesian president. We have safety nets. But we also have a much larger, more complicated system. A more tangled mess. Environmental worries are snowballing at an alarming rate. Problems seem to be happening faster and faster and solutions are caught up in bureaucracy, how can they catch up?

“Too big to fail” is a justification for propping up the banking sector. But “too big to win” seems more appropriate for humanity at the moment. Everything is so out of balance. In the medium run we’ll shift back to equilibrium, but what equilibrium will that be? Currently it looks bleak. Are there enough tools that we can make use of in the short run to alter our Destiny?

Nature operates in the long run, so is not really a factor here. Even if we blow ourselves up with nuclear war, she’ll survive us, and flourish long after we’re gone, whether in the form we know her now or something entirely different. Sustainability, Environmental Justice….all those movement have nothing to do with the survival of nature. It’s all about the survival of humanity. If the “save the earth” campaign was rebranded as “save the humans” would it have more support?

It’s a beautiful day outside, pink and yellow blossom amidst small green leaves everywhere under the bright blue sky. But also blazing hot. I have a lot to do, but I can’t focus well. Instead, I worry.

I used to research eschatology of different mythologies as a hobby. I stopped when I realized they disturbingly paralleled real life.

I cannot be optimistic today. I am afraid.

Love,
Herbert.

Economics’ third pillar is the assumption that good policies increase the range of choices an individual can make. Economists’ enthusiasm for income is driven by the view that more wealth gives people more choices. Our enthusiasm for political freedom has the same source. Economists talk about good policies increasing “utility levels” which is often understood as suggesting that these policies will make people happier. Happiness is an important emotion, but there is no sense in which it is particularly related to economist’s definition of utility. Formally, higher level of utility is equivelent of having more options, not wearing a smile.

Glaeser, Edward L., “The Economic Approach to Cities”, pg 3.

So, yeah. Economics is not the path to happiness. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something. And they’re probably not an economist.

If you want to read about whether more choice leads to more happiness, I recommend Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice

The Great Vegetarianism Debate is something I try to stay out of. It’s not that I don’t have opinions on it. It’s more that I feel that my opinions tend to be misunderstood.

In general, I feel that vegetarianism is a a more lifestyle choice than an omnivorous one. But I also do not feel that vegetarians have an inherent moral superiority than non-vegetarians.

Mostly, my issue with vegetarianism is that it obscures the bigger issue. It’s not about whether you eat meat or don’t eat meat. It’s about whether or not you eat conscientiously. It’s about paying all costs.

What does food cost? The trite answer would be “what it says on the sticker at the supermarket”. But is what you pay really what food costs?

Rarely. Food production and supply is a very competitive industry. Therefore, most non-monetary costs, such as pollution, cruel treatment to animals and workers, soil degradation, are going to be externalized. The only costs you see in an apple are the dollar costs of production, labor, transit, and storage. And even then, not even. The grain industry, for example, is heavily subsidized, so the price the distributor pays the farmer does not even cover production costs.

Tthere are many negative externalities such as waterway pollution from run-off and fermenting, anti-biotic filled animal waste, air pollution from transit and excess methane, pain from animal confinement, soil erosion from intensive farming, poverty from sub-minimum wage day labor’s pay, non-renewable resource depletion from a system built on petroleum, resistant diseases because of antibiotic overuse, poor societal health due to nutrient-poor food….
Those are all costs, costs that society as a whole, and each of us as an individual, has to pay.

If those externalities were internalized, food would be grown more sustainably, more healthily, because the cost of the food would include the cost of replenishing the soil, cleaning the air, preventing pollution, raising animals humanely, and the regulation necessary to ensure standards are carried out; all of which have labor and capital costs.

If the monetary value of these externalized costs were reflected in the costs of the food we buy, what we eat would be very different. We would eat very little meat, mostly because we couldn’t afford to. In fact, most people probably wouldn’t have the choice but to be primarily vegetarian.

Not entirely vegetarian, I’d argue, because I believe that if we have an obligation to put the ecosystem back in balance, that also entails substituting for the natural predators of populations that have become dangerously overpopulated, such as deer and rabbit, to the point of endangering not just themselves, but their ecosystem as a whole, as well as most invasive species, such as zebra mussels. Squid and jellyfish populations have skyrocketed from global warming, so eating those proves no harm, and indeed prevents their choking out other ocean species. And if anyone wants to eat pigeons and squirrels, I certainly won’t stop them.

Note none of these are domesticated animals. Domesticated animals are overpopulated, certainly, but we control their population. We don’t need to eat more, we need to breed less, so that each can live healthily, without restrictive confinement, antibiotics, growth hormones, or stress. That would mean there would need to be a lot fewer animals around. Yes there are a lot more arguments you can make about the “ethical treatment” of farm animals that basically say domestication is wrong, but I’ve never understood what those people would have you do. Release them all into the wild? They’d die. Stop raising them entirely? They’d die. If a cow, or chicken, or pig is raised in an environment where they have a happy, natural, unconfined life and a swift death and their activity and waste are used to replenish, not deplete the environment, I don’t really see what’s wrong with eating their flesh (except a person distaste for cow-meat). I have a really big beef with the industrial meat complex, because it’s unsustainable, and full of costs which are externalized, one of which is the humane treatment of their animals.

At the moment, the people who pay full economic costs of their food, are those who choose to. They’re the ones who buy what’s local, seasonal, fair trade, sustainably grown, humanely raised, and unprocessed*.

Do I pay full cost of my food? Not always, I admit. I try, but there are always tradeoffs to be made. My produce comes from the Chester Co-Op which does source a lot of food that’s from far away and conventionally raised. But it’s also supporting the effort to bring fresh fruit and vegetables to a food dessert, an effort I value highly and believe in supporting. There’s a social benefit that’s offsetting the economic cost I’m not paying. Like girl-scout cookies.

A contentious omnivore can be as sustainable as a contentious vegetarian, and can is easily more sustainable than an uncontentious vegetarian, though an uncontentious omnivore is most likely, but not necessarily, less sustainable than an uncontentious vegetarian.

The most important thing is to think. Not close your mind one way or the other, but ask questions, demand answers, discuss, and decide for yourself. But ignorance of our food chain is one of our society’s biggest sin.

Love,
Herbert.

*It’s difficult to find processed food at full cost these days, especially anything that comes in plastic.

yeah, yeah, I know this is belated. Sue me.

I have finally made it through Michael Pollan’s engaging book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. I am probably the last foodie on the internet to have read it.

Our dependence on the industrial food system is sobering. Frightening is our refusal as a society to think about it. Pollan’s approach is open-minded and curious, following the simple question “What should I eat” backwards to “what am I eating”?”, “Where did it come from?” Questions that more of us would rather not have answered.

My overall impressions is that it was well presented and accessible, and while I had more background knowledge than the average reader, it still told me new things and made me think. I often found myself drawing conclusions from the text that Pollan made explicit a few pages later.

Below are my thoughts on the individual sections.

Love,
Herbert.

Part I: Corn
Two statistics from this section stood out for me:

One: Americans are more corn than Mexicans.

As a half mexican, this is boggling. In Mexico, corn is literally our daily bread. But we see the corn we eat. It’s not hidden in our sodas or candy (cane sugar is cheaper) or in our food additives or “natural and artificial flavors.” The amount of energy (read: petroleum) it takes to break corn down into it’s constituent parts and reconstruct it into every ingredient you don’t recognize (and many you do) in preserved foods. Our meat even, is now longer fed on grass or scraps (both of which are inedible to humans), but grain. Enough corn to feed the third world we give to livestock these days.

(How do we know this? Corn carbon atoms have an extra hydrogen atom than most plants. We can measure how much of a body is made up of this extra-atom carbon and have a good idea of how much corn the person is)

Two: Without artificial fertilizer, “two out of every five humans on earth today would not be alive” (pg43)

This has some very scary implications. The primary one being that 40% of the world’s population would die if the world went organic. Puts a bit of a moral conundrum on the shoulders of those against conventional industrial farming, don’t it?
But artificial nitrogen fertilizer has always been a petroleum resource, and no matter what estimates on the remaining oil supply is, fossil fuels are a finite substance. So there are two and a half billion people are living on borrowed time. Oil prices are in flux, as is the supply. Those who are going to lose out first are those who can least afford to.
I’m not sure how we can win this one. I’m not sure we can. The obvious solution, decreasing population (or to start, decreasing population growth) is dauntingly impossible.
I don’t know if to hope Pollan is wrong, or if his statement does not include modern intensively-sustainable techniques (which are proven to show larger yields per acre), but also while knowing full well that we’ve long been living above capacity on our planet, yet it is not the fault of any one of the 2.5 billion people living on borrowed time (and more like it’s 40% of each of us, instead). It’s not out fault but we must take responsibility. Somehow.

Part II: Grass
This section was my favorite. Joel Stalatin, the grass-farmer, is wicked smart. Obsessive yet, but an economist at heart. Economics is really all about resource management, using the least amount of inputs to produce the largest amount of outputs. Yes there’s all this about inflation and profit maximization and financial markets and asymmetrical information, but all that is nuance. Many times it is the most basic concepts that get glossed over.

For what could be more simple, what could be more complex, than your daily bread, your daily meat. How many inputs are needed to make something as thoughtless as a hamburger? A live animal yes, and a butcher of skill. Some fire too. But behind that? Years of labor by the farmer and the butcher, a pasture of grass of fifty different varieties. The sun and rain that makes the grass grow, the climate and weather system that brings the rain. The soil, a product of eons, and all it’s microbiotic inhabitants. Petroleum and ore that allow the meat to be transferred, the knowledge of a civilization that tells us how meat is to be grown, cooked, and stored. Is all that really captured when ground chuck goes on sale for 1.99/lb?

Economics is about resource management. It doesn’t tell you to use all your resources now to create the largest amount of output in the present, nor that money is the path to happiness. Those are human inferences. In fact, economics would be happier if your resource use was paced and sustainable. Look beyond microeconomics…there is a long run, an equilibrium.

Equilibrium through resource management is what Joel Stalatin has found. He knows his grass, his soil, his weather, his animals, and efficiency is his obsession. His output his maximized mostly by waste minimization: manure is not waste, but a valuable input to maintain the quality of his grass and soil. His animals graze the grass to where Marginal Cost = Marginal Benefit, and moves them before they take a bite too much. He grows complementary animals to increase output without corroding resources. He produces up to the very limit of his land’s carrying capacity, and not a chicken over.

That’s what some people find difficult to realize: Economics is not about producing as much as possible. Its about producing as much as possible given your resources. You can just as easily produce too much as too little. The right amount in the right amount.

Of course, he has nothing to the planet’s greatest economist, Mother Nature herself, but Joel Stalatin, I salute you.

Part III: The Forest
This section taught me the most, though I think I have the least to say about it. I didn’t know much about the elusive mushrooms before. Again, forging is a good use of human’s intelligence applied to food, “the cognitive niche”. Can humans sustain themselves on forage and hunted game alone? Of course not. But our mind was wired to it, and it taps in to a sense of observation and concentration that so few of us use these days. Haven’t we all been obsessively hungry at one point or another? I’m hypoglycemic, I know. You can’t think about anything else, and you wonder what you can eat. Probably we should all be required to try it, to look at the world in hunger and reverence. A rite of passage even. It shows us what we do know (when did we learn that all compounded fruits are edible?), what we don’t know (is this mushroom edible? Will it kill me?), and what we might never know (why do morels only grow after a forest fire? Why can’t we cultivate truffles?).

Why do we presume to know nature so well? We really don’t.

If the only ones who benefit from this celebration are those currently alive, it would be unfair to ask future generations to pay for any of those costs….Costs imposed on future generations should be commensurate with benefits received by them.

–Bluestone et al., The Urban Experience: Economics, Society, and Public Policy

Yet isn’t this exactly what we’re doing in terms of our environment? There is little economic justification for using up our natural resources now, putting our future into an ecological debt.

In some cases, debt is justified. Sometimes you need an influx of captial to get out of a period of recession and stagnation. But we’ve been borrowing and borrowing more in times of prosperity, instead of paying off the loans we already took. How does that make economic sense?

If, a hundred years from now, our great-grandchildren are still working to clean up the skies, still struggling to find enough food on a warmer climate with unpredictable and violent weather, how are we going to be remembered? Certainly not with fondness.

If we want to leave a planet that our children won’t hate us for, we need to start saving now.

Love,
Herbert.

I’m behind on my readings updates! Here’s one that I read a few weeks ago:

So I meant to check out The Earth Care Manual, a permaculture guidebook for Britain and temperate climates. However, due to a mix up on my part, I ended up with The Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture, which is written for Australian climes. Ah well.

It was still a good read. It was designed very much for the person already set on creating a permaculture set up for their land, particularly in a rural or suburban setting. Ms Morrow stresses observation, giving the reader many assignments to get to know their land, using her farm and a friend’s suburban home as example cases. The graphics are simple and cartoonish, and there are many grids and datasheets providing examples of how the reader should go about organizing his observations and what they might mean.

Earth User’s Guide is not a deeply technical work, and indeed, one should probably go elsewhere for instruction of specific technique. However, as a permaculture design book, it is designed to make the reader aware of the space he owns, and of the interactions of the biotic and abiotic components of the ecosystems and how they will affect the growing pattern.

The stress on observation, initial and continuous, is crucial, I find. Permaculture requires a certain mindfulness, a certain intimate knowledge of the land. It is impossible to work in harmony with what you do not understand, and a generalized technical knowledge is not sufficient when each acre has it’s own microclimates. Modern monocultural industrial farming is a sort of brute force agriculture; the land is beaten into submission with long straight rows, pesticides, chemical fertilizer, and GM crops. Permaculture is more of a mental exercise; a continual sorting out of what works and what doesn’t, trying to create an environment that is both wholly natural and wholly edible.

More than sun and soil, Morrow stresses wind and water as prominent concerns regarding the layout of a garden. When possible, designs should incorporate animals as well as plants; not just domesticated animals, but the birds, insects, rabbits, and other wild creatures that are indigenous to your region.

While it is primarily an agricultural work, Morrow spends a significant amount of page space dedicated to home design. For this I am grateful; the concept of energy-efficient housing has long been discounted in the first-world because of the availability of indoor climate-control technologies, but is often a matter of simple design principles: extra insulation in cold climes, long eaves in sunny ones, courtyards in hot ones.

Overall, I found the book highly accessible, a good primer on the considerations necessary for permacultural living. And permaculture, despite being primarily of agricultural application, is indeed applicable to most parts of life -it’s living to stay. It’s quite a basic book, and anyone designing a permacultural space will need to find more in-depth and technical work, but if you don’t even know where to begin, The Earth User’s Guide is a good place for that.

Love,
Herbert.

Bill McKibban opens his wonderfully readable Deep Economy with an elegant metaphor: More and Better are two birds who for most of human history resided in the same bush. A person could throw the stone of his life’s pursuit at the bush with a good chance of hitting both. However, things have changed. In the first world today, better has moved to a different bush. But many people still have yet to realize that we now have to choose.

At it’s heart, Deep Economy is about a fundemental economic principle: The Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns. DMR an almost universaly applicable phenomenon where each subsequent unit of a good or service obtained is worth less than the previous one. So that first ice cream cone might be delicious, the second unethusiastically good,, and by the fifth you might be downright sick of them.

Bill McKibben is telling us that we’re on our seventh cone of economic growth with sprinkles of environmental degredation. While the first couple provided us great gains of prosperity, utility, and happiness, the recent ones are not making us better off, and possibly even less happy.

Microeconomics tells you that the sensible thing to do is to build until marginal benefit equals marginal cost, but McKibban argues, and I agree, that we are already far past that inflection point.

Instead of ecoonomic growth, which we have too much of already, he proposes that we focus our energies on cultivating communities. Americans have sacrificed community in favor of a materialistc hyper-individualism, which worked until we overdosed. If our economy, our society is more community based we will be happier with a simultaneous lessened desire to consume fewer material resources.

(McKibban provides the caveat that there are still some places where More = Better, mostly in poor developing countries, where close-knit families and communties exist (and in some clases, might be all they have) but their lack of material prosperity provides a very low quality of life.)

Most of the book deals with providing examples of successful local community initatives: Urban market gardens in Cuba, Local radio in Vermont, Bus Rapid Transit in Brazil, “community intersections” in Portland, small-farmer rabbit co-ops in China, CSAs in Massachusettes and the possibility of localizing the food supply. He wants to reinforced that a “deep economy” is not only a theoretically possibility, but a budding reality.

Considerations McKibban does not touch on are how to speed change from a “more”-focused society to a “better”-focused one (besides, of course, everyone buying his book and becoming enlightened…) and what kind of econometric model would be necessary to consider all manners of costs and utilities. Of course, the latter is outside the lay scope of his book, but possibly necessary if Sustainable Economics is to be considered a sersious discipline within in the field.

McKibban does not advocate a radical shift to frugality and communes nor roamnticizes peasent living. Instead, he is a champion of balance, something much of our society sorely lacks.

Bill McKibban is a sustainable economist.

Love,
Herbert.

I am a student of Economics*. I feel the asterick is necessary since I do not feel most peoples’ conception of Economcs is the same as mine.

What do you hear when you hear Economics? The “dismal science”? Capitalism? The stock market bubble? Alan Greenspan? The “Invisible Hand”? Ridiculous hypotheses of hyper-rationality?

That’s not what I think Economics is. My conception of Economics is based on two premises:
(a) can best be summed up in a quote of my Macroeconomics professor: “In Ecconomics, more is not better. The right amount is the right amount”. Economics is, at it’s heart about finding equilibria, the intersections of two lines. Economics does not dictate that growth is primary measure of a successful economy. Those are assumptions that society (and politics) apply to their interpretation of economic data.
(2) All economics processes should be considered in the long term. I know the short term considerations are nice because they have so few exogenous variables to take as given and so many externalities to disregard. But I feel it’s unrealistic. Mostly in that I feel most businesses and economies would like to exist in 10, 20, 50 years from now. Those that don’t probably are planning on being exploitative and should be regarded with suspicion.

Consideration of Economics in the Long Run changes many important factors:

Firstly, business practices, reputation, adaptability, reinvestment become much
more important than annual profit rates. Sustainability becomes the watchword.

Furthermore, in the long run, the exogenous becomes endogenous, and externalities are internalized. While economies may be “open”, the Earth is still a closed system. In the Short Run, the small view, the Outside world is so large and other that it is disregarded. However, in the Long Run, anything you do to affect the closed system eventually affects you. This is especially true for environmental externalities. Yes, you can pollute the atmosphere, empty the aquafiers, overtax the soils. The reserves of clean air, fresh water, fertile earth seem just waiting for exploitation. It seems like a good idea in the Short Run. But in the Long Run, well, if you use it all today, there won’t be any left tomorrow. The air will be unbreathable, water scare, soil dead. What will you do then?

Thinking only in the short term is easy, yes. But it’s also crazy, suicidal, even. We’ve been binge drinking oil all evening, what will we do in the morning when we wake up with a splitting hangover and an empty keg? What were we thinking, we’ll ask. But we know the answer: we weren’t.

Realistically, we should scrutinize models of business, of politics, of society, not just to see if they work well, but to see if they work well in the long term.

Again, to quote my Macro professor, there are two lessons economics teaches you:
#1 (Microeconomics): Markets are wonderful.
#2 (Macroeconomics): Markets are not so wonderful.

Both of these are equally important. In my opinion, solving the problems raised by the second issue are more interesting.

I believe that the principles of economics can be used to analyze endevours for their Long Run potential.

I am a sutainable economist.

Love,
Herbert.

So here’s my prediction of what the buzzword of a peak-oil age will be:
“Smart”.

Smart-growth, smart-grid, smart-farm, smart-card smart-transit.

After decades of being told that increased machine power would make our lives easier and full of leisure, most of these Smart systems will not refer to AI or computer-regulated efficiency. Instead, there will be a rally for human power. Especially in agriculture, the only way to create an efficient sustainable system is to apply the human evolutionary advantage of reason and memory to it. Less money and resources will be spent on machines and chemicals, and more brainpower will be consumed by our work. We will have less leisure, but we will have more life.

Nothing will be more important than education, which itself will need to change. It needs to become more diverse, cultivating to the specialized intelligences that different children have. It needs to be more far-sighted, teaching the basics of how our world functions, how we need to treated, and how to problem-solve and how to learn for a lifetime. It needs to encourage a greater variety of post-graduation options; university is not for everyone.

We need to work more, so to work the earth less. Human energy is the most renewable resource we have.

Love,
Herbert.

I have posts to make up about The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Hope’s Edge (I’ll get to them…), but at the moment what’s on my mind is The Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed, ed. Vadana Shiva.

Talking with Prof. Everbach a couple of weeks ago, he asked me, “So what?” I’m doing all this reading and learning about what’s wrong with the current food system, and how people think it should be, and their philosophy as to why it should be like that. But, so what? What am I going to do about it? How am I going to change things? What needs to be done?

The Manifestos are about what needs to be done on a global-political level, and I mostly agree with it. Food doesn’t take well to be commoditized like shoes or computers: it doesn’t travel well: food is best cultivated and distributed as locally as possible, and global legislation should favor a localcentric, diversified system rather than globalcentric, industrialized approach.

This makes sense to me; the agro-industrial complex doesn’t need the support of the WTO and FAO to thrive; it has enough power from it’s sheer size. The global trade organizations should work to promote a competitive market, which means protecting the interests of the small players. Furthermore, trade should be encouraged as a benefit, not an expense, to the local economy, which means local industries, agriculture especially, should be supported.

The other major premise of the Manifestos deals with the agricultural biotech industry. Besides a staunch position against GM foods generally, they are adamantly opposed to the patenting of seeds and lifeforms, a cause very dear to my heart. For one, I don’t know how they prove that there is no “prior art”. Two, it discourages crop diversity, and encourages dangerous monocultures. Three, GM crops rarely delivers on the promise to be more productive, and are more expensive than their natural counterparts, and sterile seed prevent farmers from being self-sufficient or financially independent, and make them completely dependent on the whims of industry year after year.

The Manifestos are directed towards change in government and intergovernmental organizations. Which makes sense. Agriculture is not capable of thriving in a free market, as it is full of externalities (such as pollution, soil degradation, diversity loss) as well as serves a market with a fairly inelastic demand. Or course, much of regulation is saving the industry from itself, as unsustainable practices will come back to harm the business in the long run. Also food security, biodiversity, and agricultural independence are public goods that the market has no reason to provide on it’s own.

However, while I have strong opinions at the policy level, and have much support for those striving for governmental change, I feel a pull towards the other end of the movement, to the personal, “grassroots” level.

There is a lot of argument among food advocates, I’ve noticed, as to which is more important: change on the personal level or change on the policy level. I don’t see why the answer can’t be “both”. Policy change is important: we need a political environmental that’s supportive of small farmers, high-quality local food, that provides consumer education starting in grade-school, that regulates using the precautionary principle in favor of consumers instead of industry, prevents the patenting of life, and understands sustainable solutions.

Those are some big tasks that require a huge amount of advocacy time and energy. However, no less important than making the government fertile and receptive to positions of Good Food, is making the consumers, and ourselves, fertile and receptive to the cause. The system is broken from above because we have offered no resistance from below. People need to take their food, their health, their lives back. Education on the personal and community level is crucial to raising awareness. Kitchen gardens, CSAs, guerrilla gardens, community gardens are all necessary to provide empowerment and connection with the cause. It is important that we get in touch not only with where our food comes from in nature, but the people it comes from: not mere consumers but “co-producers”, as Carlo Petrini advocates. There need to be people who interact with local communities, providing information, sparking discussions, fostering connections, organizing initiatives. Controlling your own food supply provides security: it protects your children health, it provides a buffer when money is tight, it creates a satisfaction unachievable in consumption, it keeps money and work within a community. Food is power.

We cannot merely say “this needs to be done”. We must do. We cannot hope to change the world if we are unwilling to first change ourselves.

Top-down, bottom-up…all efforts are needed. And when we meet in the middle, we shall feast and dance.

My poetic side is starting to take over, so I should stop here.

Love,
Herbert.