3.2 Eating Well - three courses to plenty

Food in the kindness economy soon, as soon as we can make it happen. It is Do-able, wonderful, a deepening and developing of food-giving ecosystems that will serve plenty for us all. Local food that will nourish us all, and nourish this place. A food system that builds the health and well-being of the land, water, air, that deepens and strengthens bio-diversity and resilience through this time of climate chaos. Food. 

And I will serve it in three parts. The three parts of a sustainable food system: grow it, store it, and share it. Grow it, store it and share it. That is the three course serving of local food I am imagining in Thunder Bay’s kindness economy today.

Something Different This Way Comes

Food - food! What is more essential than food?

Your three square meals, your balanced diet, your gatherings around food as a family, friends and community to break bread and build connections. I love food. And I don’t do well without it. I mean, who does? But my hangry is scary, and easily triggered when I don’t eat reliably and well. I don’t think well when I’m hangry. And I really like thinking.

So - I cherish the food in my life, I think about it a lot

And in Thunder Bay we are blessed when it comes to food. We have the capacity, the land, the savvy and the people-power to grow all the food we need, right here locally.

I talked to Brendan Grant, who with his wife Marcelle Paulin grow vegetables at Sleepy G Farm, the only certified organic farm currently in the region. I asked him what it would take for all the food eaten in Thunder Bay to be grown locally back in season one. If you haven’t heard that conversation I recommend it. Brendan did the math and knows what he is talking about. It is so do-able. We have the land, we have the growing season and savvy.

What we need is people, people giving the land their time and attention. People pouring love and reaping food AND healthier, happier land. People getting their hands dirty. Because in growing more food locally, we can knit ourselves into closer, sweeter relationship with this land

Feeding our bodies, yes. And  feeding our souls.

Rise Up, Rise Up
Oh Rise and Feel your Power
Rise Up, Rise Up

We want freedom to live in this peace
We want power, we want to make it okay
Want to be singin' at the end of the day
Children to breathe a new life
We want freedom to love who we please

Remember that hit song by the Parachute Club from the early 80s? That amazing, slapped bass line - I wish I could play it for you. That joyous, dancing percussion and drums... I will put a link to the video for Rise Up on the landing page. I cried when I watched it - it was filmed in the Toronto of my youth, a Toronto that was less polished and more affordable, and oh the power these young people are gathering from one another from their joy and connection and confidence in their future, that they will help make this world a better place.

I was 12 when that song was a hit. Sam turns 12 today, the day I post this podcast for you to hear. So I cry as I  imagine this growing of local food sparking and roaring here for us. I imagine a growth in local food production, a growth in people here becoming a part of that growing, that doing and noticing and knowing, and it rises up with joy and confidence in me.

I keep thinking of a film I watched on Netflix a while back. I wish I remembered the title - google and my memory failed me. But the movie was set in Japan. The lead character had a city job and a city home, but she went to a farm farmed by somewhat distant family to help bring in the harvest. She packed a little bag, was met at the train, stayed a week or two. I think they harvested flower stamens - saffron maybe? Anyway it was beautiful. These scenes of people carefully harvesting from open blooms, cupping them so gently. And the main character got a special kind of leave from her work, they had a word for it in Japanese a change is as good as a rest kind of permission to take some time away because helping grow food is essential work.

I imagine something like that. Giving one another time to join in the work of growing, giving us all time and support to go out to the land and get good work done. In the Kindness economy I imagine Thunder Bay regaining our connection to that essential work. Growing, working with the land.

Talking about a new way
Talking about changes and names
Talking about building the land of our dreams
His tightrope's gotta learn how to bend
We're makin' new plans
We're gonna start it again

Growing things is hard, but we are good at it. The world is full of spaces people have gardened and enriched. Places where their harvest is close at hand and needs little attention, that don’t look much like the square-cornered flattened fields we associate with farming. They look like particularly healthy and verdant grasslands, forests, waters and flocks that make eating well year round kind of easy.

When colonists came here they might have come up on a three sisters garden, they were often grown in clearings. And likely those visitors did not fully understand what they were seeing. It looked so unlike the farming they knew back home. But the clearings didn’t just happen, the opportunities for them were noticed and then those clearing were cleared and prepared and maintained. There was skill and thought in the where, skill and thought in which seeds were planted and the timing each year of when. And skill and timing in the harvest. And in storing that harvest to feed them over the full year until the next harvest of corn and beans and squash - but we’ll talk more about storage in a bit.  A three sisters garden is sustainable, it is science applied, it is learning taught and remembered.

I have grown a three sisters garden next to my more European rectangular rows and beds. At my community garden in Castlegreen before I moved in with Arno, I rented two beds side by side. One I planted in circular beds of corn and beans and squash, the other I planted a little bit of everything else, in rectangular beds with aisles to walk through as I seeded and weeded and harvested. The three sisters garden took so much less care, and produced so much more food per square inch than my more managed and manicured rows.  Because those three seeds are in balance with one another. They each release into the soil what the other needs. The squash shades the corn and bean roots, the beans climb the sturdy corn stalks to grow fat and rich in the light. Once the bed is made and the seedling weeded, they pretty much take care of themselves.

In the sustainable local food systems I imagine here in Thunder Bay, (soon, soon, as soon as we can get together and start making them happen,) our food growing efforts are forever works in progress,
forever lessons being learned and watched for, forever calls to pay attention and notice but what you expected, and did no expect. Growing food is proactive and reactive and many hands make light work. Most of all I imagine those many hands.

Spending time together growing food will grow happiness, as well as food security. The happiness of rooting yourself in and caring for your home, helping it grow richer, stronger and more generous to all of the living things of your community.

I can almost imagine that colonialism impoverished this land of so much of its wealth of healthy growing spaces and cared for, generous harvest places by accident. That those who came here from Europe’s unsustainable habits tasked to take from others what they can no longer provide for themselves, I can almost imagine they ruined so much plenty, so many sustainable food systems
Because they did not recognize this plenty as the fruit of generations of careful, clever work, as the  intentional results of generations in humble and respectful relationship with this land.

Because we do not see what we are not looking to see. Even really big obvious things are easy to miss. I think of the video of the person in the Gorilla costume dancing in the middle of the screen
A gorilla that most people completely miss when they are directed to watch for something else. The video that Sam talked about in the final episode of Season two, Being Ancestors.

We often do not see what we are not looking to see.

But I fear the losses this land has suffered in the centuries of colonialism are not just accidental. Those coming to extract also aim to impoverish and weaken the people they have come to steal from. 

The Romans would salt the fields, so nothing would grow there

The mass deforestation of the ancient White Pine forest of Northwestern Ontario, that was a salting of the fields.

I hosted a woman from South Korea once, and brought here with me to visit family, driving from Montreal to near Algonquin Park, through so much green and growing, rocks and trees and lakes.
I was so proud of all that growth and plenty. But my guest was appalled. Where are the trees? She asked, looking into the bush all around us. She saw trees, and saw that they are all young, less than a hundred years old certainly. And a forest without its ancients is no forest in South Korea. In her home, a forest’s ancient trees are known and cherished. She saw no Grandmother trees in our woods and she was appalled. I had had no idea.

I went to the National Archives and found pictures of the felling of the ancient forests of Ontario, huge trees that mothered acres of rich and ancient growth. There is a song on my album Bones about that, from the perspective of a settler trying to farm on a field that was all too recently an ancient forest. And later my Step-Dad Michael and I wrote a musical about it, again from a settler point of view, the Last of the Great White Pines. Now I see the ghosts of those Grandmothered forests everywhere.

This growing and deepening of life and food in this land we call home, it is a restoration, a rebuilding of relationship. And it is the key to our health and wealth in the future. There is nothing more powerful in restoring our planet’s balance and reclaiming our rightful place as a good part in this web of life, than by getting our hands dirty, planting our hearts, and nourishing growth

Damming the rivers and flooding the land was another salting of the fields.

Here, where people travelled by water, I imagine the food gardens were richest along the shores. That’s where the wild rice beds were, another wealth built up over thoughtful, skillful, countless generations that needed no more maintenance than a skillful, respectful harvest
A harvesting that did not take too much, but instead thinned where thinning promoted health and growth, and spread seed where seeds would do well. A harvest at the right time and stepping lightly, leaving only the intended footsteps.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimerer is one of the references that most inform this podcast -
you can find my whole library of hope on the home page at www.SomethingDifferentThisWayComes.ca Robin Wall Kimerer is both an academic biologist, and a first nation woman very consciously rooting herself in her culture, language and history, sharing stories in order to spark good things happening.

So - In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimerer talks about a study comparing sweetgrass harvested in traditional ways, with leaving sweetgrass undisturbed. A big, solid, Western Science applied study.
The expectation was that undisturbed would win out, and it was just measure of which manner of harvesting hurt the sweetgrass less. But that was not what it found. Instead the study proved the traditional harvests strengthened the sweet grass, made it healthier and grew the bed.  The unharvested bed of sweetgrass weakened and grow smaller over time.

We are a part of this web of life. When we add our skills, attention and learning to the growing, we can help deepen that life, even as we feed ourselves.

The many shores of the rivers and lakes and wetlands of Northwestern Ontario were known and cared for millennia, since time began. And almost all of those beloved and well cared for shorelines have been lost, drowned and flooded for Hydro-electric Dams. There is so much rebuilding, regrowing and restoring to do. So much salted land to help and heal and build our connections to.

Dams not only drowned shorelines, they also strangle the natural movement of life and health along waterways. Some Northwestern Ontario Dams don’t even produce hydro electricity, they were built for other reasons and somehow remain, blocking the natural movement of life along the water, somehow harder to remove than they were to erect, even as they strangle life.  

If you have not yet heard my conversation with Phil McGuire in Season Two about his Save the Mothers campaign, I recommend it. Phil McGuire worked so hard to raise our understanding of, and our valuing of this essential and powerful movement of life across the land and through the waters. I wear my Save the Mothers t-shirt with pride, hoping it will prompt conversations.

Conversations are something I imagine this growth of local food to prompt. I imagine a pouring of love onto our land, growing food and growing connections

Oh rise and show your power
(Rise up rise up) Everybody is dancing into the sun
(Rise up rise up) It's time for celebration
(Rise up rise up) Spirits time has come

You don’t get from an untended field to a sustainable, rich food-giving diversity in a single season
It will take time, attention, trying, learning, improving, collaborating just to get us close to where we were before the forests were cut and the shores flooded and poisons poured into land and water.
We need to restore - and more. We need to go farther, because the plenty of that recent past
enjoyed a time of climate stability that we don’t have right now. We need to adapt to a crazier climate, and we need to be careful in what we introduce and change so that we don’t unintentionally do more harm than good.

I imagine rainbows of options, a diversity of species, growing many varieties of each food, like a harvest of rainbows. When you can predict less well than ever what weather a growing season might throw our way, thanks to this climate instability we’re living with right now, the more options you give life to get from seed to harvest, the better the odds you’ll have a harvest. Added bonus, the variety, and the beauty. 

Have you ever seen a display or had a salad of heritage tomatoes? Tomatoes that are different colours: pink and purple, orange and yellow. And different textures, softer and firmer, softer and firmer, juicier and chewier. And different flavours - the sweeter tomato and the sharper, the kind of citrusy and the kind of meaty. 

The species of food that fits the time-lines, travel and consumer appeal of the global food system, is very narrow. Beef steak and Roma dominate our modern diets because of those narrow frames
But when you choose your food with the broader frame that includes the health and wealth of us all
Rainbows of food fit on the menu. 

There is a whole world of options out there. Rainbows of carrots, peas, beans, beats, potatoes, jerusalem artichokes, apples, onions - you name it. Each with their own strengths and weaknesses, each with prove the star in a different growing season. We need diversity in our entertainment and stories, as I said in last week’s podcast. We also need diversity on our plates. 

Plant a diversity and pay attention, keep seeds selected for their success in your particular place, and you will, over the years, both find and help evolve the species that are a particularly good fit for where you live and eat. Because growing local food includes saving seeds from each year’s harvest
to plant the next year’s harvest. 

And we have expertise in that here in Thunder Bay. We have Superior Seed Producers. I will include a link on the landing page to the recent report card on food production in Thunder Bay. It is an amazing snapshot of capacity, accomplishment, and potential.

https://foodsystemreportcard.ca/food-production/

Farming is hard. It takes a dense overlay of understanding and skills. It takes planning, and responsiveness. Farming successfully requires some savvy of biology, chemistry, husbandry, genealogy - the list is long and timing is key. Many heads, many eyes on the land, a pooling of skills, a valuing of the work and its success - will makes this miracle of growth and security easier, and fun. 

I imagine many people pitching in on the growing, and on the conversation. Timing and observation, so key to getting from seed to harvest. I imagine growing our local feed being a community conversation. I imagine an evening community perambulation and pooling of observations.
A learning and sharing and celebrating.

Because timing is everything, and timing is hard. Because learning is everything and learning is best done together. And the real jam in the work is in sharing our understanding of it, is in cherishing our success as a community growing together.

I have a hedge of rhubarb. It’s like three feet wide and ten feet long. My girlfriend and I kind of got into a rhythm and lost track of time and next thing we knew, that’s what we had. We had started with this one old overgrown rhubarb plant that would spring straight into seed, it was so overgrown.
I saw that root-bound rhubarb and immediately understood what it wanted me to do. I invited my friend Julie over and one sunny, early summer afternoon we each took a spade, and started splicing fat, happy leaves off the main plant right down to the root and popping them into new spots. We chatted and joked as we worked. The work was satisfying, it was fun. We lost track of time. And now I have an embarrassment of rhubarb.

But I also have a second root bound rhubarb that has been begging me to split it back into youthful vigour for over a decade now, and I have not yet done that good work. I need to invite a friend over and hand them a spade. It will be fun. And until it is fun, it likely won’t get done. Many hands make light work. You need to invite the helping hands and give them a job. That’s the hardest part.

Oh rise and show your power
(Rise up rise up) We're dancing into the sun
(Rise up rise up) It's time for celebration
(Rise up rise up) Spirits time has come

We want lovin' we want laughter again
We want heartbeat
We want madness to end, we want dancin'
We want to run in the streets

That is the real harvest of this local food production growth I am imagining. The joy and the wealth we gather when we connect with our land when we pay attention, and learn from it. Nature knows how to grow, how to heal. And it calls on us to do what it needs. There is a conversation to be had, a relationship to build, if we give the land our time, our attention, and our care.

I was listening to a recent Blind Boy Podcast. He was asked what people can do to build their mental health, their emotional resilience. And he recommended seed bombs.

He plugged a local farm in Ireland that sells seeds of wildflowers that are indigenous to Ireland. He lives in Ireland. He warned against buying just any old packet of wild flowers, you could end up with flowers native to Poland when you want to rewild Ireland. Then he talked about the joy he gets from his backyard. Which is about three foot square. Three years ago he stopped mowing it and instead sprinkled in some of those Irish wildflower seeds. And right away the next year he’s got a couple of dozen kinds of flowers, and with them bugs, then lizards, and foxes. He’s giving the land back a few square feet of diversity and resilience, and it makes him feel good. So when asked what his practices are that help him take care of his mental health, he recommended making stopping mowing and instead sowing native plants in your yard.

Or making seed bombs.

A seed bomb is seeds mixed with some compost and some modeling clay rolled into a ball about the size of a golf ball. You throw a seed bomb where it might grow. That’s all. He recommended throwing seed bombs in abandoned spaces and untended public spots like roundabouts and roadsides. He was recommending sparking rewilding as a way to feed your soul, to restore your own understanding that you matter, you can make good things happen, that you are valuable.

Nourishing nature, building our connection to our place on this planet, feeds our hearts and souls. It’s powerful healing. The land calls to us. It is not hard to hear.

Oh rise and show your power
(Rise up rise up) Everybody is dancing into the sun
(Rise up rise up) It's time for celebration
(Rise up rise up) Spirits time has come
Rise up now
It's time, it's time, it's time
Oh rise and show your power

(Rise up rise up) We're dancing into the sun
(Rise up rise up) It's time for celebration
(Rise up rise up) Everybody's time has come

I imagine the harvest deepening the growth and the life in spots and plots around and through Thunder Bay. According to that recent report cord on agriculture in Thunder Bay, about 10,000 acres in the area have stopped being farmed within the last five years. 30,000 acres over the last 20 years.
Not because they can’t be farmed, but because - well there are lots of reasons. That is a rabbit hole that is not about imagining the Kindness Economy. So I am not going to go there. If you want to, I would start with that report card - the link to it is on this episode’s landing page

Anyway I imagine those recently farmed fields bursting anew with food in this renaissance of local food I imagine in our Kindness Economy. And I imagine food growing in yards and road margins.
I drive the streets and see so many possible spaces food could be grown. Other cities will need to grow on rooftops, build grow-ops in highrises, but we have land, land everywhere. Many hands could be neighbours pooling their efforts, maybe taking down a fence and divvying up duties.

I imagine shuttles and carpools and community bulletins. I imagine a pouring out of love, a rolling up of sleeves, a celebration and such success. I imagine Roots to harvest and master gardeners and academics at our College and University bringing so much savvy to this local growing, and we’ll need savvy. Growing things takes skill, teaching and learning, consulting and forgiving, mapping and monitoring. Strong backs, careful hands, sharp eyes, organizing and imagining alternative.
I imagine so many Thunder Bayers pitching in and profiting from this growing of local food.

I think we will sing.

From preparing the ground through seeding, weeding and harvesting, I imagine community and joy. Such joy.

Something Different This Way Comes

We will talk about the harvest, and the sharing, next. But first I want to give a shout out to Leea McKay. She designed an ad for Something Different This Way Comes that we are running in this month’s edition of the Walleye. Check it out. Great work. I love it. And she continues to help get the word out about the podcast through her social media marketing savvy.

Something Different This Way Comes is an independent a podcast as you can find. I write it, record it, research and fact check it, compose music for it, edit and post it. The only sponsors I have are you, listeners who choose to put a little money where their ears are, and give me a boost. And what a boost each donation is to my heart and to my bottom line. There are costs that I pay monthly, programs to record and post I pay even between seasons, plus one-off expenses like that ad - my first ad for this podcast - and I detail them all at www.SomethingDifferentThisWayComes.ca . I also detail there any contributions that come my way, with my profound thanks. All I’m looking for is the equivalent of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer if you were to see me out and about and wanted to thank me for this work. If you listen regularly, and choose to contribute regularly, then you are a patron, helping get this show on the road. Thank you.

To contribute click the GoFundMe button on the home page, or email me through the contact link. You can join my newsletter too, once weekly each season giving you a little behind the scenes intel.
I am so delighted that you are listening. Thank you.

Now let’s think about storage. Food storage.

(A) 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 (E) plenty
(A) 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 (E) plenty
(G) grow (D) keep and (A) share
(G) plenty (D) every (A)-where

I have been growing most of the vegetables I eat, and harvesting locally most of the fruit I eat year round for about eighteen years now. And it is hard. There is a real learning curve.

My first year I had a whole bed of lettuce all ready to harvest at once. One woman living alone with maybe fifty head of romaine lettuce. I gave them to Shelter House, and I learned. The next season I planted less lettuce, and more broccoli and I started to figure out how to store my harvest

Grocery store culture makes it easy to miss but a harvest is a brief thing. You plant your seed, weed and maybe water and watch it grow, then you need to know the moment to harvest. Too soon and your food is not ripe, is not nourishing, and might easily rot. I have canned pears because I had set aside that evening to do the work. Even though the box of pears were not quite ripe. But I knew they’d be over ripe the next evening I had free. Well, that was a waste of time, energy, syrup and pears. So stubborn. That’s how I learned to value my harvest over my plans.

Harvest too late and your food is going to seed, it is tough, lost its sweetness, is all roughage and no joy.

Some harvests need to set a skin if you want them to keep. Some need to stay out of the sun, some need to dry in it. The science and skills of managing a harvest are multiple. Not self-evident. And when you get it wrong - what a heartbreak and a waste.

Ever bought veggies that went bad in your fridge before you got around to eating them? Food you babied from seed through weeding and mulching and harvesting and storage. It hurts more. Food is more than an expense on your weekly budget. And yet about half of what we grow we waste in our current food system. That's a huge opportunity to do more. Some goes bad before it is eaten once people buy it, but most of that wasted food is lost between the field and the grocery cart. In the  kindness economy, we figure that one out. And eat 40 or 50 % more of the food we harvest - now that’s economy!

So in the kindness economy, we build root cellars and food sheds. We grow keeper varieties of our food. Flip through a seed catalogue - millennium of people keeping seeds has given us lots of varieties that keep well. They may have grown rare because they don’t fit that narrow frame that filters option out of the path to your average grocery shelf.

But one seed planted can get you the next season’s field worth of seeds - Rarities can rebound quickly when you’re talking seeds. So - in the Kindness economy we plant a rainbow of variety including plenty of keeper varieties that keep fresh and tasty long past harvest. If you store them right. That’s where the science and technology of root cellars and keeping sheds come in. Each fruit and vegetable has its perfect conditions for keeping: light or dark, how damp or how dry, how cool or how warm. You don’t have to figure it out by trail or error, these are well documented facts. I have kept carrots in my root cellar in damp sand for two years from date of harvest, still sweet and crisp. 
Squash keep in our kitchen for months before they start drying out. Cellaring is powerful science.

I remember visiting Holland Marsh on a school trip when I lived in Toronto in the 80s. And they proudly pointed to their keeping shed, three stories and an elevator that allowed that community of farmers to keep their harvest and sell it as it was needed, pretty much as fresh as the day it was harvested. 

B&B potatoes has high-tech root cellars. Sleepy G Farm built one a few years back and now they offer a winter weekly root veggie basket that is great. Belluz Farms has high tech food keeping facilities. In the kindness economy I imagine - we’ll build more. 

But not all harvests can be cellared. Berries need jamming or dehydrating or freezing. Cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini - you need pickling, fermenting and saucing. There are businesses in Thunder Bay already expert in fermenting and canning and pickling. And local businesses are amazing value builders. They put service above profit. They bring savvy, expertise and a commitment to doing the job right. Entrusting local businesses to help turn our time is ticking harvest into year-round plenty. And giving them those many hands that make light work.

That’s what I imagine in our kindness economy. Keeping our harvest. And processing it.

Grains like wheat, oats and barley keep well given the proven science and technology of a silo. But they need processing into rolled oats, or ground flour, or malted barley. Brule Creek flour mill grows its own wheat on 400 acres, and actually grows more wheat than it needs some years to produce all of that beautiful flour. We already have Canada Malting here in Thunder Bay, and several local breweries. We need an oat mill, and more bakeries.

We already produce more milk in Thunder Bay than is consumed here. It is something we export.
And we have several amazing cheese producers now in the region. Not enough to meet our entire cheese needs, but we could get there. How delicious.

I can just imagine it. The growing and the keeping. The making and the skill. How secure. How uniquely Thunder Bay. Growing into ourselves, into our skin as we root into this place and learn to live by it. Grow life and security, health and real wealth.

And like I read in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, Such a great book detailing her family’s year of eating only what they grew themselves. The time of harvest and putting food by is so busy, needs so many hands, so much time and skill and attention - but it makes good food easy for the rest of the year. The tomatoes are already sauced. The sausage is ready to slice. Open that can of pears and voila - dessert.

We’ll have to get back into growing sugar beets and making sugar if we want local syrups for canning. But we can did that back in the forties and fifties. We can do that again. Easy peasy. In the Kindness Economy

Waste not and we’ll have more
Save the seeds, feed the land
Waste and food we’ll store
Seed the wild, many hands

Here’s another way of keeping and storing food that springs to mind when I imagine the kindness economy. Shepherding.

I went to the Farm Conference by the Thunder Bay Soil and Crop Association last month. A presentation by the Agricultural Research Station had plant producers joking over lunch about how they could get animals grazing their lands after harvest. Even without beef farms nearby. Because grasslands need their ruminant grazers. The science is solid. We can harvest the grains and spread manure as a fertilizer, but we can’t match the effectiveness and efficiency of hooved animals grazing
In eating they promote both growth of more carbon-capturing leaves and the sequestration of that carbon in the deepening soil, And in walking they break up soil and help water move where it is needed, Where a tractor risks compacting that soil and lessening its life and resilience. Same ingredients of fodder and animal, different mix. And the animal pastured wins out, Land needs its animals.

Plus, new science is finding that there are microbes that live in the rich and deep soils of wild pastures that capture that methane grazing ruminants like cows and Bison burp up, capturing and sequestering it. Microbes that die out of fields that don’t see the animals they feed. Cows here, fields there, methane-munching microbes go away. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC517830/ I’ll put a link to a study in the landing page. 

More good news - industries are springing up that can sprinkle those precious microbes back into a soil, and leap-frog it back into the rich diversity it might have lost being farmed with out grazing, or with monocultures and chemical inputs. There is one here in Thunder Bay that is now helping restore agricultural lands internationally - check out BioNorth Solutions https://bionorthsolutions.com/

So let’s let the animals we eat, live in relationship with their food. Let’s made fodder a winter thing, and pasturing a growing seasons given. And that means the return of shepherding. 

In most food cultures based on a relationship with an animal, there is a seasonal movement from winter shelters to warm weather pastures. We help move our neighbours cows from their pastures to ours and back again, and it is a pleasure. The cows are huge, I could never make them go somewhere they did not want to go. But they want to go whether the farmer leads them, they know their farmer leads them to fresh pastures. And they know to avoid the electric fencing we use to manage where they graze. It’s on light little plastic stakes, the kids can fill their arms with them and carry them easily, And pop them into the rocky ground then string the wire. We don’t bother to run the electricity on a cattle run, the cows are happy for the guidance and not tempted to test them for charge.

Shepherding is good work. It feels so good to get to know the herd, to walk with them and connect to them. And pastures that are well grazed, not too soon and not too long, grow richer for it.

In the kindness economy, I imagine cattle crossings and cattle movement, as many fields grazed as their farmers wish. I can imagine them in town too, not cows but goats or even sheep. But I can imagine grazing replacing mowing wherever people welcome that capturing and deepening of life.
I can imagine urban animals again. And urban shepherding. Complete with a wagon like the one Arno pulled in the Santa Claus parade the first year Santa’s wagon was pulled by horses. He shoveled up the manure, put it in a big bucket pulled on a bright little wagon. His holiday honey wagon. Which we took home and added to our compost. Nothing goes to waste.

Plenty is a little chaotic, a little messy. With all kinds of jobs for many hands. But so rich, so giving.
Growing community that is richer than the sum of our parts.

Nothing wasted, nothing wanted
There’s a role that you can play
Grab your courage, never daunted
Growing plenty everyday.

So we’ve imagined food in Thunder Bay’s kindness economy from growing to keeping. Now let’s talk about sharing

Because the true measure of a place’s health, wealth and kindness is that everyone is okay. No one hungry, no one turned away from the table. And if we grow this food together as a community, as a gift of love and relationship from and with this land, then obviously we share that food.

I’m talking community kitchens. And community pantries where you can pick up the food you need and take it home if you want. But mostly, a flourishing of community eating here in Thunder Bay.
Making bread and breaking bread together. That’s what I imagine in the Kindness Economy.

Have you ever gone into the Dew Drop Inn? They serve a free meal to anyone, no questions asked.
And this is no thin soup served with judgement and expectations like a Hollywood Soup Kitchen imagines. The Dew Drop Inn is a place of welcome and respect. And the food is good. Really good. 
You can taste the love and care in it. It nourishes your body and your soul. So does the company. No judgement here, only welcome and acceptance. It is a good place to be.

Plus that kitchen is professional. Staffed by a pro who has taught and led a whole host of volunteers as kitchen staff to have the skills and the savvy needed to make really good food, and waste nothing.
The chef sets the menu to suit the food in the pantry rather than shopping to meet the fashions and expectations of the day - , and that helps. But he is a professional, and the food he makes from whatever ingredients they have at hand are delicious. Delicious. Meals planned to minimize left overs. Although a skilled chef can transform many leftovers into newly delicious. Stocks and casseroles and beyond. The waste is so much less at this Community Kitchen than you get from even the best-run restaurant.

I imagine Dew Drop Inn like tables welcoming all of us everywhere in Thunder Bay, so many that no one and no place in town is more than a short walk away from one. This is where we all gather. This is where we all eat often. I mean if we grow this food together, of course we would gather to share in the eating of it. And of course we would all take part in the work of cooking and cleaning, serving and being served, whenever and however we can.

I imagine them in schools, or at least feeding school kids. I want that so bad for our kids, hot meals, respectful company, A place at their community’s table and a certainty of eating well. Plus the experience of having helped grow and maybe even process that harvest. A precious time of day that also teaches kids to help prepare and set, clear and serve. Like so many schools in Europe already manage. Oh I love to imagine this welcome difference in our schools.

But not just for students, Community kitchens for everyone. We could build on the community kitchens already there, Update and upgrade them, maybe expand them And build more wherever they are need.

We’d need expertise, skilled chefs and food managers. And they would need to teach and support, as we all learn what we don’t yet know but can figure out in order to make sure everyone has a place at our community’s tables.

And because we are wasting nothing, we will compost. Composting is not easy. A household that composts perfectly is a miracle and an exception. Composting is a science and a skill.

But Thunder Bay is about to launch its green-bin, municipally run composting program within the year. That is good. Waste not, want not. Build soil and restore life. Compost.

https://www.tbnewswatch.com/local-news/city-faces-decisions-on-new-green-bin-program-5136251

Here is your song, composed for you today:

(A) 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 (E) plenty
(A) 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 (E) plenty
(G) grow (D) keep and (A) share
(G) plenty (D) every (A)-where

Nothing (E) wasted. Nothing (A) wanted.
There's a (E) role that (G) you can (A) play
Grab your (E) courage. Never (A) daunted
Growing (E) plenty (G) every (A)-day

Waste (E) not and (A) we'll have more
Save the (E) seeds and (G) feed the (A) land
Waste (E) not and food (A) we'll store
Seed the (E) with (G) many (A) hands

If my imagining rings hollow for you because all you can think of is - who will pay? Who will pay for all this growing and storing and sharing of food? I think you have the cart before the horse. Local food to feed local people and nourish our local land, that’s the first thing. A true essential. Put that first and everything else will follow. First we do no harm, then we make sure everyone is okay. 

Start guitar…

It’s Spring. Where can we start? Donate to Roots to Harvest or the Dew Drop Inn. Volunteer. Talk about it. Plant the seed and water it. Eat Local Thunder Bay, a well spring of our Kindness Economy.

Imagine that

Something Different This Way Comes

I’ll be back next week. Thanks for listening.