meals each week and to accommodate special dietary needs. Learning about gluten-free baking recently is a great example. It also means that we are committed to our slogan of local, seasonal and organic and our mantra of “Quality pays.” We don’t have an explicit contract, but I know our members assume that we are using the best quality local and organic food that we can. When the pressure of food costs squeezes us, and I am faced with choosing local/organic over conventional, I know what my members are expecting me to do. I do use some conventional produce, but as a last choice, and often I just change the menu to fit what I do have as opposed to compromising to get what I want. Ultimately, membership means that we enter into a mutualistic relationship. A series of mutualistic relationships, really, because the relationships we maintain with our farmers are directly related to our membership relationships and vice versa. This differs greatly from the service, or even subservience, context of restaurant or catering work where everyone is trying to squeeze the other person for all they can get. Our model is based on trust.
For us, the CSK has been revelatory. We are finally putting together all of our seemingly disparate skills: agriculture, culinary arts, environmental education, management and urban homesteading into one cohesive piece — our business. We value having a home-based business, employment that matches our values, and an income that, while modest, allows us to grow our savings while also having a flexible, quality of life-based schedule.
To our members we offer, in exchange, an opportunity for them to also realize their own quality of life goals. The extra breathing room we give them each week helps them more readily balance their careers, their growing families, their kids’ extra-curriculars and community involvement. Our members are active, involved people with strong career paths. They are educated and aware of social and environmental issues. They value the provenance and health value of our food. I imagine that many of our members make sacrifices for their careers. Eating food of inferior quality, buying into a corrupt food system or paying a premium for crap don’t need to be among them.
Ultimately, we care about our members. Our work has paralleled our members through births, deaths, comings of age, sabbaticals and returns, growth and recession. I know their jobs, their homes, their families, their likes, dislikes, aversions and allergies. I can infer their income, style and politics and they, mine. We come to know each other. Feeding people in this way has a strong aspect of intimacy. It is honest work, and it enriches us.
THE OLD ADAGE about women (or men) could just as easily apply to people in general — you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. Human relationships would be challenging in the best of times, I imagine. Like everyone else, though, I wouldn’t know. Now entering my late thirties, my life has been filled with wars against other nations, relentless technological change, and of course the never-ending destruction of the planet we live on to satisfy illusionary physical “needs” and an ever-expanding human population. In an age of trauma, disassociation from the natural world, perpetual adolescence and the threat of civilizational collapse, getting along with one another is that much more of a challenge.
But I can tell you something, at least about myself. Living alone out in the woods, even as a couple, in a house you built by yourself that is largely off the grid, is pretty boring. Unless you have an exceptionally introverted personality and get most of your satisfying relationships from nature and not human contact, such a life will ultimately ring hollow. Thoreau only spent two years in the woods.
Like everyone, I was thrown for a loop by the attacks of September 11th. My former wife and I were building our cob home out in the sticks, already interested in and applying ecological concepts like natural building and solar energy. We had friends and family in New York City whom we couldn’t contact for days. The physical reality of a globalized, interconnected world was no longer something that could be ignored. Things were happening that made our lives no longer seem safe, even in our remote wooded enclave.
For me personally, this resulted in an in-depth look at the reason that the alleged perpetrator had given for attacking our nation. I use the word “alleged” purposefully, simply because no proof was ever given to prove Osama bin Laden’s guilt, and because the official story of what happened on that day has more holes in it than my colander. What actually happened on that day a peon like me will never get to know, but I won’t be force-fed a bunch of patriotic malarkey just to have an answer. It will remain a mystery, as it should for everyone, especially for those who are so sure of what happened one way or the other.
But if I did accept the premise that American troops in Saudi Arabia were the motivation for the attack, then I couldn’t help but wonder, why did we have troops there? To say it’s all about oil is to miss many of the other underpinnings of empire, but at least for Saudi Arabia, it is all about the oil. It didn’t take long for me to come across a very interesting book by Kenneth Deffeyes titled Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. My crash course in peak oil had begun. Over the next two years, our responding to the attack by invading the last oil-rich nation in the world for exceedingly flimsy reasons fueled what I will admit was an unhealthy obsession with the topic. But here was a game-changer to a young man in his mid-twenties. Things were not just unsustainable in the long run, they looked to be so in the short run as well.
I started a discussion group that met once a month to talk about the impacts of peak oil. This had the unfortunate effect of me being seriously introduced to the topic of global climate disruption by a knowledgeable attendee. As if I didn’t have problems enough already, now I had to swallow this other massive bummer of a pill. At first, our group did everything we could to raise awareness of these two topics, especially peak oil. We had only modest success, and at the time this surprised me. How could people just ignore these two world-changing–topics? Didn’t they want to know the truth? Frankly, no, they didn’t. They were having enough trouble getting along in their personal lives without fretting about the end of civilization as they knew it. Fair enough, I suppose. If I had been able to ignore these topics and continue to live my life as it was, I probably would have been happier, at least for a few more years. Happiness is a worthy goal, for sure, but it is as ephemeral as a rainbow. And by living in a false world, I would have been sacrificing any hope for the much more vital ingredient of meaning in my life. It was just not in me to do this.
As the group grew, a few began considering radically altering their existing lives to better prepare themselves for the potential upheaval of a consumerist world torn loose from its moorings. This was in 2005. Katrina would soon devastate New Orleans, causing massive disruptions to North Carolina’s fuel supplies as a result. The notion of being centered in a community capable of perpetuating itself in a relocalizing world was the main concern of this smaller group. My former wife Rebekah and I were part of this group considering a move, but our dissatisfaction with where we lived was as much centered on a general lack of available community as it was on moving to a place that would be potentially self-sufficient in a short period of time. Although a quick collapse seemed like a possibility (and still does), the idea of planning one’s life around this idea is both counterproductive and impossible. It is to make a life decision based on fear, and once you start doing that, you are doomed to be either alone and starving in the woods or controlled by some outside force. Fear is the foundation of dependency. Where optimism does not exist, it must be manufactured, or there will be no hope for success.
Two members of this group were Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson, the director and producer respectively of the all-encompassing documentary What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire. Talking with both of them, along with reading the recently published 30-year update to The Limits to Growth, allowed me to understand some of the interconnectedness of all of the world’s ecological problems. Ultimately, peak oil was one of many examples of unsustainable resource use, and global climate disruption was one of many examples of unsustainable pollution. Although both of these problems seemed to have their roots in fossil fuel use, when seen as part of an even larger problem of a fundamentally askew relationship between humans and the planet,