beyond the harvesting of food. For example, foraging parties are occasions for experiencing conviviality by spending time outdoors with others, either by walking or by sharing some of the work for processing harvested produce (such as shelling nuts together). Foraging can also provide an awareness of being ‘embedded’ in an environment that produces food regardless of our direct intervention, nurturing the sense that food production is not just an activity that is subject to human control and calculation. In this sense, foraging not only provides a practical focus for the coming together of a ‘community’ of other foragers, but it can also usher the experience of feeling part of an ecosystem, fostering a sense of participation in an ecological whole that includes ourselves. In this sense, the experience of foraging in a communal garden multiplies lines of interest and possibilities for further engagement, facilitating resonance with other offerings (such as Skillshares or ‘Inner Transition’ practices, discussed in the next chapter) existing within Transition, through which one may find a way into this evolving milieu.
On some of the occasions when I have been involved in growing food outdoors, I have also found the sharing of food at the end of a day’s work to be a central part of the experience. Food growing activities, such as tending to communal gardens or orchards, have sometimes included mini-potlucks, where participants could bring food they had cooked, normally homemade cakes, and share it with one another. An experience of this sort can consequently make one more receptive and eager to partake in (or organise) more potluck events, where people bring food and sit around tables to chat with each other and dwell together in a shared space where a ‘community’ is thereby assembled.33 This was, for instance, the case with events organised by the Network of Wellbeing, a Totnes-based initiative that, while formally separate from Transition, often shared an overlapping membership, and through which participation in food-growing projects within Transition is sometimes encouraged. In fact, this is how I was able to originally get involved in tending to communal gardens in Transition.
Eating also amounts to the stealth cultivation of bodily orientations and ‘tastes’ for particular kinds of foods, such as ‘organic’ or ‘seasonal’. If, as suggested by sociologist Michael Carolan,34 attachments to food are not just something we can concoct intellectually, but which are built through repeated engagement with a particular experience of taste,35 then it makes sense to see how – according to one interviewee – it is crucial to offer experiences of alternative food choices:
At our community meal, we only serve vegetarian food [...] we don’t suddenly sit up and say ‘Now, we’re going to turn you all into vegetarians’. That would just be a nightmare! It would be a waste of time. However, they’re having an experience of it, they’re getting used to people coming up and saying ‘Hey, you know, the cabbage that we’ve just been eating has come from so-and-so’s allotment, or we bought if from so-and-so, and all this stuff is made by hand, it’s not processed, hasn’t come from a factory, all these apples have been picked at a local community orchard. All these kind of things [...] these connections are happening. People are eating it. They’re experiencing it. That’s what matters.
Moreover, in all of the above activities, people are able to relate to each other through the common tending to a garden, through participation in a foraging expedition, or by sharing and eating food. In this sense, the connection between them is somewhat more ‘ready to hand’36 than if it were just based on people’s negotiation of political views about community, local food or climate change. In being brought together through engagement in growing, harvesting, sharing or eating food, it is easier for individuals to be assembled as a ‘community’, in that attachments are already partially formed as people come in with the goal of doing something like tending to the garden or preparing food.37 This is akin to the situation of going to a dance party and being able to leverage an attachment to a drink as a way to not feel ‘awkward’ for not dancing, as one does not have to negotiate explicitly the choice not to dance. Which is why occasionally those people less inclined to dance might still be able to join one such event and, on finding the right song, even join in the dancing. A party, in this sense, has a lower threshold than a dancing class, where the very explicit purpose of the gathering is to dance. To apply this to Transition initiatives, then, the ‘community’ is not built through the achievement of a discursive consensus over what action should be taken to address the issues that the event seeks to build awareness of,38 but it is – in a way – preformed by piggybacking on a particular material activity: growing, planting, foraging, cooking or eating. In engaging repeatedly in similar doings a social aggregation is eventually built nonetheless, as one starts seeing the same faces at a number of events, and begins to feel included within a ‘community’, one not sought explicitly through linguistic agreement on shared commitments. It is, instead, built through the lowest possible threshold, of offering minimally assembled spaces where people can engage in material activities that bring them together and make them stick to the activities and, at a distance, prompt them to expand the range and variety of their involvements by taking the plunge into the diversity of the Transition milieu.
It is in this sense that the engagement with food in Transition is broader than the way food can be represented in permaculture. Food becomes specifically a ‘Transition’ thing in its ability to act as a facilitation tool to draw people inside the moving of Transition, beyond a narrower focus on the food growing project isolated from a wider cultural transformation. Of course, some people who grow food will stick to only growing food. Moreover, many food growing projects within Transition are based on permacultural principles (mulching, no-digging, use of natural inputs, integration with ecological context, mapping patterns of use and interaction). It seems that food growing in Transition can simultaneously be a way of cueing the life-world of permaculture, as well as having an existence as a ‘Transition’ activity. The two are not mutually exclusive. The quality of being a ‘Transition’ thing emerges most vividly when food is approached for its ability to feed interest and curiosity for a moving that spirals beyond the original port of call into valuing other related aspects of the food growing experience (the challenges of working with others, the possibility of meaningful connection with the natural environment, the connections of food growing to concerns about jobs, energy generation or local resilience). This is how food growing facilitates participation in a culture of diverse Transition activities: an invitation seems to be open to follow through the unfolding of Transition, and intensify it in more ways than by simply growing food. In this ‘more than’ quality lies precisely the orientation towards a maze of other intra-twining practical trajectories that weave the fabric of Transition (and which, by virtue of their participation in it, simultaneously acquire their identity as ‘Transition’ things).
Critical food cultures
Alongside the tending to communal gardens, participation in Skillshares and the organisation of potlucks, the moving of Transition in relation to food unfolds through initiatives that are directed towards the development of dedicated cultures of consumption. I am referring here, in particular, to the development of community-supported agriculture initiatives and, in Totnes, the incubation of a Food Hub.
A community-supported agriculture initiative is usually one where a local farmer is supported by a particular group of consumers.39 This support can happen in various ways: from direct shareholding to the guarantee of regular purchases, to the contribution of volunteering time. In Totnes, the most representative instance of community-supported agriculture is a farm located on the Dartington estate, called School Farm. This site used to be a market garden supplying retailers in Totnes, and not originally organised as a CSA scheme. It adopted this model, however, through the support of the Transition initiative. Namely, the Dartington estate conducted a land use review, in order to know what to do with its property once the dairy farmer – to whom it leased most of the land – was to leave the estate. As part of this review and consultation came the proposal to undertake a community-supported agriculture scheme. It followed from this that the Transition initiative was approached by Dartington, as the group who would have the greatest familiarity with setting up projects of this sort. At which point, the Transition initiative in Totnes advanced the idea that School Farm could become a CSA venture, and subsequently provided assistance to the growers involved at School Farm in dealing with the Dartington
