this, School Farm adopted the form of a community interest company (CIC) and, as part of that, it started issuing ‘shares’ to customers, who would get in return a portion of the garden’s produce. While this form of direct consumer involvement is an oft-praised feature of community-supported agriculture schemes, it is also the case that it is only part of the mix through which this particular garden supports itself. Grant funding and income from educational projects are the other financial legs on which the project retains its viability. This is particularly interesting, as it shows how a CSA project of this sort is shaped in an inclusive way to enable as wide a variety of interactions with as broad an audience as possible. For one, the CSA scheme comes with the organisation of monthly work parties to which subscribers of the farm’s shares can partake. On top of this, there is also an active community of volunteers who help on the farm, reproducing a pattern of engagement and community building shared with other projects, such as tree planting or the tending to communal gardens in town. Moreover, the educational function of the CSA equally shapes the project in significant ways. School Farm is often showcased as part of ‘Transition Tours’, as an example of the type of agriculture – organic, local and participatory – that carries Transition in the realm of food growing. School Farm has also been engaged on courses at Schumacher College and other local agricultural colleges. I remember, for example, visiting School Farm for the first time on one of my earliest stays at Schumacher College, as part of an ecology course. School Farm was meant to showcase how ecological farming would ‘look’ like. Making space for the educational function, as explained to me by one of the growers at the project, is also reflected in the mix of crops in use at School Farm, where the goal appears to be diversity – to enable the development of growing knowledge about as many different varieties of plants as possible – rather than the ability to place the most lucrative crops (such as salads) on the commercial market for a premium. Therefore, School Farm is more than an attempt to make a quantitative difference in terms of its contribution to local and organic agricultural production around Totnes. It is also a site where interested audiences – typically people with an interest in Transition, horticulture or food growing more generally – can gain exposure and nurture different embodied understandings of food, discerning how the growing of sustainable food actually looks.
What, instead, of ‘uninterested’ audiences? A recent report authored by the Transition initiative, alongside other local institutional partners, observes that over 70% of food consumption in Totnes still takes place through the conventional channel of supermarkets.40 There is, in other words, another problem that Transition food activism equally tries to address. Which is to remain open beyond the circle of ‘converted’ to the mantras of local, seasonal and organic. This requires attempts and experiments to draw, into the moving of Transition, participants for whom food is mainly related to in terms of price, or convenience of access (which a supermarket, with extended opening hours and because of its nature as a ‘one-stop shop’, can satisfy). The question then becomes one of allowing the moving of Transition to involve a demographic that might not necessarily be able to connect with experiences of communal gardening, community potlucks, foraging, volunteering in a CSA or buying a veg box. For this audience, one attempt at facilitating an inroad into the animating concerns driving Transition’s engagement with food has been the development of a ‘Food Hub’. The concept behind the Food Hub is to try and attract consumers in the simplest capacity as people who want to buy groceries on a budget. Engaging with the Food Hub does not require a pre-existing concern for the ecological or social impacts of modern farming methods, or for the impacts of supermarkets on the food chain. The Food Hub is going to be based around a software infrastructure, through which to be able to coordinate a myriad local producers with consumers, ‘assembling’ a community of interested buyers and sellers. The idea is for consumers to be able to select their groceries online, for these to be delivered to a local community centre. In this way, by cutting out the middleman, it is hoped that prices will be such as to make the Hub an attractive choice for people acting in the simple capacity of consumers of food on a budget. However, by enabling contact with food that is fresh and seasonal, this may be a doorway into the discovery of new experiences of taste that may shift attachments away from ‘supermarket’ food. In this sense, the Food Hub is different – in the audiences it tries to engage – from other existing Transition projects. At the same time, by acting as a kind of ‘Trojan horse’ to induce new forms of gastronomic tuning,41 as well as by inducing a state of awareness of issues around food production,42 it shows the potential to relate back to the moving of Transition, by favouring an orientation towards the other realms of experience, both related and unrelated to food, where Transition practices can be experimented with. This reflects an approach to changing attachments and commitments – one that was pointed out to me in conversation with a Transition activist engaged in the food group – whereby change is understood as a ‘drip, drip, drip’ process; a gradual one, rather than there being a discrete moment that makes one shift their allegiances. It’s an accumulation of experiences, so that what is important is to make sure that opportunities are open for people to undertake small experiments that disclose the complexity of the issues at play in the background of everyday attachments (e.g. to supermarket shopping), and invite a questioning of what people do in their own lives. In the case of the Food Hub, it was already in the development stages of the project that early promise transpired for this sort of ripple process. A committee of local producers and local consumers was set up to enable early trials and the gathering of feedback to design a workable system. In this scoping process, connections took place between producers and consumers who became suddenly aware, for example, of the reasons why meat from grass-fed cows is different from that of battery-raised cows, and why producing a more nutritious and sustainable product eventually translates in a slightly higher end price. In other words, already through the process of designing the system, experiential cracks have been insinuated in the otherwise predominantly price-based experience of some supermarket consumers, signalling the inception of an attachment to different products and, over time, perhaps an openness to other animating trajectories woven through Transition.
In conclusion, in this chapter I have tried to begin from where Transition is often said to have begun, namely the derivation from permaculture as a ‘gardening’ approach to relating in the world, and gardens (and other food-growing projects) as a practical pursuit. My concern, however, aimed to unearth a fork in the road in the moving of permaculture that leads, through differentiation, into Transition. In the attempt to make the permaculture way of seeing accessible beyond the customary circles of dedicated permaculturists, Transition sets off as a move beyond the material and discursive set-up that is normally necessary to introduce permaculture, and – at the same time – it also discloses a tension towards more than permanent agriculture, in favour of a more encompassing ‘permanent culture’. Transition, by way of showing attunement to the challenges of ‘reaching out’ to untouched audiences, is almost an application of permacultural principles to the to disentanglement from the strictures and access barriers of permaculture proper, and effects a turn towards inclusivity. Therefore, despite the relatedness to permaculture in its observational, minimally interventionist approach, an important difference is also insinuated: namely in the way that Transition is presented and in the realms of experience it tries to engage beyond the focus on growing food. As a consequence of this, one need not be familiar with permaculture to join the moving of Transition; this has been my experience in meeting Transition activists in Totnes, only a handful of whom had deepened their interest in permaculture by taking design courses, or the like.43 Transition does not, therefore, act – as I myself had originally thought – as purely an inroad for laypersons into permaculture. It appears, instead, as a transformation of permaculture, where the formal apparatus of the latter is – to quote Rob Hopkins – ‘implicit’ and not explicit. Such features as these are equally present in Transition: the awareness and attention to context and to social/biological ecologies, the concern for making inroads as targeted and minimally disruptive as possible into the drift of people’s everyday activities, and the gradual, slow approach to change. Yet, these are all integral to the lived experience of Transition, without necessarily having to be formalised through a relatively more regimented procedure (as is, on the other hand, the process of undertaking a permacultural design).44
Moreover, the open-ended orientation of Transition, such that the engagement in it is always open to yet further deepening and intensification,
