CEFS sponsored the Carlo Petrini dinner here in Raleigh NC on May 23rd, and about 750 people showed up–VIPs, ticketed friends, and free general admission. On June 10th, Piedmont Biofuels Industrial is hosting a benefit dinner for the Pittsboro Farmers Market. The dinner is sponsored by Eat Local Triangle, Eastern Carolina Organics, and driven by The Abundance Foundation. They have a 75 person limit for $25 for an adult plate and $10 for children’s plate. Tami says talapia has already been donated from the Roberson’s farm: They are moving their greenhouse from down the road to about two hundred feet from the house, and they’ve kindly made the market dinner beneficiary of the moving process.

june10thdinner

In between the two,

“the House Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry passed on to the full committee on Thursday a briefly-worded provision that could have huge ramifications for the abilities of state and local governments to effectively oversee anything involving agriculture. Under the heading Miscellaneous Provisions, Sec. 123 USDA Inspection and Determination of Non-Regulated Status, the subcommittee approved a provision that would ban a state or locality from ‘prohibiting an article the Secretary of Agriculture has inspected and passed, or an article the Secretary has determined to be of non-regulated status.’”

Highlights on this: “passed without discussion.” It’s on our growing small farms chatlist, thanks to Lawrence London; it’s on blogs everywhere, even under unexpected titles: try post menopausal ponderings. There are no limits on who can jump in . . . There are serious repercussions if not enough of us jump in . . .

Where it all comes together? Petrini made me laugh, out loud, with a bunch of other foodie/farmer/environmentalists who were laughing out loud. That’s a deeply good thing. Showing up is good, laughing is good. My favorite quote: “happiness is shit” and I lost some of that on translation, but on a guttural level, I get it. Carlo Petrini’s wrap up point was a simple description of bodily and earthly metabolic systems—our bodies and excrement are healthiest when we are putting in good fuel/food, and then that excrement is most fertile—i.e. builds good soil and food. This cycle works, on micro and macro levels. If we create healthy bodies, we will bodily feed the worms better and contribute to healthier planet. (Now this jumps us into green burial practices, which is a necessary but momentarily tangential direction.) I nutshell this with: we are shit/compost, and our happy/healthy bodies make a happier/healthier earth. I.E. it is a bodily duty to be healthy/happy . . . It’s from a philosophy of abundance and a position of privelege, but for those of us with the latter, it is a really good place to start . . .

I’ve been mulling a lot lately on how to build local food systems infrastructure: how do we literally put our money and mouths toward building the community we want and the ideals we believe in? I’m convinced that most positive change comes from the bottom up. You start as simply as individually choosing to stop eating processed, chemical laden foods in preference of fresh, heirloom varieties and regional traditions in preparing them, and eventually you end up half way across the world evangelizing the same, but for bigger reasons than you could have initially imagined. What I put on my own table and in my own body–here’s my acamemic/queer/feminist sensibilities showing–makes the personal political and the political personal.  My food budget, my refrigerator matters in bigger ways than just within my household.

Every personal decision I make matters. That’s another element of abundance and connectedness philosophy. And so exactly what we can and can’t determine locally and at the state level about our own desires to exceed FDA regulation (efforts) is intensely important, not only to how we create our local community and environment, but also to the potential to make national change happen. Out of that personal decision we connect and collaborate. We’re working on it. . . . When numerous strong and effective local food systems are in place–world wide–then we begin to have a better shot at equity of distribution to those suffering most from social, political, and environmental repercussions. This is where the privledge of Slow Food movements and the simplicity of a $25 benefit dinner fall into the broad mix of the in between–the working on it part–and wrap around to potential broad scale action and impact, right?

Join me for dinner on June 10th. I want to make good compost.

( back to dissertation writing . . . someday soon, I won’t have that on my plate . . .)

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