My Brother-in-law Tim talking about Farm- Centric Food Systems and creating efficient communities.
Tim’s vision reminds me a lot of the essayist Wendell Berry:
“There can be no such thing as a “global village.” No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come again to the paradox that one can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one’s partiality.”
I find a lot of convergence between what Tim expresses in his video about building food systems and what I hear come from community development efforts(like the one I work with Common Change) that work in their local context toward sustainable, caring and generous communities.
Where the law of scarcity tells us that we are not enough and must look outside of ourselves and our communities to fulfill the ways we (and our communities) are deficient, the way of generosity and gratitude invites those on the margins to the center of community to offer their gifts toward the good of the whole and proclaim “together we have enough”. Reliance on global economies (food systems) and sources of assistance outside of the local community cannot build communities and local economies that first seek after the health of community.
Tim owns F.E.E.D Sonoma a distribution company that transports foods from Sonoma County farms to surrounding restaurants and markets.