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 estate.
As a consequence of 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