Food Systems Transformation

For resilience against climate uncertainties, supply chain disruptions, and food security issues, developing robust place-based, local and regenerative food systems is key.   

 

In 2023, New England State Food System Planners Partnership commissioned a report, New England Feeding New England: A Regional Approach to Food System Resilience, which put forward a regional goal of New England producing and consuming 30% of its food needs in the region by 2030. However, according to the report, to achieve this goal would require maximizing current existing agricultural land as well as clearing an additional 588,000 acres. Already the integrity of ecosystems is undermined as they are fragmented for uses that degrade soil and health. Farmland is being converted to solar installations or development; forests are being decimated for farmland or development or solar. We believe there is another way to meet regional food needs that enables existing farmland to be protected as farmland; forested ecosystems to remain forested with a focus on their health and integrity, and solar to go on already-developed sites.

 

To achieve food self-sufficiency for human communities in the Northeast USA/Eastern Woodlands Biome requires a change in how we source carbohydrates, proteins, sweets, oils and fats. What is also needed is a change in what we regard as food and, most importantly, entering into a deeper sense of relationship with the living world that sources our energy. 

 

“If the central pathology that has led to the termination of the Cenozoic is the radical

discontinuity established between the human and the nonhuman, then the renewal of life on the

planet must be based on the continuity between the human and the other than human as a single

integral community. Once this continuity is recognized and accepted, then we will have fulfilled

the basic condition that will enable the human to become more present to the Earth in a mutually

enhancing manner.” (Thomas Berry, “The University,” in The Great Work, 80).

 

Being integral with the rest of the Earth community: how does this affect the dominant culture’s relationship to food—no longer as a commodity but connecting to aliveness, in service to life. 

 

Given the uncertain future, learning to listen to the natural world is a key adaptive skill. How do we develop this capacity, as individuals and as a collective?

 

Food—and the old and new cultural rituals we have around preparing and sharing a meal and nourishing our communities—offers an opening into a different web of relationships as well as into paying attention and listening to the larger story unfolding around us. It also provides a fertile context for highlighting current systemic dysfunctions as well as considering solutions. 

 

The Northeast USA/Eastern Woodlands Biome was historically a region rich in mast forests and native seed grains. Indigenous peoples co-created abundance with the forested landscape for millenia. Protecting forests is essential for the health of the region’s water, air, soils, biodiversity, and climate stability. Instead of clearing additional land for agriculture, how can we develop sustainable relationships with current agricultural land, the standing forests and other wild and native local sources of food that have evolved in place, and that are already abundant but currently undervalued or rendered invisible by the current system? Transitioning to a relational community natural agriculture model, growing foods that are more nutritionally fulfilling, supplies a higher nutritional density on a smaller amount of land. What processing infrastructure and co-operative models are needed to make them accessible?

 

Bioregional Cuisine

Bioregional cuisine relates to local and seasonal food produced and consumed within the bioregion, in ways that support the integrity of ecosystems and the thriving of all forms of life. The cuisine is provisioned using native ingredients and ingredients from that place from specific eras of migrations rather than relying on a globalized supply chain. 

 

Developing a bioregional cuisine and building a bioregional pantry of foraged, forest, and local ingredients helps connect people to the interdependencies and seasonalities of place, and helps to preserve wildlands and safeguard biodiversity while addressing issues of human food security, nutritional quality, food justice, and environmental and climate challenges. It also centers beauty and art—a celebration of the innate beauty and creativity of life. 

 

In partnership with Forest Kitchen, founded by Kyra Kristof, the Wellspring Commons Stewards are co-creating educational models based on bioregional cuisine. These are kitchening workshops and immersives designed to give experiences of the taste and texture of place and the extraordinary diversity available in the local landscape, introducing participants to new and unfamiliar foods and palettes, to the depth of nourishment available around them, as well as to the ecosystems of relationships that produce these foods. These workshops serve a diverse range of stakeholders in food systems transformation. In concert we are contributing to the development of a bioregional pantry and to systemic elements of a bioregional food system. 

 

Culinary storytelling of place brings about a narrative shift through nourishment, communicated through a meal and its conversations with the enteric brain. The enteric brain, or enteric nervous system, is a complex network of neurons located within the walls of the gastrointestinal tract that is in constant communication with the central nervous system, forming gut-brain access. Bioregional cuisine links soil health to relational land care and agricultural practices to gut health to the enteric brain, which directly impacts how we as individuals, families, organizations, and communities are able to navigate not-knowingness, uncertainty, and the impacts of climate catastrophe. “The more your body is made of place the more in tune you are and know what place is asking of you.” - Kyra Kristof

 

Kitchening with unfamiliar ingredients invites curiosity, creativity, intuition and expanded sensing. These are also invaluable skills to develop to navigate future unknowns, along with the real and tangible value of joy and play—qualities that aid in navigating discomfort or challenging circumstances, fostering adaptive qualities that will become increasingly important. 

 

“There is a story of food as fuel. A story that gets told in the counting of calories, reinforcing a vision of bodies as mechanical. But what if the transformations of the beings we ingest—the bodies who become our bodies—is a conversation we are having with aliveness? Whose bodies are we of? What conversations are we having? Are our bodies bioregional? How might we be able to listen to the places we inhabit when our bodies are truly of those places?” - Kyra Kristof 

 

The bioregional pantry is composed of provisions that are both commercially and not-yet-commercially available, such as hickory nut oil, from a native mast crop of this biome.  Ingredients for the pantry are sourced from providers who model right relationship in their growing and harvesting methods. The pantry represents the web and relational patterns and brings them into wider awareness. 

 

The bioregional cuisine and pantry together also serve to raise public awareness about and help address current hurdles around processing bottlenecks—regarding forest nut flours such as acorn, for example. As an alternative to an industrial extractive system that commodifies generous free living plants for profit, we are exploring ways to integrate high quality native foods that are not commercially lucrative into the foodway, and collaboratively pursuing sustainable community models for gathering and sharing the harvest. 

 

This foodways exploration serves as a nexus for exploring solutions across sectors, between foodshed and fibershed, ecological and human health and land conservation stewardship, for example.

 

• What are the assumptions at work regarding what is considered food, and the foodshed? 

• How does eating from place—and in particular the connections to our gut microbiome and nervous system— help us listen to place?

• Where does the infrastructure (community-scale) need to be built?

• How might the bioregional pantry serve as a commons, a shared body, and what are the relationship structures to support that?

• How are we creating contexts for emergence, recognizing that systems are changing and some of what is needed doesn’t exist yet?

• What innovations and creativity would emerge from our curiosity about what foods are already here (rather than defaulting to the ingredients and flavor palettes we are habituated to)? 

• What stories want and need to be shared from and through relational foodways and bioregional cuisine?

• How does bioregional cuisine nourish human bodies to help root to place, and have the strength/fortitude/clarity/courage to navigate a world of uncertainty we have never encountered before?