Mindful Consumption in a Living Economy
Notes to Pandemic V
Early in the pandemic, my dad sent me a photo of the Farmer’s Market in his neighborhood in Los Angeles. His text caption read, “Ghost town.” One of the vendors he spoke to said that he can’t sell 50% of what he grows, and because so many farms are in similar situations, food banks and shelters can’t even take all the possible donations. Many crops are being re-tilled into the soil, and milk is being poured down the drain. More recently, there was an image circulating on social media of a mountain of potatoes being left to rot juxtaposed with a photo of literally tens of thousands of cars in line at a food bank in Texas. Each time, seeing these, I felt such an intense feeling of sadness and fear come over me, I had to work hard to keep anxiety at bay. I had to remind myself that this moment is a moment of revelation, of underscoring, of pulling back the curtain on the unsustainable, unjust, unequal aspects of our society. None of this is new. Our food system was already like this[1], we are just seeing it in high relief.
As I sit with and live through this intense period of human history I have been oscillating between feelings of hope and optimism, and periods of anxiety so intense it’s like the feeling of waking up mid-nightmare, or just after a near accident. At these times I have to work very hard to stay grounded. My chest feels tight and I have to remind myself to breathe, to look at the amazing happenings outside, to look at my daughter and the chicks we are raising as part of the home-schooling experiment we have unintentionally embarked on, to listen to the birds singing wildly above. It is mostly news that sets this anxiety/depression off and I have had to be very careful of the news I consume, even the conversations I have. Any articles, even by folks I admire and generally agree with that focus on what we should be afraid of are not ones I choose at the moment. The truth is there is a lot to be hopeful about. As in all times of crisis, people are revealing their true generous, caring selves in ways some of us might find almost surprising but shouldn’t. And parallel to horrific news is almost always something so amazing, so beautiful, you can’t help but feel hope and faith in people and the future again. It is not a matter of wearing rose colored glasses, the beauty is there. But harsh realities make their way to me, in this case through a casual text and a tweet.
The thing is, they should. I for one don’t want to look away from reality, to keep my head in the sand or risk being paralyzed by despair in the face of it. So, one question I keep coming up against is how to face the truly scary and depressing information being revealed by this crisis without spinning out, without being made dysfunctional by anxiety, fear or grief. While I am certainly mindful of what information I consume—and strongly recommend that each of us be as careful about information consumption as we are about what food we eat— I acknowledge that this only works up to a point. Beyond this, I have come to recognize that I need a practice, an inner practice that works to meet all the news that does find its way to me with a different attitude or stance, one in which I am first willing to feel, be with, but then let go of the grief, anger, and fear that come up—recognizing that being with—rather than attempting to block out— the pain of this world helps things to heal, helps things to move.
And second, perhaps even more importantly, the stance involves a patient and humble curiosity. A curiosity that asks: How can I ingest this information in a way that does not come from, or feed into, fear and anxiety, but that instead helps to further the process of illumination this moment instigates, and in so doing even helps to pave the way for a more beautiful future? How I can use this information to support the kind of world I want to see emerging “on the other side of this.”? What does this moment of illumination and destruction point to that I have power or choice over? Not only me individually, but me as part of the collective. What are the collective opportunities to choose something different together— even as we each make our choices individually?
It is a practice to do this, and I don’t always succeed. As with any practice, sometimes triggers trigger and I revert to a less healthy, reactive reaction. That’s ok. It’s understandable. But as I cultivate the capacities to meet this moment and learn more about what this moment has to offer us, I am really digging into these questions and invite others to join me. Few of us have answers right now, but it is crucial that “we walk while questioning”—as the Zapatistas, an indigenous rebel group in Mexico, so aptly puts it.
II. We are creating our future
The reality of the matter is that we are at a true crossroads, and while this is an opportunity for a better world, a more humane economy in which we recognize our interdependence with the earth and so many people’s love and labor, there is also a real possibility that this is the beginning (or really the continuation) of a dystopic future that so many films and books have been written about. A future (present) in which no one leaves their homes. Food arrives in boxes from the chain grocer. All interactions are mediated by screens. People with means live with the knowledge that others are being treated like chattel on the periphery.[2] And not just during the pandemic. Seriously some people were already living like this—by choice, it felt more convenient.
My goal here is not to incite more fear, but to encourage us to take seriously that both the harsh realities and the hints of more humane alternatives being illuminated in and by this crisis are not forgone conclusions. We need to think seriously about where and what our power and capacities to act are, both our actions and inactions are impactful. They are impactful not only in the immediate ethical sense, although by all means let’s be ethical, but also in the longer term story we are helping to create, of the possibilities we are leaving open or foreclosing, through our behaviors in this moment.
As I write this, I am very mindful of our differential access to “choice.” Some of us, especially those of us in low wage jobs, or recently unemployed, have to do what we can. Certainly, we each have choices to make, but the ability to make choices—through no fault of our own—varies. So please, anything I say here is not meant to be prescriptive or judgmental, I am simply inviting us to continue to use this moment of “pause” as an opportunity for honest study and reflection.
I know many of us are feeling vulnerable and scared of this virus, but I think it is important to remember that the virus is not the only ill facing us. We need to be concerned about holistic wellbeing, mental and physical health, our mother earth, and the kind of communities and economies and democracy we want to see emerge (or survive) on the other side of this.
It is not my place to tell anyone if they can afford to risk driving to their local grocer’s or the farmer’s market, but what I will say is that it is so crucial that each of us be discerning, for ourselves, about when we are making choices out of convenience or fear, and when we are making a choice because it is for our wellbeing—remembering that we are part of a larger collective whose wellbeing we must also tend to. We need to ask ourselves who and what we are supporting: Amazon/Whole Foods and other big box stores that are not only forcing their workers to work without adequate protection, but who even before Covid 19 were causing numerous small and medium businesses to go out of business and transforming people’s expectations for convenience to trump all need for human connection? Or flesh and blood people and businesses and a world in which they are still possible? Cheap meat and dairy produced by an industrial food system that sees animals and workers as resources to be used as cheaply as possible with no thought of eco-systems, families, or humanity? Or small farms who process their own meat, charging a realistic cost for food that they grow with love, care, and a recognition of their embeddedness in an earth, community and a living economy? The transformation to a resilient, diversified, locally based economy is not something that will or can wait “until the other side of this”. But there is so much more to what’s at stake.
Some of the ways in which we choose to accept social distancing and sheltering in place more generally are not simply benign ways in which we are obeying the law and containing the virus, they are also furthering trends in isolation, detachment from nature, from people, and from the living systems that we are all dependent on. Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not encouraging us to neglect these measures—nor am I one who is advocated for the premature opening of economies for economics sake— I am inviting us to be discerning, to feel into how we are living and consuming in this moment, and how it makes us feel—not in an immediate gratification sense, but on a deeper level, especially now that we are hopefully going slower, slow enough to feel. This is not a question unique to this time. In fact, as I said earlier, there is very little about this pandemic that is completely new (apart from the virus itself).
The beautiful part of this is that as we make those choices from this place we actually start to reclaim and reframe the economy. Even while our leaders speak of our country and this economy solely in terms of the stock market and other measurable statistics, we can begin to more palpably feel the ways in which the economy is itself a living breathing collectively agreed upon thing.
[1] Actually one of the silver-lining facts of this time is that small farmers are weathering this crisis MUCH better than our industrial food system, and there is a lot of hope in this! Check out: https://fair.org/home/ricardo-salvador-on-the-food-system-covid-19/
[2] For those who can stomach it, the second episode of Black Mirror is a good example of this.
