{"id":102,"date":"2018-08-15T14:32:25","date_gmt":"2018-08-15T14:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/?p=102"},"modified":"2018-08-15T14:32:25","modified_gmt":"2018-08-15T14:32:25","slug":"enough-is-as-good-as-a-feast-by-kim-stanley-robinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/imaginingalternatives\/2018\/08\/15\/enough-is-as-good-as-a-feast-by-kim-stanley-robinson\/","title":{"rendered":"Enough Is As Good As a Feast – by Kim Stanley Robinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

<<As part of the Feasts<\/strong>\u00a0project, and the “Make an Everyday Meal Utopian”<\/strong><\/a> strand of it, we’ve asked\u00a0people with a wide variety of expertise to contribute some pieces which might be of interest to anyone setting out to add a salting of utopia to their daily bread. The pieces won\u2019t be anything as standard or straightforward as a set of recipes to be followed mechanically; but rather, a series of fresh ingredients to be stirred into the mix, as anyone wishes, and if they see fit.>><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve lived in a small alternative community for the past twenty-seven years.\u00a0 It\u2019s not that alternative, really just a suburban subdivision near the west edge of Davis, California, called Village Homes.\u00a085 acres of tomato fields were developed in the late 1970s, with the idea of tweaking the usual template of American postwar suburbia to something more like a European village from an older era.\u00a0Streets were made as dead-ended lanes, walking paths ran between fenceless common areas, and swales were cut into the land to capture water in the rainy season and direct it back down into the ground.\u00a0 Residents own their own homes, and usually have a small private courtyard space, but otherwise the land is owned communally by all homeowners, and decisions about land use are made by a small volunteer government with town hall voting.\u00a0Organic gardening space is available to all who want it, and the landscaping is mostly edible in the form of fruit and nut trees.\u00a0 The community is anchored by a small restaurant, a set of offices for rent, a swimming pool, and, crucially, a pre-school daycare center that rents the community center during weekdays.\u00a0 Energy use is about forty percent of typical suburban use, and about eight hundred or a thousand people live here, so it is neither very energy-efficient nor very densely populated.\u00a0 Taken all in all, it\u2019s not paradise or utopia or the housing solution to the world\u2019s ills, but it is nice, and for me it has proved the idea that urban design influences social reality, and that infrastructure helps to determine social and human relations.<\/p>\n

Thus Village Homes; and because it\u2019s residential, there is a food angle to it, including that social aspect of food we sometimes call a feast.<\/p>\n

The crucial element in our social life, as I said, was the preschool in the community center.\u00a0 We\u2019ve never met all the people in the village, but we did meet the parents of the kids that our kids were playing with at school.\u00a0 The pool next to the community center, and the big green flanking it, were obvious places to go after picking up the kids, and as the kids continued to play together, the parents got to know each other.\u00a0Thus grew some of the closest relationships of our life, those family-by-affinity relationships that I think were common in older forms of village life.\u00a0 It was easy and felt natural, and it\u2019s lasted beyond the time of the children growing up.\u00a0And as part of that, we often ate together.<\/p>\n

In those years, a gazebo at the south end of the big green served as a meeting place for potluck dinners.\u00a0 For many years we met there on Thursdays, spring through fall.\u00a0 In the long evenings people brought out vegetarian dishes, which often included vegetables and fruits grown in our gardens. \u00a0\u00a0The kids ate and played on the big green, the parents ate and talked.\u00a0The absence of meat in any of the dishes seemed insignificant.\u00a0 If someone did bring a meat dish, it was signed as such, and eaten like anything else.\u00a0The variety of dishes was wonderful, and I found the ease with which such quality dining and socializing could be created remarkable.\u00a0 Having grown up in the atomized standard American suburbia of the 1950s, consisting of nuclear families each tucked into their own mini-castle, I was perpetually amazed that such little adjustments in form could lead to such big improvements in content.<\/p>\n

As the topic here is the future of feasts, I think it\u2019s worth mentioning briefly the possibility of vat-grown meats becoming available in the future.\u00a0 To an extent this is a non-issue, in that the feedstocks for any such futuristic food products are going to still be organic chemicals derived from plant materials, so they aren\u2019t going to be very different from the already-existing plant-based substitutes for meat that we have now.\u00a0 But they might taste meatier, because they might indeed be meat, literally animal muscle and fat, cultured from sample tissues; which means they won\u2019t have come from the growing and killing of sentient beings.\u00a0 That would be worth pursuing.\u00a0 Shifting land away from animal husbandry, especially of cows and sheep, would ease our immense burden on the biosphere and the atmosphere, leaving more room for wild creatures.\u00a0 It would be better for our carbon balance, and most importantly, hugely better in terms of how we treat our fellow creatures.\u00a0 So, vat-grown meats, genetically modified?\u00a0 Yes, please.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the loosely vegetarian orientation of our Village Homes potlucks felt good, for the reasons cited above, both environmental and animal-moral.\u00a0 The variety of cooking styles at each meal was huge and made the absence of meat barely noticeable\u2014really the meals were a treat for the senses.<\/p>\n

I found that the peace and quiet of the evenings, and the sight of so many faces of known friends and acquaintances, all gathered so casually, combined to create a particular pleasure that never went away.\u00a0 Ease and unpretentiousness were very important to that feeling.\u00a0 Maybe one aspect of the commons that we don\u2019t know enough about to miss, having lived our lives without a commons, is that lack of structure and leadership.\u00a0 This was brought home to me by the way we used to harvest the village\u2019s almond trees, which grew in a three-tree strip along the street bordering our village.\u00a0On harvest day a mechanical shaker like a small tractor was hired to visit, and as its operator drove from tree to tree, we moved big canvas sheets ahead of him, spreading them under the trees.\u00a0Then he would clamp their trunks with his device\u2019s clawed arm, and it would shake down the almonds in a brief violent shivering, and when the almonds were all down we would pull the sheets over to the street and dump the almonds into the gutter, where they could be easily swept into big burlap bags and later transferred to a long carport roof for drying in the sun.\u00a0 All this was done with no leadership, and even no organization; people just did what they wanted to. \u00a0\u00a0That self-organizing got the job done as efficiently, or maybe more efficiently, than if someone had been directing us.\u00a0 This felt wonderful.\u00a0 It felt ancient.\u00a0 It was harvesting, or gleaning, and it was palpable in our brains and bodies that we had had evolved to do such things.\u00a0 We were social primates doing a social primate thing.\u00a0 The experience made me feel sure that vast parts of our brain still lie in wait, ready for moments like that one.<\/p>\n

The potluck meals felt like that too.\u00a0They were not feasts in the sense the word usually evokes; they were social, like feasts are, but they did not involve an excess of food.\u00a0 Quite often there wasn\u2019t even enough food, and over time we had to adjust and bring a little more to make sure everyone got fed.\u00a0 But \u201cenough is a good as a feast.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 This is an ancient English saying, it appears in the first few pages of Barlett\u2019s Quotations<\/em>, authored by the great anonymous.\u00a0 It\u2019s worth pondering that phrase for a long time.\u00a0 Hungry people invented that phrase.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a capitalist sentiment, in fact it reverses capitalist logic, but it could become part of a post-capitalist structure of feeling.\u00a0 The brain and body feel it well.\u00a0 One could even add to it, now, the medical news that not only is enough as good as a feast, it\u2019s better than a feast\u2014as a feast is too much, by definition, and will make you sick, especially if you feast every day, as capitalism urges you to do.\u00a0 So as a working axiom for going forward, and finding a way to get in proper synch with our biosphere, even with all the eight billion people alive, and all the wild creatures too, it seems to me a crucial thing to keep in mind.\u00a0 Enough is as good as a feast\u2014or better.\u00a0 And that\u2019s a good thing.<\/p>\n

Now that the kids have grown up and moved away, our potluck in the village has stopped happening.\u00a0 Other potlucks in the village still fill the two greens on different nights; these may be focused on kids, or on particular common areas, or friendship groups within the village.\u00a0 I always like seeing them.\u00a0 For us, the potlucks served their purpose in their time.\u00a0 Maybe we\u2019ll revive them some day, those of us who still live here.\u00a0Whether or not we do, it was a beautiful act of social creation\u2014a result of living with a commons, rearing the kids together, and thinking socially and creatively.\u00a0 Food mattered and was a great pleasure, but it was only one part of a larger way of life.\u00a0 We were lucky.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the\u00a0<\/em>bestselling\u00a0<\/em>Mars trilogy\u00a0and the critically acclaimed <\/em>Forty Signs of Rain, <\/em>The Years of Rice and Salt\u00a0and <\/em>2312. In 2008, he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He lives in Davis, California.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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