Subsistence Agriculture in the US

Reconnecting to Work, Nature and Community

Ashley Colby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000193800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Lebensmittelindustrie

Focusing on ethnography and interviews with subsistence food producers, this book explores the resilience, innovation and creativity taking place in subsistence agriculture in America.

To date, researchers interested in alternative food networks have often overlooked the somewhat hidden, unorganized population of household food producers. Subsistence Agriculture in the US fills this gap in the existing literature by examining the lived experiences of people taking part in subsistence food production. Over the course of the book, Colby draws on accounts from a broad and diverse network of people who are hunting, fishing, gardening, keeping livestock and gathering and looks in depth at the way in which these practical actions have transformed their relationship to labor and land. She also explores the broader implications of this pro-environmental activity for social change and sustainable futures.

With a combination of rigorous academic investigation and engagement with pressing social issues, this book will be of great interest to scholars of sustainable consumption, environmental sociology and social movements.

1 Introduction

Building shadow structures at the crisis of industrial capitalism

The most systematic and comprehensive organic and living alternative to existing hegemonies comes not from the ivory towers or the factories but from the fields.

– Rajeev Patel (2007, 90)

It was a below freezing Chicago February day. In the middle of the afternoon the sun was hidden behind thick winter cloud cover. The snow was blowing across the parking lot of a Chicago Public High School on the city’s far South Side, where I parked and made my way quickly inside. As I walked through the front door, I was greeted by a pen of milking goats inside a mobile enclosure with bowls of water, dry food and a bale of hay. As I walked toward the goats I found that the smell was, surprisingly, not too strong: earthy and sweet. They were extremely curious, and I felt as though any minute one of them would make the leap out of this weak enclosure and start wandering into some obscure corner of the school. As I looked down the main hallway, I saw a number of tables set up with rabbits, quail, guinea fowl, chickens and roosters, and even ducks who were inside a plastic gate with a children’s pool.

This was the fourth annual Urban Agriculture Livestock Expo hosted by Chicago’s Advocates for Urban Agriculture, a coalition whose stated goal is to “support and expand sustainable agriculture in the Chicago area, from home- and community-based growing to market gardens and small farms” (2018, 1). The expo was a free annual event meant to allow those who keep animals for food production to share information with fellow animal food producers as well as anyone interested enough to come to the event. As I looked around, I saw people of all ages, races, and genders mingling to chat about keeping animals in and around Chicago for food production – both for meat and animal products.

A middle-aged white man walked up to a young black woman at the table in front of the ducks:

MAN: So, why ducks instead of chickens?

WOMAN: Well, for one thing they’re smarter. And the eggs taste better. But you do have to figure out the water.

M: Water?

W: Yes, ducks need some kind of pond to be happy and healthy.

M: Oh, and how do you do that exactly in this Chicago winter?

W: Well, first you need to figure out your space…

(Field notes. February 14, 2015)

The conversation continued.

I felt as if I had come across a hidden population that is taking part in a private activity of subsistence food production (SFP¹). Individuals at this event represented diversity across dimensions of social difference such as age, race and gender.² Despite this seemingly vast diversity, people at the Expo connected over their specific interest in common: subsistence food production practices, in this case with a special focus on animal agriculture. In this seemingly mundane space, inside a high school in Chicago in the middle of winter, I saw something that is both potentially transformative yet full of contradictions.

Sociologists have been interested in social, economic and political responses to modernity since the founding of the discipline. Scholars such as Marx and Weber (1930) studied the ways in which industrialization changed the structure of modern life. Recent scholarship has focused on the ways in which late capitalism is laden with contradictions and looming crises (Harvey 2017; Roberts 2009) – economic, political, and environmental. Academics from a variety of backgrounds have taken notice of these crises (Beling et al. 2017; Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007), and argue that our global society may be on the precipice of another major transformation analogous to the industrial revolution, whether we actively embrace it or not (Polanyi 1944; Leonard 2011). This new era of crises is also acknowledged by “risk society” theorist Ulrich Beck, who makes the claim that our society is in a state of metamorphosis, which “implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging” (2016, 1).

Economic sociologist Karl Polanyi’s (1944) seminal theory of the double movement argues that as market forces work to commodify all aspects of life – including land/nature and labor/human beings – counter movements arise that seek to de-commodify these resources. It is a process by which “society defends itself against domination by the self-regulating market” (Evans 2008, 271). Much of this theory is in the lineage of Marx and Weber – especially in the discussion of alienation and disenchantment of the industrial era and the resultant push to counter alienation and enact re-enchantment (Berman 1981; Foster 1999; Foster and Holleman 2012).

Taking as an assumption that the global capitalist system under which most of the world operates is now facing deeply structural changes, some scholars are exploring the alternatives that are simultaneously arising as a result of these crises (Berman 2017; McClintock 2014; Wright 2010). I define these as shadow structures, which can be any sort of individual or group social organization that adopts an alternative logic to that of late capitalism, meets presented needs, and exists parallel to (not in direct conflict with) the hegemonic industrial system. Some examples of shadow structures include: alternative currencies, tool or seed libraries, alternative modes of transportation, downshifters, voluntary simplicity, non-monetary exchanges/bartering, gift economies, freecycling or dumpster diving, among others.

This story is unlike the one that is the primary focus of sustainable consumption literature. We hear from social scientists that environmental social problems are seemingly insurmountable (Brulle and Pellow 2006; Catton 1994; Davidson and Andrews 2013; Deitz and Rosa 1994; Frickel and Freudenburg 1996; Molotch 1976; Pellow 2000; York, Rosa and Dietz 2003). Scholars of sustainable consumption tend to look for solutions within the community of predominantly white, educated, wealthy environmentalists of the Global North (Boli and Thomas 1997; Boucher 2017; Frank, Hironaka and Schofer 2000; Franzen and Mayer 2010; Inglehart 1995). I move beyond the myopic solutions that advocate slight changes in individual consumer behavior, or those that hope that technological efficiencies will lead to widespread transformation (for more on this critique, see Akenji 2014; Geels et al. 2015; Isenhour, Martiskainen and Middlemiss 2019; Lorek and Fuchs 2013; Middlemiss 2018; ORourke and Lollo 2015). When we are faced with the failure of an economic system that is fundamentally set up to exploit land and people, we must look to individuals and communities exploring transformational solutions.

This book seeks to provide next steps for readers at an impasse from the bombardment of difficult news and seemingly insurmountable crises by demonstrating the innovative, tangible and meaningful ways individuals are already combating the failures of late capitalism and simultaneously creating a new future. Further, the diversity of the people whose lives I explore in this book help to outline a sustainable future that is inclusive, varied, and innovative from people who are rarely invited into the conversation on solutions to environmental problems. However, not every aspect of this shadow structure development represents a perfect solution, so I also explore the paradoxes, contradictions and challenges that arise in this messy, complicated process of making new social structures.

By drawing on the concept of shadow structures from Berman’s Dual Process Theory, I am situating this book in a school of thought that includes Marx, Polanyi, Braudel and the Annales School, Wallerstein, and others whose main focus is the dialectical forces of history and economy. Instead of making prescriptions about what should happen (for example, how we should consume better), I am instead describing what I have observed in my data (that is, what people are already doing) through the lens of the current historical moment, which includes the messy end of capitalism and the emergent alternatives to it.

In some ways, the meanings of the subsistence producers I observe are particular to their own personal life courses, including the specificities of their time and place. In other ways, they are representative of this moment in history, and the meanings and processes of those living in it (Burawoy 1998; Small 2009). Despite the overlapping social crises unfolding (Beck 2016; Beling et al. 2017; Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2007), there are surprising ways in which many members of this diverse SFP community are showing signs of resilience, defined as the ability to adapt to major changes (King 2008).

This research is an in-depth exploration of the meanings and processes brought to the act of subsistence food production in urban, suburban and rural field sites within the larger Chicago metropolitan area. I went into the field wanting to know more about these people who decided to produce a significant amount of food for their own consumption. What drove them to take part in this activity, sometimes seen as laborious and difficult? I was curious to know how their self-reported behaviors and thoughts interacted with academic conceptions of environmental identities and actions. I was also driven to understand the complex interplay between the seemingly private nature of SFP and the potential impact on the more political or public realm.

Marginalized environmentalism

One lens through which to think about mitigating negative environmental effects is sustainable consumption, a term that has been used across academic disciplines and within policy circles for the past couple of decades. Sustainable consumption has often been co-opted by mainstream policy makers to focus on ecological modernization, which includes: increasing efficiencies or renewable technologies, putting power in the hands of individual consumer-citizens without considering limitations of power or structure on the ability to act in the marketplace, or market-based solutions that advocate slight changes in pricing or incentives (Isenhour et al. 2019). Each of these perspectives have frustrated researchers and activists of sustainable consumption, who have instead suggested that it is our fundamental social structures that are the cause of the problem, and that “durable solutions will require social pressure and cooperation, if not social transformation” (Isenhour et al. 2019, 5).

Several scholars of sustainable consumption are already exploring versions of shadow structures from the sharing economy to small-scale experiments to socio-technical niches. Schor and Wengronowitz (2017) find that some aspects of the sharing economy represent structures that mirror business-as-usual capitalism, especially among for profit sectors. However, among those participating in the sharing economy – in both the for profit and non-profit sectors – they have also found an emergent eco-habitus (Carfagna et al. 2014) that values localism, building community, less corporate structures and...