Manifesto 2022

[On the occasion of the Rogue Food Conference, Flat Rock Farms, Lewisburg, TN. December 9-10, 2022.]

Rogocity

Culturally speaking, regenerative agriculture is still truly a rogue activity. But there is hope: while the numbers of consumers engaged with it is currently small, these numbers are growing!

Our understanding of food and its role in our lives, is largely determined by cultural influences. But, increasingly, as the stream of mono-culturally engineered edible "substances" dominates our diets, our bodies–friends who are doing the best for us under very trying conditions–are increasingly unable to survive, let alone thrive, without the consumption of food that is sufficiently nutrient dense and diverse enough to support a healthy gut biome.

I suspect none of this is likely to surprise anyone at this conference.

The prevailing mode of engagement of much of the commodity food and healthcare industries is to treat food as collection of chemicals, packaged to appeal to us through sight and taste. It is an excellent example of the result of applying a reductionist ideology to human existence. Strong words, perhaps, but it denies an opposing viewpoint, that what, how, why and when we eat determines much of what we believe, what we think of ourselves. It is fundamental to us and reflects who we are, both individually and collectively, into the world.

Frederick II of Prussia, is attributed by Marshal McMahon, after one of the late Italian battles, to have said:

An army, like a serpent, goes upon its belly. Few men know how important it is in war for soldiers not to be kept waiting for their rations; and what vast events depend upon an army's not going into action before it has had its "coffee". I have read somewhere that Napoleon, on being asked what a soldier most needed in war, answered, "A full belly and a good pair of shoes".

When the Stomach Talks, the Brain Listens

There is an ancient Greek saying that men think with their stomachs and feel with their minds. The stomach does a lot more than dump acid on your latest ingestion. It also fires off signals to the brain via its own extensive network of neurons. There are 100 million neurons in this "second brain"; a far greater than those in the spinal cord–or the whole of the rest of the nervous system outside of the brain.

The "stomach brain" enables the gut to make its own decisions regarding the behavior of the digestive system and what the "head-brain" learns about what's going on in its guttural colleague. In fact, about 90% of the fibers in the vagus nerve–the main nerve for the gut–carry information from the gut to the "head brain".

So, "butterflies" and that "sinking feeling" in the stomach have a neurological basis. Neurons lining the stomach are filled with chemicals (known as neurotransmitters) that help nerve cells communicate with one another. One key neurotransmitter is serotonin, which plays a major role in mood regulation. While serotonin is also found in the "head-brain", 95% of the body’s serotonin is in the stomach. ... Growing research interest in the "stomach brain" has spawned a field of study known as neurogastroenterology, which will likely reveal even more exciting findings about the stomach’s IQ in the future.

Materialism has Had its Day

The materialist perspective of the world which has dominated Western thinking since the late 18th century, emphasizes reductionist reasoning which, somewhat simplified, results in an approach to learning that is dominated by finding out how something works by pulling it apart into its individual material components and putting it back together again, leaving out those parts considered "redundant" to functions deemed important (according to that mode of thinking). This approach is at the root of industrial food production, to chemicalized human nutrition, to non-experiential education, to process work, to the music industry, and a whole host of other aspects of our lives. Because, ultimately, a materialist perspective considers matters of the spirit redundant, or at least not essential, questions of the meaning of things, of nature, of the nature of things, of the spirit of things, of our spiritual lives are relegated to unessential, at best, and at worst deemed deeply suspicious, silly, or even denied. Joel Salatin provides a succinct description of the reverse:

You and I are much more than than the dissected pile of organs, blood, bone, and flesh. Life is more that just pieces and parts; it is breath, interaction, spontaneity.

As inside, so outside

We are, and project ourselves as, what we eat. We build cultures in which food is integrated into our sensibilities and understanding of the worlds and environments in which we live; to learn–or remember, culturally speaking–to recognize, respect, even celebrate the diversity of life, of different intelligences, of different forms of communication, of cultures. Until the nutrient-dense food from regenerative agriculture becomes more widely expected, regenerative agriculture will be slow to expand from a niche activity or "service" for an enlightened few, to a more mainstream cultural paradigm. In a recent podcast with Joe Rogan, the visionary realist farmer, Will Harris is even circumspect about whether it is going to succeed or not:

I don't know if change is going to come, or not, but

• It won't come from Big Foods; they're making too much money.
• It won't come from Big AG; they're making too much money.
• It won't come from the government because they're getting the money that Big Ag and Big Food is giving them.
• It won't come from the University system because ...
• It won't come from (the majority of) farmers because of their commitment and ownership to the status quo.

So, if there is a change, if it'll come from consumers. And I don't know if it's coming from consumers or not, because we're hopelessly addicted to cheap food.

You are not alone!

We gather here at the 5th Rogue Food Conference as rogues (and maybe some vagabonds and a few villains :-). Being prepared to 'go it alone' when the going gets tough does not mean that rogues don't appreciate company. We do, as the palpable camaraderie shows. A society more open to difference, dare I say 'diversity', that respects the rights and sovereignly of individuals to act 'outside-the-boxes', to be even a little maverick, is a healthier society. Brave individuals and groups have a distinct role to play in helping society to not get stuck in the past for the sake of worn-out-traditions. Such a role often falls to artists, designers and musicians, where such behavior is celebrated - mostly long after the fact, of course!

And let me not forget the biologists and mathematicians and others in the life sciences who've 'seen the light' or 'heard the clarion call' for a more holistic, diverse and abundant investigation and celebration of thinking about the nature of action, of being! One thing America and Australia shares, is the breeding (and epi-genetically/pheno-typically raising) of mavericks. In Michael Broyles' book Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music you'll find some fine examples. Here are just two to whet your appetite:

• Harry Partch who insisted on composing in 31-tones-to-the-octave scales, for bespoke instruments he made from wood and bone and hide.
• Conlon Nancarrow, who spent a considerable amount of his life hand-punching piano rolls to play music with an unparalleled virtuosity, complexity and precision.

Many of you will recognize the maverick in my compatriot permaculture developer Bill Mollison. And, before I tell you want we're up to and how you might like to celebrate with us, I'd like to acknowledge the guru roguish maverick with us here today: Recall his wise Socratic advice to us all in "Folks, this ain't normal":

I learned long ago at farmers' markets that most people can't handle science. I would crack out one of our eggs in a saucer and one from the supermarket in a saucer. Women would come by, children in tow and ask what I was demonstrating. I started out with vitamin B and polyunsaturated fat, and by the tenth word the child was pulling on Mommy's arm, pleading, Mommy, can we go now? This guy is boring.

Aims of the Institute

Honoring Nature in all her diversity, has the potential to once again become a dominant paradigm for how we act: studying, imitating and integrating the diversity of her life processes. Facts don't necessarily have the power to change our minds. In reality, it quite the opposite: When misinformed people are exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds, often becoming even more strongly set in their beliefs. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation stronger.

At the Institute, our aims are to:

• Explore and express biomimetic systems
• Cultivate the knowledge and appreciation of the positive symbiosis between creative practices in land stewardship, the arts, sciences and mathematics, through natural systems thinking.
• Contribute to a wider understanding of the interconnections between nature's biomes in regenerative farming practices, agroecology, rhizosphere reactivation, nutrient-dense food consumption and (gut biome) health.
• To foster emotionally and technically engaging artistic expressions of biological and ecological systems and facilitate their dissemination throughout the world.
• To encourage people of all ages to participate in learning and expressing the diversity and resiliency of Nature's ways and means.

On a Personal Note

We are attending the Rogue Food Conference, for community, of course, and to outline and discuss the establishment of the Institute as a viable means for the artistic, scientific, and educational exploration of the biological systems which form the fundamental principles of regenerative agriculture: soils, fungi, bacteria, plants, animals, atmospheres; organic matter, water, nutrient cycling.

The visible and the invisible; the sounds and the silences; the static and the kinetic.

David and Rebekah Worrall
December, 2022