Loren Cardeli: Who really feeds the world? (ep380)
“For every $1 of aid Africa gets, $24 is taken out. We have to address something deeper, something more systemic, but we don’t want to talk about that. We want to talk about food waste, composting. Those are treating the symptoms of the disease, not the root. ”
In this episode, we revisit our conversation recorded in late 2020 with Loren Cardeli, the co-founder and Executive Director of A Growing Culture, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, advancing a culture of farmer autonomy and agroecological innovation. A Growing Culture is a farmer-centric organization that believes the key to sustainability lies in returning small-scale farmers back to the forefront of agriculture. As part of this growing movement, Loren and his colleagues promote farmer-led research, extension, and outreach, helping to create sustainable, self-driving futures.
Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include the reality of who really feeds the world, the leadership of small-holder farmers in sustainable agriculture, the limitations of top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions, and more.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app, or read on for the episode transcript.
Artistic credits:
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Ali Dineen
Episode-inspired artwork by Lucy Haslam
Episode references:
Hunger for Justice, a storytelling series designed to center justice in food system dialogues, by A Growing Culture
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book by Paulo Freire
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Transcript:
Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Loren Cardeli: I grew up not around agriculture. I grew up outside New York City, Westchester County. I grew up with two very dynamic and different food cultures. My father is Puerto Rican and my mother is Jewish and food was woven into the stories. It was woven into our cultural experiences and behaviors, but it took me a while to understand how important that was.
I grew up in a hyper-intellectual family—one of six and I grew up with some serious learning disabilities, a language disorder, a word retrieval issue, ADHD, and a number of things that. That led me to a situation where I felt I needed to retreat from society. Initially, I pursued arts and creative media and music, because I couldn't find the words that I wanted to express myself, and I remember some of the most painful moments as being around that dinner table, around that food where conversation was always flowing, and having an opinion and thoughts, and not being able to express it. And as soon as I tried, my words wouldn't come out and I'd be paralyzed and my brother would jump on me and make fun of me, and I remember what it was like to feel silenced and unheard. It was pretty painful.
I carried that for a while, unable to relate in many ways, and my younger sister, who's my best friend today, when she started high school, she was in 9th grade, I was in 10th, and she saw my loneliness, my frustration, and she pulled me aside one day, and she said, we have to get you out of here. In my mind, there was no other place. There was no other opportunity. We weren't in a family where boarding school or private school was ever an option. We didn't know anybody who did these things. I told her that was crazy. And she told me that she was committed to seeing something better for me. So my sister confronted my parents and convinced them to find a way to get me out of there. I really think of that as one of the moments that saved me.
I went to boarding school up in Vermont the next year and I milked cows at five in the morning before class and I started to get connected to the environment. And that's when I realized how our relationship to the environment is really the epicenter of how we relate to each other and our world around us. I realized what it was like to live in a culture that was interwoven with ecology. And it was at that moment that I realized I didn't want to go to college, so I took some time off, deferred and. saved up my money working at a hardware store in New York, and got a one-way ticket to Latin America on my 18th birthday, got the fuck out of town, and wanted to prove to the world that I was independent.
And I ended up meeting somebody at a bar that first night—a twenty-eight year old, charming Casanova-esque man, who was wearing a purple bandana, wrapped tight around his long hair and I remember the moment that he saw me and met me, I was at a bar, [and it was] one of the first times I could order a drink, I was just freshly eighteen and outside of the United States and I went to the bar and I asked for a beer and they looked at me and said, what kind? I said, what do you have? They said dark and light. I ordered the light and this hand slapped my shoulder and said, men don't drink light beer. So I said, okay, I'll take a dark beer, and at that moment he wooed me into heading out into the jungle that night.
We got on the back of a truck, we stopped and got some basic supplies and drove for hours. We left the city and it turned into country road, country road turned into dirt road, dirt road turned into a logging road. And we finally ended up in this little village. It was about 2am. No lights or anything and we dropped our stuff off and he said, there's a two-hour walk from here into our camp. And somehow, without a fear, without a thought that I might get taken advantage or something, I kept going. We walked through the jungle that night. And ended up at this slash and burn camp where I lived with [this man] and another Indigenous man who was about fifty-five years old.
And the two of them trained me on how to live, we drank from the same stream that I bathe and wash my clothes, and we hunted our own meats. We grew our food, we harvested wild foods. We built cabanas. They taught me how to shoot guns, how to run chainsaws—everything. And that relationship lasted multiple months, it transformed. Started off all like bush life 101, started off with this air of romanticism, where I couldn't believe I felt like I was the luckiest person in the world, learning from these folk and being immersed in culture and being able to live off the land like a badass. And then a couple of things happened.
The first thing that happened was, I hadn't been successful at hunting, so I went to the nearby community, which was that town that we got dropped off at—they don't speak Spanish there. During British control, they outlawed the language. But this community that we lived near, which was two hours away, which was officially our closest neighbor. They only spoke Spanish. There was nobody who spoke English. So it just gives you an understanding of how during colonial occupation they never got that far into the bush and we were further. So I walked there with my machete, went to negotiate with the chicken farmer to bring back some chicken to cook for dinner.
And I heard some screaming and I ran over there and I saw a young man, I guess my age around today. And he was holding his son in his arms. I remember this, his son's body was pale, limp. His son had died from drinking the pesticides his father used on his farm. The father didn't label the pesticides. And the son thought that it was water. Now, it was at that moment that I realized how harmful industrial agriculture was, but [also] I realized something deeper, that the gateway to environmental erosion is cultural erosion. And that the very first step of the industrialization of our food system is to make culture obsolete. So here we were so close, but yet so far away.
Learning how to live in the jungle, how to live off the land, how to grow sustainability and have a surplus, so close and so far—this little town that didn't know the Indigenous local knowledge because what? They were connected to a logging road. And what? With that connection becomes middlemen and brokers and pushing down and agrochemicals down their throats. And once that relationship starts, it erodes. Libraries are lost, elders are lost, knowledge eroded.
That is the threat to industrial agriculture—that local knowledge. That is the threat because it makes industrial agriculture obsolete. Farmers, unnamed scientists over millennia, developing local varieties, local ways of growing.
And when that's gone, we have no choice but industrial agriculture. So that's a moment when I realized I wanted to create the nonprofit A Growing Culture. I wanted to work with farmers around the world and celebrate their knowledge and their ingenuity.
But besides that, I went back to the community, shook and scared to the two farmers that I was living with. And something else that changed me was that I realized that the relationship that they had with me was more and more abusive. I did all the washing dishes, carrying water, washing clothes. At first, I was excited just for any opportunity, but then the tone changed, the dynamic changed. Not with the elder. He was always grateful to me, but the one who was about twenty-six or something, he started threatening me and scaring me, and here I was, eighteen years old, on the bush, scared shitless. He would scream and shout, throw things at me and he never hit me, [but he did] raise his hand. I was always scared that he would.
I became—I don't know what word to use, but in service to them. And to a way that wasn't an option or a choice. And then I started realizing that some of the trees that we were cutting and miling, that I thought we were using to grill cabanas? When I would be in the woods for hunting or gathering materials, I noticed those piles were missing. So I figured out that they were selling wood on the black market. I realized that they were growing drugs. And I realized that there was a legacy behind them, a history that I didn't know, and so I started finding this out and I was scared and one night, the elder told me that I had to sneak out in the middle of night if I wanted to be okay, and so I left.
Got on my way. To the logging road and hiked and hiked until I could hitchhike out of there. And I just continued traveling for about four more months through multiple countries, through Latin America, working at different farms, in different communities, but that was a pretty influential moment in my life.
Kamea Chayne: Wow, what a personal journey this has been. I'm glad you got out of there okay, and you came out founding this amazing nonprofit, A Growing Culture in 2010.
I know through all these experiences, you're really dedicated to centering and supporting the struggles of smallholder farmers. I would love to hear how you define smallholder farmers. I do know that the majority of farmers worldwide are smallholder farmers, but is this picture any different in the United States and in other industrialized countries, where Big Agriculture dominates?
Loren Cardeli: When you work on a global scale, it's hard to find the language that works. Terms mean different things. Language doesn't always translate. And so even the word "farmer", is loaded. When I founded this organization ten years ago, I thought "farmer" was pretty inclusive. But in the United States, we have a term that a lot of other places don't, which is "farm worker". In a lot of the world, they don't have that term. They're farmers, they're farmers that are prevented from owning land, farmers that are pushed off land, but they're fucking farmers.
When you have pastoralists, you have hunters and gatherers, you have fisherfolk, you have all these people that are central to the peasant food web but that don't consider themselves farmers. So as an organization, it's hard sometimes because for every word we have to use, we have to unpack it and almost unlearn to learn, and to build in a curriculum.
We prefer the term "peasant", but that is, for a lot of folks, triggering and we want people to sit with that, to understand why that is.
You did say that farmers, smallholder farmers, produce the vast majority of the world's food, and that is true. Smallholder, Indigenous, and peasant food producers only control 19% of agricultural land, yet produce over 70% of the world's food supply, protecting over 90% of agricultural biodiversity. They do that, faced with unimaginable adversity. This is a population that is not white.
We think that farmers in the United States are white, because we've created terms like farmer and farm worker. To separate them, to divide, so one has power and one doesn't. But all over the world, in the United States alone, it's estimated that 70–80% of hands that touch your food are immigrant hands. And in a global context, it's probably... I don't know what you would estimate, but at least 90% of the hands that touch your food are not white. And those hands are feeding the world, [while] they have less than a fifth of the agricultural land, faced with unimaginable adversity—racial discrimination, gender discrimination, unfair market policies, lack of control, trade agreements that predate upon them, neoliberalism that has put them under attack every day of their lives. And yet they still manage to outproduce an industrial agriculture.
It's important to imagine what they can do if we tip the balance in their favor. If we removed those barriers and struggles that we unfairly put upon them. But then we'd have to understand what is agriculture? Agriculture is a ten thousand year old knee on the neck of the ones who grow our food.
From the very first day, with the founding of agriculture, the very seeds sown, were seeds of injustice, patriarchy, hierarchy. All of a sudden, we have the haves and the have nots, we had the rulers distributing the surplus, controlling the surplus and the peasant class producing the surplus. Those who produced were not in control. Militaries were amassed, walls were built, laws were created, to govern and to shape a system designed to oppress the very ones who grow our food—imagine that.
Climate change, the industrial prison system, the globalization, the patriarchy, are all the fruits of those very first seeds sown. That's the reality.
We live in a world where a majority of the world's hungry are actually growing food. Whether you're in India or the United States, suicide rates among farmers are at alarming levels. So I guess the bold idea is to imagine a food system that nurtures the ones who grow our food rather than exploits them.
Kamea Chayne: What really stands out to me from your organization is that your mission of realizing a sustainable food system is similar to the missions of many other organizations, it's just that you have so much embedded within this vision of a sustainable food system that often gets left out of the missions of other organizations. And you actually don't spend a lot of time talking about the more commonly heard things like agrochemicals, food waste, the efficiency of the food system, soil health, and a lot of the more technical land practices, in your advocacy. Rather, like you just highlighted, a lot of your work highlights conversations around power and justice.
I'm curious what you think we miss out when our focus is just on the ecology aspect and what we're doing to the land, and leaving out the power relations and power dynamics between people, and the hierarchical structures that exist.
Loren Cardeli: I think we all have a vision for a better food system, for a more sustainable food system. What A Growing Culture believes is that the only way to do that is to address power; is that our relationship to the environment is a reflection of our relationship to society. Until we dismantle these hierarchies, until we dismantle the injustices and the patriarchy, we will not have sustainability.
It's really interesting to look [across] the United States and all the the organizations committed to changing our food system. I don't see them talking about power or injustice or privilege.
I see them talking about soil carbon. I see them talking about chemicals and pesticides. I see them talking about why can't people just buy local food, vote with your fork, consumers [are] the only way to change this world.
It's incredible because on our Hunger for Justice broadcast [that we started] this year, during COVID time—we've had over a hundred presenters, from Brazil to Philippines to New Zealand to all over the United States, to Africa, Asia, everywhere, Indigenous, smallholder, peasant farmers, activists. And a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about what was the big takeaway, and it was crazy because not a single one of them advocated for composting. Not a single one of them talked about food waste. Not a single one of those communities talked about if we all bought this one brand, this one product. Then when you go to these conferences, I don't want to name names, but when you go in the United States to these regenerative and sustainable Ag conferences, presentation after presentation is another white person presenting a solution that's going to [change] the world. And that solution addresses everything. That solution can see the elephant in the savanna easier than the elephant in the room—it circumvents privilege. It doesn't address power. It's taboo.
West Africa produces about 80% of the world's cocoa, but gets less than 2% of the $100bn revenue. Now, I ask everyone listening, when making those farms regenerative and organic, exploitation is still baked into the system. For every $1 of aid Africa gets, $24 is taken out. We have to address something deeper, something more systemic, but yet we don't want to talk about that. We want to talk about food waste. We want to talk about composting. These aren't the solutions, those are treating the symptoms of the disease, not the root.
During our Juneteenth broadcast, Chris Newman of Sylvanaqua farms, when he was finishing up his excellent forty-five minute monologue, which covered the history of agriculture in the United States—which I think everybody should go to, it's available on our YouTube channel—he was asked for a closing statement, and [in] his closing statement, they asked him, what was the last thing [people] should hear? And he said, after thinking for a second, if the world is to be saved, it's going to be saved by BIPOC people. There's a couple of ways to interpret that. And I think some of my own unpacking and unlearning has led me to realize that initially I thought I was wrong. At first I listened to it and I said, that makes sense. The adversity that's been dealt to these communities allows them to see things differently. Adversity breeds ingenuity. And that that's what he meant.
But I realize that in its own way, that was flawed, racist. I had to think deeper. When you look at Indigenous communities all around the world, there's a sense of animism. There's a common thread of a different way of relating, different way of seeing, a different way of being, they look at the rivers as kin, animals as kin. And personally, I think what he meant was that if we are to be saved in this world, it's going to be adopting another way of relating to this world, another way of engaging with nature, with brothers and sisters and humanity. There's another way out there.
And the problem with industrial agriculture, with monoculture, [is that it] doesn't allow freedom of choice, it doesn't allow diversity, it doesn't allow other ideas.
Kamea Chayne: Perhaps to add to this, I was recently speaking with two Afro-indigenous farmers who shared similar concerns to do with their struggles with local officials there in Kenya and Ghana, or organizations from the outside coming in to encourage them to adopt the Western forms of "ecological agriculture" that are really just limited versions of the indigenous forms of agriculture that they had been practicing, but transformed into a more extractive approach to fit the global economy and the global market. But that leaves out, like you said, the deeper worldviews of how they relate to the lands and to all beings. These relationships that are just completely erased in how we place value on things in this globalized economy.
And, for example, to many of their communities, seeds are actually not for sale because they're sacred to their communities, as a part of how they build relationships to one another, and to the land. I'm curious, with your work with communities and smallholder food producers all over the world, do you see similar trends happening, where there these outside forces, oftentimes Western organizations that have good intentions of wanting to help improve what's going on around the world, but really going in to offer limited sets of solutions that actually detract from the localized, Indigenous, and place-based knowledge that people had already been embodying and practicing?
Loren Cardeli: Yeah. That's development, isn't it?
Kamea Chayne: "Advancement."
Loren Cardeli: Yeah. That's such a hard dynamic there, Kamea. I've been all around the world, I've worked in multiple countries, and I'm hard-pressed to find a model that actually did good. Good intent doesn't mean a damn thing anymore. There's a proselytization, a missionary-esque model of development that pushes...
So often, even these green NGOs are founded on the same premise of the Green Revolution—they're repackaged, rebranded. It's that, we need more calories, that hunger is the result of not enough food, and that through increasing production, we get the eradication of hunger. Which is just bogus. Right now, we produce enough food for about 1.5 times the population, yet 1.2 billion still go to bed hungry. The math doesn't work without injustice in the equation. It's not about the amount of food produced, it's about the amount of food delivered and accessed.
I've seen it all over the world, NGOs pushing these models. The vast majority of them are backed by industrial agriculture. One Acre Fund, which was awarded The Audacious Project, which was the most audacious and bold idea or whatever, a few years ago. They push seed and fertilizer input packages on farmers. They tell farmers exactly how to farm. [And the] farmer gets a better yield the first year, but gets stuck onto a model of agriculture. The farmer doesn't have autonomy over their practice.
There's a number of stories that I can share around the world where I saw development treating farmers as simply beneficiaries of aid, rather than active innovators. It's disgusting. It's models of white saviorism, models of top-down extensionalism, and it really breaks my heart.
Because those communities are not only land defenders, they're not only defenders of sacred biodiversity, but they're active innovators and problem-solvers and solution-generators. If we are to feed the world, if we are to have a sustainable or "regenerative" future, then it's going to be based on the knowledge and ideas of these people. And when I push programs to funders, to try to get capital to these grassroots communities, they want to see how much soil carbon is being added, how much yield is being increased, when personally, I don't really care about that.
Give me a metric for the deobjectification of the ones who grow our food. Give me a metric for cultivating agency and resilience in the face of neoliberalism. That's what we care about—unlocking that potential for the betterment of us all. And you're right. Seed savers all around the world, they understand that seed is not owned by an individual. It's our collective ancestry, it's our collective right. They understand that you can't trace the owner of that seed, because it's been adapted over millennia by unnamed scientists and farmers who are adopting these varieties to mitigate the natural ecological and social problems of the world.
Last year around this time, I was in Uganda working with some women seed savers, and this woman walked me to the back of her house. She showed me this field of groundnuts—peanuts. It was a beautiful field. She was like, it hasn't been raining much, but look how strong this crop is, it's drought-resistant. It was beautiful. And she told me that, over 20 years ago, when Joseph Kony, a warlord was cutting off the nose, lips, ears of women and children, using child soldiers, terrorizing communities up and down northern Uganda, the government could not fight back, so what they did was move all these people into local internment camps, local refugee camps, for people that never had to leave their country. She told me, she had a moment's notice before she left her house, and she had to grab her family heirlooms.
And what did she grab? It was those seeds. And so, every year, for over 20 years, at the edge of that camp, she'd plant this seed just to keep it alive. Every year she made sure that that family heirloom was staying alive because it was sacred, it was the most valuable possession to her family. And today, she has a field of it. You don't patent that, you don't hoard that.
Seed is the DNA of our culture. It weaves together the fabric of our society.
Kamea Chayne: That really illustrates a huge problem with our economic system, which is that through the way it places value monetary value on things, there are so many things that are not captured in that value. It just leaves out so much that it [makes] everything transactional. Overall, it leads to the degradation of our collective health, because our health is not just reliant on monetary value. There are so many other forms of wealth and riches that we need, in order to survive and thrive. This really speaks beautifully to that.
And I'm actually very curious about the work that you do on the ground, because you work around the globe with smallholder food producers in different countries and regions, [in which] people have to navigate different local politics, regulations and laws and their own sets of struggles that vary from place to place. With so many variables, how do you approach supporting these food producers in their own unique struggles and causes?
Loren Cardeli: By recognizing that last part—which is that everywhere is different. Everywhere needs something different. There's local nuance and context baked into every approach. We're not a one size fits all organization, and so many of the nonprofits that exist in the world, they're designed to champion this one-size-fits-all, the silver bullet, and talk about scaling up. We're not into that. We believe in scaling out, more than scaling up. And scaling out is scaling out the agency and resilience of farming communities.
So the way we work with these communities is threefold. We raise capital to bring to the hands of grassroots groups, so that they can problem-solve, they can innovate, they can drive solutions and incubate ideas. We try to make that as untethered as possible. The second thing we do is connect groups around the world. Farmers in Madagascar need to learn from farmers in Mongolia, who are learning from farmers in Bolivia. The revolution might not be televised, but it will be open-source, and it's time to collectivize that innovation and democratize that information. And so we've built a digital knowledge-sharing platform that is called the Library for Food Sovereignty. It's governed by the community that it was designed for. And it holds the stories, the ideas, the innovations, the successes, the failures and case studies of the grassroots population. We connect producers and activists through digital and analog ways, but we understand that this struggle is global, and that solidarity is and has to be a part of that.
And the third way that we work is communications. To learn, we must unlearn. We must decenter ourselves and center the peasant food web, the community that, faced with unimaginable adversity gives birth to unbridled ingenuity, that community that's outproducing industrial Ag needs to be centered and celebrated, and we fight for that and we do that. So all of our programs involve pieces of each of them. And so in the Philippines, where our partners are being faced with a murderous dictator who kills a farmer every four days, we're working on advocating for their rights, the right to land, the right to stand up, we're putting the pressure with letters to the UN, to stand up to this murderous dictator.
In Tanzania, we work with Samwel Nangiria and the Maasai of Loliondo, fighting back against an unfair land grab led by an eco-tourism company in Boston that celebrates their outreach to the Maasai community, but are involved in a land grab pushing out the homes. Samwel has been arrested 15 times, he's been shot, he's been tortured in jail, fighting for his ancestral land. So we work with them to do storytelling. We've sponsored programs so that the community can do participatory video and advocacy work, we've gotten them equipment support so that they can film and tell their story.
In India, we work with Debal Deb. In India, in 1970, there were 110,000 varieties of indigenous rice grown. Today, less than 6,000. Debal Deb has saved 1500 of those varieties, and he grows every single variety every year. Because seed libraries are living, they're not something you put in a freezer, they don't belong in a morgue. Every year, these varieties have to adapt and become resilient to those conditions. So if they are drought-tolerant, they have to be raised under drought circumstances. If they are flood-tolerant, you raise them in floods. You have to create this to build that resiliency. And Debal does that on land that he leases and rents. He has like something like a few acres of land that he cultivates 1500 varieties on.
And I think the International Rice Research Institute says there needs to be 60 meters or something, apart, for each variety to maintain genetic integrity. If Debal put that spacing, it would take up the whole state. But yet industrial agriculture doesn't understand the very basic understanding of how these systems work, Debal laughs at that. And he says you're talking about geographic spacing. And he looks at temporal space. He knows when those rice varieties are open for pollination and when they're not, he knows their pollinating windows and he comes up with a plan. Every year, a planting pattern that protects them, by circling them with varieties that are not the same window of pollination. And he's able to pack these varieties real tight to be able to preserve them.
But what he does, most importantly, is that he enters all those varieties into the commons. None of them can be patented and none of them are owned. He never charges a damn thing for those varieties. He has a pay it forward model where any farmer anywhere can come and get those varieties. He gives them a kilo of seed. The next year, they have to bring a kilo back, or give it to another farmer. This is the system.
So what I'm saying is that everywhere we work, it's something different. In East Africa, we're supporting women farmers to innovate, looking at the intersection between climate change mitigation and gender equality, combating the narrative that people that look like me have the solutions to climate change.
You're not going to find those solutions in Silicon Valley, Iowa State, or Cornell. You're not going to find them on Wall Street. You're going to find them in the communities that have already been dealing with these issues, that have created unbelievable models for growing food. Those are the true, disruptive technologies needed.
We are a movement support organization. when we partner with you, we partner with you, we're in the trenches with you. We work alongside you. And when they call and say we need help with the campaign, when they call and say we need support advancing this innovation, this workshop, when they call needing help doing agroecology trainings, when they call needing help doing communications, we respond and are there for them. Because the work is about being in service to the ones you work [with]. And nonprofit after nonprofit, forget that. It takes time to build this trust and respect, to build that mutual love and admiration. And we've spent the last ten years doing that. So our partners know that when they need us, we stand with them.
And we know that that looks different every application, because we know there's no one size fits all. The one size fits all is industrial agriculture. That linear, extractive way of looking? We're not going to give birth to the solution using that same framework. Every community is different. When you grow food, you know your neighbor's farm is different than yours. So we're open to that. And we work in any way we can, in support of the ones who grow our food, with the bold and audacious idea that together we cultivate a world that actually nurtures the ones who grow our food, rather than exploit them.
Kamea Chayne: And that is the only future of sustainability in my mind. I, like you, also don't believe it's possible for us to achieve a sustainable food system by swapping this practice with that practice, without addressing our relationships with the earth and to one another, because it's ultimately all connected, and sustainability has to address this power piece and support the decentralization of power within the food system to really center the very hands and the people and the voices out there on the frontlines growing our food. So I'm very much with you on this, and I'm just very touched and inspired by everything that you guys are working on. And I really hope our listeners will continue to follow you and donate if they can and support the work that you're doing.
I would love for you to share any calls to action you have in terms of how they can best support A Growing Culture and this future of food that you speak to.
Loren Cardeli: That's the challenge. We're not good at asking for donations, we're not good at pushing ourselves. Our organization really strives to decenter ourselves. It'd be hard to get a lot of the people that work with this organization—we're grassroots activists around the world—to even want to do podcasts or speak out in this way because we love the work and we love championing the ones who actually have their hands in the soil. So many of these organizations have these talking heads that are the founders and the leaders that consider themselves experts in agriculture, but have never fucking farmed. That's the sickness of our society, [that] we think that's even acceptable. A leading regenerative expert? Give me a break.
So we do have a hard time with raising money and with funding our programs. So if there are people out there that this resonates with, follow us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Agrowingculture.org. If you can donate, if you can donate monthly, a small amount, a latte or whatever. Think about what the equivalent is because your subscriptions to Netflix and Amazon and Spotify don't support farmers. We do. And we work for them and we work alongside them. We're pushing for something different here. If this resonates, reach out. Email me at loren@agrowingculture.org. Call me. Reach out to our team. Send us direct messages. We are here to work with you because the world's most renewable resource is collaboration.
We must do this together, we must learn that we need to give credit where credit is due. We've been in conversations about recognizing Indigenous knowledge, looking at regenerative and sustainability as almost appropriations of these terminologies, looking at the organizations and the movements that come out around this that don't give credit. The first thing I can ask any of you, the call to action is to name it, recognize that the peasant food web is outproducing industrial agriculture, recognize that that is majority BIPOC individuals. Recognize and celebrate their ingenuity and their contribution. Recognize that when you're eating, it's because of them.
And the second thing I ask you, the most important thing, more than supporting us, more than following us, is ask these questions. If you look at an article, if you go to a conference talking about our food system, if you're looking at a nonprofit and a solution, ask if it addresses the very inequity that plagues our food system. Ask if it addresses power. Ask who is centered. Does it democratize production? Because we live in a food system that produces calories, not nutrition, that consolidates control, not democratizes production, and that protects the bottom line, not the bottom billion.
The only way to address this is to be bold enough to fight for the ones you don't know.
Fight to restore power in their hands and to have that faith and that optimism that that community can design a food system better than we can. So please don't share articles, don't email them to my mother, who then forwards them to me. Don't tweet them. Don't go to conferences. Don't be part of solutions. Don't champion them. That don't recognize power struggles and power dynamics, and don't return the power to the ones who grow our food. Please. That's the biggest call to action, I ask.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?
Loren Cardeli: Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the most important book I've ever read, by Paulo Freire.
Kamea Chayne: What is it that keeps you going? What keeps you motivated in this work?
Loren Cardeli: When you do this work, you're not cultivating relationships, you're not networking, you're not creating friendships. You're extending your family. Through this work in the last ten years, I've cultivated a family around the world, and Kamea, you've met some of them now. And those people check you when you need to be checked. They challenge you when you need to be challenged. They lift you up, when you need to be lifted up. You're responsible to them and them to you. And that's love.
Kamea Chayne: What makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment?
Loren Cardeli: I think we all hunger for something. I think in our society right now, we know that there's a void in us. And if we're not hungry for food, we're hungry for justice. Until every last one of us hungers no more, we need to lean into hungering for justice. And I see that in the youth, I see their ability to want change so bad. So I'm hoping that we can do this together.
Kamea Chayne: Loren, thank you so much for joining me on the show and for this really important work and for your dedication. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Loren Cardeli: Keep fighting. We get so lost that there's not a solution, we get lost that there's not an easy fix to anything, we get overwhelmed with all this truth. But know that our change will be collective and that the more people we can bring together, the more we can imagine a world that's different. The more we can make happen. I applaud everyone who's committed to the process of unlearning and the process of learning. I hope that we can stand in solidarity.
