Celebrating life and a local economy through food!

Celebrating life through food and building community resilience through local economy

Celebrating life through food…really isn’t anything new. But in this blog something might surprise you about the benefits of gathering your local produce to build your local economy as a collective community member.

Setting foot in a supermarket is truly an incredible experience. Our ancestors could never have dreamed of such abundance: fruits and vegetables from all over the world and to boot available all year round. Thousands of high calorific products from fat, sweet, salty and crispy in abundance, enough to make the taste buds of any mammal mad with excitement!

How fortunate to have access to such abundance at the tip of our fingers?

Porc or Salmon for dinner?

Nature’s Path cereals and Chef Boyardee Ravioli are on special…Sweet!

For me, it’s as if something is missing … despite all this abundance and colorful choices, we fill our shopping carts in a mechanical, more so automatic way. No thought process about how it got to where it is now on the grocery shelf unit. As if we pretended that it was not the most overturned experience to have access to such abundance wealth in terms of food, we take it for granted, myself included.

Going back in time…

If we go back through our ancestral lines all of us have some type of linage that touches the land as a sustainable way of life and activities around food as an important part of life to feed our bellies also to feed our need to be part of a community in this regard. Life’s chores back then were filled with hunting, gathering or farming and most of all our social time with our neighbours.  Food has always been the gathering point of humans, which makes us come together which fulfills our needs for survival as the human race. Let me explain: We have no fangs or claws, which way back when we were on the weaker end of the stick of the food chain, so there was really NO CHOICE for us as ‘weak’ two legged to gather and finally be strong together as a tribe. If not we as humans would not have existed today.

So we came together, we poured our strengths, knowledge and wisdom to support ourselves as a tribe to meet our basic needs for survival, in which now we take for granted. Which is normal, we do not need to be protected as we did in the past.

Thanks to the relocation of production, globalization and the green revolution, we have come to no longer depend on each other for food, but the desire to meet and socialize remains inscribed in us. It’s called an atavism of the human mind. It still resided in our DNA to gather together and food is still the centerpiece of our social interactions and, surely you would agree, the best way to get people to gather is to share a good meal.

Normally…Naturally, not so long ago (100-120yrs ago) we would eat together the fruit of the crops that we harvested as a tribe or with our neighboring farmers. Now the new ‘normal’ to gather is by responding to this atavism with the last stage of the feeding process: we eat together the fruit of crops that we have not harvested (apart from going to the grocery store of course).

But what about the other steps that brought this food to our table? Production, harvesting, processing, conservation and socializing… were in the past so many favorable and necessary moments to have a good time together.

Kimichi Celebration

How easy it would be to buy our golden kimchi (type of spicy Korean sauerkraut) at the grocery store?

So why piss off gathering and grating cabbage with a bunch of neighboring strangers?

I give Kimchi as an example because here where I live we use this product: this living being rather to gather our local community in Mont Tremblant, QC to fabricate it’s creation.

Here’s how it all goes down:

The ‘fermenter’ (an individual who specializes in fermented foods) tells the farmer how many vegetables he will need for the yearly quota for the community consumption of KIMCHI, the farmer plants accordingly, dates are set in the fall (harvest time) to create the Kimchi, the community shows up to chop up veggies and gather for local harvested meals during the Kimchi prep, then stored in large barrels in the cold storage for a period of time, the fermenter then communicates with the community/tribe that it’s time to put the Kimchi into mason jars, yet another gathering is initiated through this fabrication of this one product and then people leave with loads of Kimchi for the year in exchange of their time and efforts. The rest of the Kimchi is then sold at a reasonable rate to others in the local community. All these live treads knit in a precise manner to finally create this ancestral fabric of coming back to a way of life that is sustainable and responds to our basic foundational needs to feed ourselves and nourish our need to be together.

To share a secret with you, the production of kimchi is just a pretext …an excuse for us to come together and celebrate the bacteria that delivers the product of divine digestion that is the foundation of this great creation that we call life. Which in turn creates resilience in the community collective, kimchi keeps our gut bacteria in check and getting us together feeds our basic survival needs to belong to a tribe. So we feel this sense of security (food and tribe wise), confidence and belonging that our nervous system grounds and we wake more rested and alert from a deep sleep: which is the perfect culture for optimal immune resilience.

Together, we create the favorable conditions for our beloved, lactic acid bacteria (which is found in fermented vegetables necessary for good gut bacteria). As we step back into our own realities after gathering we connect with others and share this exceptional story. The bacterial culture becomes addictive others now want to join in the fabrication…the fun, but in truth it’s one of our needs for survival, to be part of something greater than ourselves, to be part of a community that shares similar values that run deep in our veins that are essential to be exercised and shared in a collective energy.

To participate in the Kimchi Celebration is to participate in the fabrication of a living breathing phenomenon through community efforts, but also in the unbroken chain of life that arises resilience similar to our ancestors, but here with full consciousness of its fruits for future generations to come.

To participate in the Kimchi Celebration is to Dare Life in Us!

In closing I invite you to reach out, search out in your community who? Where? How? Are people gathering to be part of a larger community collective to feed its basic survival needs?

Want to establish in your community a living breathing economy that thrives based on a collective local economy check us out here: http://symbiosealt.com, for more details and how we keep it alive.

Peace, Love, Happiness and Gratitude for the Teachings

Mama Lynne