Sustaining Cultivation 513sourcing of food. PFI instituted a ‘healthy food voucher’ programme that enabled
low-income families to participate in the CSA project the group helps coordinate.
PFI has organized local institutions to use local sources of food, such as the campus
conference center at Iowa State, which now provides an ‘all-Iowa meal’ option for
organizations that use the facility. PFI regularly conducts cooking classes and
nutrition classes so that eaters can regain the skills of healthy and efficient home
food preparation. PFI started up a farmers’ market in Ames, the city where Iowa
State is located and where PFI’s own offices are. PFI started an annual youth sum-
mer camp centred on sustainable agriculture and sustainable food, and began a
gardening and nutrition programme with the Ames Boys and Girls Club.
But perhaps the greatest effort that PFI has made to connect farmers and eat-
ers came in 2002, when its members voted to allow non-farmers to become full
voting members of the group. The group still asks people to state on their mem-
bership application whether they gain ‘a significant part’ of their income ‘directly
from farming in Iowa’. And only those who check this box can serve on the group’s
board. So it is still at heart a farmers’ organization. But anyone can join and vote,
and half of the group’s roughly 700 members are eaters, not farmers, who have
taken up this invitation to engage in the dialogue of what a practical agriculture
could look like – this invitation to find a place in the wordshed of the food-
shed.
The broad sense of connection underlying foodshed thinking allows us to dispense
with another unhelpful presumption about agriculture: that its purpose is only to
grow food (and fibre and, I suppose, medicine now). We do want agriculture to
grow food for us (and fibre and, perhaps, medicine). But growing food is only one
dimension of what I would argue is the purpose of agriculture: cultivation – the
care and tending of creation, human and non-human, social and ecological. Here
I mean cultivation in a way different from but related to how I have used it earlier
in this book. Here I mean it not as the relationship between who we are and what
we know, as the culture of identity and the identity of culture. I mean cultivation
as the culture of the earth, as the husbandry and wifery of life, as farming for us
all.
Cultivation, then, is a task not only for those people we have long regarded as
the agriculturalists. It is a task not only for farmers. It is a task for everyone. I
worry, though, that the image of the farm tends to guide our thinking back to a
sense of agriculture as the beyond we left behind. There couldn’t be a farm in a city,
right? A city couldn’t itself be a farm, could it? There is something jarring to the
pattern of our imagination here.
Thus I suggest, along with Harriet Friedmann, that we imagine the dominant
metaphor of agriculture as that of the garden, the garden writ large, for a garden is
something that I believe we are more used to understanding as potentially every-
where, in city and countryside alike.^33 We are more used to identifying ourselves as
potentially all gardeners than as potentially all farmers. Moreover, there is an inti-
macy and care associated with gardening, an intimacy and care that Big Ag has, to a