Exploration list: Collaboration

What if "resource use" were relational, not extractive? What if reading were a conversation, and cooking a symphony?

Self-love sauerkraut from my recent class on Ferments for Transformation and Place-Based Relationships (you can check out the recording here).

The current moment is full of reminders of our very human tendency to be extractive. Extractive in how we engage with each other, the natural world, with our own ideas. We focus on what we can get.

But that also isn’t the whole picture, because while modern society in particular rewards extractive behavior, we aren’t simply extractive beings.

We’re also collaborative, caring, curious, and this collaborative tendency extends well beyond just 1-1 human interactions.

So, what if we found a new way of being? One where we viewed the natural world as a collaborator, not “a resource” to be ripped from whenever we so choose?

This is less about thinking of the world in a new way, and more about returning home: A homecoming to a way of thinking that was and is a part of many Indigenous perspectives on interrelationship and care.

One that we have been intentionally divorced from, so that we are kept small by viewing the world through a rugged individualist lens.
One where we are separated from the beauty and wonder and awe of existing alongside a world full of other beings where our thriving and survival is interconnected (rather than each of us as an island in a sea of never-enough resources).

One where our responsibilities and a sense of reciprocity remind us that when we actually live a collaborative life, we are able to have our needs met, and to be discerning about what is a need and what is just filler that keeps us from doing the inner work to perceive our needs.

We see echoes of this desire for interconnection rippling as undercurrents beneath our current (extractive, often junk-filled) food systems: Even if they don’t come to the surface, we know there’s something more to be had.

This is evident through our relationship to food (when was the last time you thought of that jar of sauerkraut on your shelf as a community of collaborative partners, versus just a condiment?), and through our relationships to ourselves and eating (e.g. our larger societal view that imagines a false separation between our personal food consumption from larger social and environmental issues).

We are all to varying extents interwoven within that system, but we can all also feel those undercurrents.

This exploration list offers a few of my favorite thinkers in the world of collaborative living and eating: Folks who encourage us to view our food through the lens of the world around us.

Plus activities for building up your own sense of collaborative eating and living in relationship to the natural world.

I’m curious to hear: Who are your favorite thinkers, artists, writers, musicians, or anyone else who talks about our relationship to the Earth in a way that excites you, causes you to pause, sends a shiver down your spine (in a good way), or inspires you to act?

Exploration list: Collaboration

Writing about collaborative living and eating

When I first started writing about food, people would glaze over when I’d say ‘everything is interconnected!’ (sometimes they still do).

The concept of interconnection (with nature, with each other) was not a part of the larger discourse, at least in the sense that it trickled into our collective consciousness in any meaningful way until more recently. And, as current events unfold, it’s clear that the message still has not reached everyone. That for much of the world, there’s still skepticism that all of our liberation is bound up together, that we’re a part of nature, or that the bubble we currently live in could ever possibly burst.

Living a collaborative life in a collaborative world is an act of remembering.

We’re remembering how to be in relationship with each other. To ask of nature rather than just taking from nature.
This isn’t a rose-tinted glorification of bygone days, but rather a recognition that we really do function in the world in ways that maybe don’t align with how we’re programmed. That some of the issues of the current world are unique to this moment.

Those include the scale at which we consume information and ‘stuff,’ the amount we’re expected to work, the number of relationships we try to maintain, the constant scrutiny that comes from living in a networked world (what my friend Ellen calls “the witnessed life versus the scrutinized life,” more on that in another issue).
That’s on top of the kinds of issues that have always been there, and in some cases I think exacerbate tensions and divisions considerably (see: the current political climate in the US, or the pushback against public figures who even mention the name Palestine).

Collaboration also means remembering what’s a need to have versus nice to have (I’m thinking of this one, especially, as I experience the disconnect between world events and the hundreds of unsolicited ‘Prime Day deals!’ emails from PR companies that keep flooding my inbox).

I’ve been turning to, or returning to, thinkers for whom collaboration is woven into the fabric of their work, particularly in relationship to food systems and the natural world. Here are a few favorites:

Lydia Lynn Haupt’s Rooted sits at the intersection of science, nature, memoir, and creative nonfiction. My favorite part asks us to reflect on the words ‘kith’ and ‘kin’ and to consider which more fully embodies our relationship to the natural world.

I’ve mentioned Alicia Kennedy’s writing before, which blends political, personal, and culinary in a way that’s approachable but also smart. I leave every issue, whether it’s about putting together a sandwich or about the complexities of farm labor or gender and cooking, inspired and inquisitive.
It’s the kind of writing that feels generative, because even when the subject matter is heavy or challenging, it pulls me outside of myself. It views the piece as a beginning for the reader’s own explorations, not as the be all and end all (and I very much appreciate fellow writers who view the work as a conversation and invitation, not as a platform for shouting their calcified perspectives).

Robin Wall Kimmerer is bound to make an appearance on a list about collaboration and reciprocity and the natural world, and for good reason. Braiding Sweetgrass is her most famous (and well worth the read, or audiobook listen), but her other work has had just as much of an impact on me.
Read The Serviceberry for lessons about reciprocity and abundance, using a plant that’s probably in your neighborhood’s landscaping as an anchoring point (this one is good for when you want to be reminded that abundance is a natural state and does not always mean what modern folks think it means. Abundance can exist in quiet, sharing ways, not just in flashy performative shows of wealth).
Or, possibly one of my favorite books of all time, Gathering Moss, is one of those books that asks you to shift the lens through which you view the world. Gathering Moss asks us to think small, get curious, tap into wonder, but also to remember that the sometimes small and often overlooked parts of our world are often the ones really doing a lot of the work to hold everything upright (a lesson that applies to our food systems, and many other things besides, too).

Some other books I’m sitting with right now and slowly reading (or re-reading) my way through, all of which touch on climate, hope, and interconnection: How to Fall in Love with the Future, What if We Get it Right? Visions of Climate Futures, Reaping What She Sows, and Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.

I’ve also just started down another rabbit hole into the world of enthnomicrobiology: I have a lot of thoughts about fermentation as collaboration, and am eager to expand my thinking in this area and to dig further into research about the whole web of collaborations that make up your jar of sauerkraut or morning bowl of yogurt.

(P.S. when you use the Bookshop.org links in this post, I get a small affiliate commission, so thanks for supporting me and supporting small bookshops!)

Collaboration in the kitchen

I like to think of collaboration broadly, to include practices that might seem individual and private: cooking becomes a collaboration between myself and the food I’m making (I even extend that to spice blending: Jenny Dorsey’s spice-blending technique that reminds me of a perfumer’s organ, but can also be related to music, is one of my favorites).

I often talk about fermentation as a collaboration between self and microbes, which bears out in my books Our Fermented Lives and The Fermentation Oracle.

Collaboration between text and reader

This article on finding (or not finding) meaning in Heathcliff cartoons mentions meaning-making as a collaborative effort between reader and artist, which very much reminds me of discussions of meaning-making in Library & Information Science and in Book History.
You can see my thoughts on this collaboration in this newsletter, where I discuss Wolfgang Iser’s interactions between text and reader, by placing books in conversation with each other, and through exploring the concept of traces of use.

Related to this: Carlo Ginzberg’s Cheese and the Worms is one of my favorite books I’ve ever assigned my students (though they’re usually confused about why I’m assigning it).
But I do so to illustrate the fact that collaboration between the self and ideas does not always have the same outcome for everyone: In the case of this book’s protagonist, that’s taken to extremes.

And finally, Aiden Arata’s book unboxing video is my all-time favorite, in part because it discusses the impermanence and permanence of books as objects.

Exploration activities: Collaboration

When I want to feel in my collaborative element, I start small, with the kinds of collaborations that allow me to go slowly and deliberately:
I make a jar of sauerkraut, or I do nature crafts like making inks and dyes from what’s in season (I cover this in Preserving Abundance: paid subscribers remember to use your discount! I’ve put it below so you don’t have to dig).

For entering into a collaboration (or just, going out in the world) with fellow humans, in that way that speaks to the interconnected, returning home way I want to feel around other people, I begin with reciprocity:
What am I giving (or can I give) in this space? What do I hope to receive?
You could also reframe the former by asking what responsibilities you have by being a part of a given community.

Increasingly, another concern is asking if myself and loved ones will be safe in that space. I often consider if I’m sitting down at a table where I’m welcomed versus one where I need to elbow people over to fit a chair in to sit down (and which one of those scenarios I have the energy for). Obviously I get more done and enjoy myself more in spaces where my collaborators value me: But once in a while I stretch myself.

That consideration, of reciprocity and receiving, might be a useful jumping off point for you, too.

Another good jumping off point is finding places correlate to your interests: I love nature, so maybe I find a local hiking meetup or something, but could also find a local crafting group, silent book club, or fitness space where I can weave my environmental interests in while also expanding my potential circle of collaborators to include people who wouldn’t be immediately obvious.

I have so many more things I could say about collaboration, but I’m also doing book copyedits so writing a small novel is out of the question. Instead, I’ll end by encouraging you to find one new collaboration this week: Either in your kitchen, in nature, or your human community.

(And paid subscribers, remember to scroll down for the discount code I mentioned).