Gifts and Gratitude
Welcome to our 2023 Organic Growers Supply product listing! We’re happy
to offer new farm seed varieties, tools, books and more to meet all your
gardening and orcharding needs. Once again we’ve expanded our line of
potatoes and allium sets, and we’ve launched a new potato
field-trialing operation, which will give us greater ability to answer your
questions and give variety-specific information and cultivation advice. Look
for more informational charts and essays on our website in the coming
months.
As we put together this catalog, we’ve been digging deeper into
alternative economic models as we become increasingly aware of the
destruction late-stage capitalism is wreaking on our communities and our
planet. Here is the all-too-familiar origin story: First there was barter
and trade—one primitive wanderer says to another, “I’ll
give you my atl-atl for your fishing spear.” As humanity became more
agrarian, money was invented to standardize things, make them simpler. Soon
we had currency, banks, credit cards, and debt—our consumerist and
capitalist lifestyle was an inevitable progression.
We’ve heard this version so many times, and yet the late anarchist and
anthropologist David Graeber argued in Debt: The First 5000 Years
that this story is precisely backwards, “Banking, tabs, and expense
accounts existed for at least 2000 years before there was anything like
coinage, or any other physical object that was regularly used to buy and
sell things, anything that could be labeled ‘currency’.”
Only later did barter economies pop up around the margins between monied
societies or in economies that had collapsed.
Societies that functioned without banks, expense accounts or currency existed
within the “gift economy,” a term coined by Marcel Mauss in the
early 1900”s. In a gift economy, needs are met by open-handed
generosity. Any competition that arises is not based on who acquires and
hoards more, but rather who gives away the most, who can share the most food
with their community, especially in times of need.
The economy we live within shapes our ways of thinking and seeing the world.
In capitalism, gifts are often called philanthropy, to be written off on tax
forms. We have an ingrained expectation that when we give something, we
should receive something measurable and commensurate in return, and vice
versa.
What if we could reshape our ideas about gifts and debts? Let’s say my
potatoes are blighted, and a neighbor offers me their surplus before winter
with no expectation of repayment. I imagine feeling indebted. Could I
distinguish that feeling of indebtedness from the debt I owe the bank that
holds my mortgage? In her essay “The Serviceberry: An Economy of
Abundance” author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Gratitude and
reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable
property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as
they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.”
In this sense, indebtedness acts as a sacred glue that binds a community
together. We might all seek to be indebted to one another so we can look
forward to being able to return a neighbor’s kindness, and maybe even
do them one better. We might never be left nor leave each other stranded.
We might already have a sense of what this feels like when we host a work
party, lend a hand to a neighbor, or share seeds. There are examples in the
garden as well. The fruits of the garden are the product of thousands of
gifts with nothing asked in return. We put seed in the earth, the sky gives
us rain, the insects pollinate as they collect nectar and pollen, fruits
grow, and we gather the gifts of the garden to meet our needs and share with
friends and family.
Do you feel a sacred indebtedness to your own garden, to the pollinators, to
the rain clouds? How can we extend that feeling to our neighbors and
surrounding community? It is a life-giving, liberating, and sometimes
terrifying experience in our money-hoarding economy to give something away
with no guarantee of replacing what was given. But as Lewis Hyde wrote in
The Gift, “anarchism and gift exchange share the assumption that it is
not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part of
the self is given away, that community appears.”
Happy planting,
– Noah Dillard, Potato Coordinator
