Spring Tonics
My name is Candace. I am sometimes an artist and always a human. For the past two years I've been making a project that 'reconnects urbanites to our fragile food web in the face of climate crisis'. Basically, I climb through NYC’s vacant lots and public parks, collect the many dreaded (yet edible!) 'invasive' plants that grow there, get them toxicity tested, and then serve those deemed 'clean enough' at a series of free community events. I document this research and more under the moniker, "The C.U.R.B." or The Collaborative Urban Resilience Banquet.
As of March 1st 2020 many people would have framed what I do as theoretical or conceptual: ethnobotany as metaphor, food as provocation, citizen science as environmental activism. Two months ago I was gearing up for a year of public events, artist talks, gallery exhibitions, grant celebrations, press opportunities...
Ya know, ‘important’ stuff.
Then, sometime around March 12th, something happened. My city went on PAUSE and my art practice crystallized into what it has actually been all along: my life practice. The public lands I have tested and tracked are now my grocery store, and the spring ‘weeds’ I have learned to forage, the acorn flour I learned to mill, the beers I learned to bottle, the seeds I learned to save have all transformed (in a sort of inverse transubstantiation) from ‘valuable’ art objects into food objects of actual value. This week, for the first time in modern history, oil is worth less than soil. ...than food...than labor.
Ya know, the important stuff.
While we (needfully) physically distance there has also been a digital convergence: the community of scientists, mycologists, gardeners, bakers, herbalists, seed savers and activists I have come to know through my work have rallied into an ad-hoc digital village, sharing knowledge and skills for free (or close to it) with an all too eager audience. People are (needlessly) dying, yes, but people are also living. They are sharing seeds, making bread, growing greens, mending, organizing...and grieving.
Many people fled New York in fear of the viral load, but this gritty city is precisely where I want to be in a time like this. On my Sunday walk a woman pulled shallots from her community garden plot and shared them with me through the fence. She let me in and I weeded the cleavers from her flower beds and took them home to eat. Another woman dropped gloves to me from her window when she saw me bare-handed; all of us strangers in mutual reliance.
This is a scary time, but a potent one. It is our chance to build a new world and slough off the old one, and I, for one, won’t miss it. When the (informed) powers that be finally yell “olly olly oxen free” let's create a web of local communities that value food, medicine, care, interdependence, land, water and air over profit, power, individualism, or ego. May this moment galvanize us to build a food future that is just and sustainable for all beings-- human and otherwise.