rebooting food

The unspoken secret of my attendance at reboot was that, until this morning, I hadn’t looked at the program for the conference. I knew some of the names of the speakers, read somewhere that the conference was, vaguely, about “the future.” But as to the “themes” and “topics,” well, I was too busy figuring out how to get here to pay attention to that sort of thing.

My conference planning, thus, was sort of: conference, Copenhagen, wiki, cool, Air Canada, hotel, register.

As such it came as a pleasant surprise that one of the speakers was organic farmer Thomas Harttung, speaking on The Biological Way – Mind the Gap. Thomas is a compelling speaker, a bona fide farmer, and someone who has thought deeply about food, biology, farming and spirituality. The transcript of an earlier talk will give you a taste of his thinking.

His organic farm here in Denmark serves 35,000 clients with organic fruit and vegetables delivered to the door.

And here I thought it was going to be all packets and wikis and gazombozasa.

Comments

Lou Quillio's picture
Lou Quillio on June 15, 2005 - 02:08 Permalink

Whatever Thomas Harttung’s doing, he’s doing it right.

Here in agricultural Upstate New York, I’m exposed to all sorts of do-gooder CSA schemes. Harttung’s is the first I’ve seen that *actively* cuts the crap and has a shot at robust sustainability.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for CSA and all that goes specifically with it. But there’s nearly always additional baggage. There’s an *organic* axe to grind, back-to-the-land business whimsy that comes first, or industrial vilification tunes to sing (all together, now). This stuff always fails because the entire society must be reformed on the reformers’ terms, or fuck everybody.

Call it The Curse of the Crunchy.

Thomas Harttung (quietly) doesn’t seem to abide these poses, and seems to have broken through as a result. Bravo.

LQ