Eat Truth to Power
Kimberly Clark is a visionary. It matters not that her piercing turquoise eyes have a rare disorder that makes her legally blind. Though you would never guess the impairment on meeting her, it makes her intense commitment to transforming the way people relate to the land all the more impressive.
Clark operates a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) operation called “Just Add Water” tucked into the back roads of Waimanalo, where she and a group of volunteers cultivate a half-acre of papaya interspersed with various cooking greens and other vegetables.
The volunteers get to take home the literal fruits of their labor. The rest is packed into boxes along with organic produce from other small farms scattered throughout the islands. Subscribers get a delivery of fresh, local fruits and vegetables each week, and Clark gets to perpetuate her philosophy of “food as truth.”
“I’m trying to help people realize that there’s an alternative to the parasitism that our current system is based on,” she says. “The way most food is produced through chemical agriculture in this country is based on an illusion of scarcity, competition and debt. It’s toxic, and when you’re toxic, you don’t think too clearly. I try to provide organic food that fortifies the body. When the food has truth in it, your heart isn’t blocked. You feel better. You make better decisions.”
Some might regard her sharply critical views toward what she calls our “corporatized and debt-ridden system” as the rantings of a crank. But Clark has a Ph.D. in systems analysis and economics. She is part of a growing movement that regards our relationship to food as an eloquent illustration of how healthy or unhealthy is our relationship to our world.
Seen from this perspective, in which what we eat nourishes (or poisons) us spiritually as well as physically, our highly subsidized, chemically dependent food production industry is unsettling. Although alarm bells about pesticides and herbicides have been sounding for half a century, the movement toward sustainable agriculture and organic farming movement is still struggling to make headway against the huge agribusiness operators that currently produce more than 90 percent of what we consume.
Despite the long-term impacts on soil fertility and human health resulting from it, agribusiness is big business, and big business is a formidable force in contemporary America. The sustainable agriculture movement, on the other hand, is being pioneered almost entirely at the grassroots level, and initiatives like CSAs, small farmer cooperatives, and urban gardens are usually where one usually finds a vital and flourishing relationship between community health and people’s awareness of their food.
“Community is about cooperation, corporatism is about competition. Ecology and economics are essentially the same thing,” explains Clark. “There are different types of relationships in nature, but competition is not the most beneficial. A mature and healthy ecosystem doesn’t thrive on competition, but on cooperation. None of this is new… We actually have the technical ability to develop complex systems that take cultural, social, environmental and economic benefits into consideration. But you don’t hear about it because then there wouldn’t be these huge profits and that’s what the current system is based on.”
This type of systems approach based on organic models is slowly making the crossover from academia to farmers and consumers, says Clark, and this ultimately will be the agent of change, if it comes. Clark is one such bridge. Although her half-acre farm is surrounded by what she calls “a chemical ag park,” it is a beacon in the darkness that surrounds most people’s awareness about the fundamental links between food, health, and society.
Clark has lobbied at the Legislature for the Hawai’i Organic Farmers’ Association and has been an advocate for recycling. Still, she’s happiest working directly with the land. “It all just got so frustrating,” she says. “I think this is a better method for me to feed an army, to keep people healthy by feeding them healthy food.”
In addition to experimenting with organic papayas (she wants to debunk the myth that papaya production in Hawai’i has to be genetically engineered), Clark wants to promote a broader awareness about organic farming’s long-term benefits to the environment and local economies.
“Take water,” she says. “We’ve been in drought for eight years and local farmers are freaking out. During the dustbowl years in the Midwest, organic corn survived more often than the chemically produced corn. When the soil is healthy, nature does 95 percent of the work for you. Rock powder [a combination of trace minerals such as calcium and magnesium] holds four times more water in the soil, remineralizes and balances it, and yet is treated as a waste product from the quarry while everybody still argues over more water.”
Clark and her friend John Biloom explore issues such as these, along with topics of health and well-being, in a series of monthly classes called “Millennium Gardens.” She’s confident that her approach will gain allies as the renaissance in Native Hawaiian culture grows, with its own reverential relationship with the ‘aina and its community-based approach to food production. She’s hoping “we’ll move increasingly into an ahupua’a model where each island can produce its own food again. It just takes cooperation, community, and the truth.”
For more information, call or write:
Just Add Water
41-851C Waikupanaha Street
Waimanalo, HI 96795
(808) 259-5635
— Catherine Black
Volume 11, Number 9 March 2001
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