Epigraph

"Civilization's values remain rooted in philosophies, religious traditions, and ethical frameworks devised many centuries ago. Even our economic system, capitalism, is a half millennium old. So our daily dealings are still heavily influenced by ideas that were firmly set before anyone knew the world was round. In many ways, they reflect how we understood the world when we didn't understand the world at all. Our economic, religious and ethical institutions ride antique notions too narrow to freight what we've learned about how life works on our sparkle dot of diamond dust in the space. These institutions resist change; to last this long, they had to. But they lack mechanisms for incorporating discoveries about how life operates. So they haven't assimilated the last century's breakthroughs: that all life is related by lineage, by flows of energy, by cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen and such; that resources are finite, and creatures fragile... In important ways, they poorly correspond or respond to a changing world... [And] though we are fearless about revolutionizing technologies, we cling to concepts that no longer reflect realities."

Carl Safina (2010 The View from Lazy Point, pp. 15-16) 

I find this true on many levels, from the institutional to the individual. At least for me, as I bumble my way through parenting young children or putting food on the table, and stumble across the same themes in the study of health, society and the environment. To the Scratch is one space to explore the interface between old and emerging patterns of being in the world, whether personal or political. Or both.

To the Scratch

A scratch. A mark or line drawn to signify a starting place. A place to start. To start from the scratch is to start from a beginning. I imagine many possible beginnings. 

To reverse course, and begin again despite the outcomes of previous attempts. 

A starting place where one might draw advantage from previous experience or wisdom. Or, one might not. 

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“There was once a village along a river. The people who lived there were very kind. These residents, according to parable, began noticing increasing numbers of drowning people caught in the river’s swift current. And so they went to work devising ever more elaborate technologies to resuscitate them. So preoccupied were these heroic villagers with rescue and treatment that they never thought to look upstream to see who was pushing the victims in.”

 Sandra Steingraber from Living Downstream (2010 De Capo Press)  

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"Food is never just food. It's also a way at getting at something else: who we are, who we have been, and who we want to be." 

Molly Wizenberg (2009 A Homemade Life, p. 2)