THE HANDS THAT SUSTAIN US: On Skill, Respect, and Gratitude

The world’s unravelling—and it won’t be the suits who carry us. Every time we overlook the skilled alchemists among us—the quiet masters and hands that sustain us—we risk loosing them, right when we need them most.

Photographer: Josh Beaver | Pexels

When was the last time you properly thanked a baker? Not in passing. Not with a quick ‘cheers’ as you grabbed your loaf and ducked out the bakery door. I mean the kind of intentional, heartfelt thanks you’d give a doctor who stitched your child’s leg after they'd crashed their bike. Or the accountant who met your confusion with kindness instead of condescension. Because the truth is, that baker’s skill, knowledge, and commitment runs just as deep.

But we don’t think like that. We’ve been trained not to. We live in a culture that values the consultant’s hour over the grower's season or the baker's night. A culture that gushes accolades and wealth at white-collar men in glass towers, while treating the hands that sustain us all—growers, butchers, bakers, farmers, makers, cooks, composters—as low-skill, low-worth, easily replaced. As invisible. As if food just appears on shelves like magic, not through grit and graft.

And it’s not just the food trades. We do the same to the quiet magic of those who hold communities together: the neighbour who brings soup when you’re low, the elder who keeps gentle peace in group discussions, or the Douala who sits with calm compassion beside the dying gifting a final journey of dignity and love.

We’ve swallowed the myth that a spreadsheet holds more value than a saved seed. And we’ve swallowed deep.

We’re taught to aspire upward—towards the abstract, the digital, the distant. To turn away from work that’s old, physical, and land-based. Never mind that those ‘low-status’ trades hold the skills we’ll need to survive collapse. Never mind that they sustain us now, every day.

And the rot runs deeper than just white-collar smugness. Even among the ‘working class’, we’ve internalised a hierarchy of visibility. Some hands are respected as capable and important. Others get ignored.

A builder extending a deck might earn $150 an hour—and no one blinks. It’s accepted as fair pay for a skilled trade. An electrician installing a new light or a plumber fixing a tap? Same, but even more expensive. But what about the grower? The one running a local CSA (community supported agriculture) box scheme, handing over heavy crates of vegetables to the community every week or fortnight.

Here is some simple maths for you to ponder. To grow the food in just one of those boxes—preparing beds, seeding, tending, watering, weeding—that grower spent about 15 minutes a day, seven days a week, for four months (longer if the box contains onions!). That’s roughly 30.5 hours on one box of vegetables before harvest. Then add another 30 minutes to harvest, wash, and pack that one box. Call it 31 hours total. That's for the vegetables going into a single CSA box that will feed two people for two weeks. For all that time and toil the customer pays around $75. That’s $2.42 an hour. Let that sink in for a moment.

$2.42

Sure, the grower operates at scale, with maybe 50 or 100 boxes, but still the maths don’t lie. Society run by economics creates profound aberrations.

Those aberrations are not just laughable—they are insulting. Because that grower holds as much craft and care as any builder, or plumber, or electrician—often more. They read the soil like scripture, track the weather’s moods, have years of accumulated knowledge about how each crop will grow, and tuck seeds away like secrets.

They grow sustenance—food that feeds, not flatters. And unlike the fossil-fuelled churn of industrial agriculture, with its chemicals, its hectares and hectares of mono-cultures, and its heavy toll on the environment, the small grower moves with the land, not against it. Their scale allows them to lean on older, gentler methods. A quiet kind of farming that leaves room for the soil to breathe and the land to remember.

So why is the work of the local grower worth so little?

Because it's quiet. Because it's old. Because it's done by outsiders, migrants, elders, women, and people with dirt under their nails. Because economics has long decided food is supposed to be cheap—not because it’s tuppeny to grow, but because the system doesn’t give a damn about the people doing the growing. And it needs us spending on all the other disposable baubles and beads that keep economies humming—a constant cycle of new tech, phones, vehicles, clothing, holidays, and all the rest. And yet, the grower’s abilities are the skills that sustain us. These are the people who hold community and survival in their calloused palms.

It's not just growers. Exactly the same maths can be done for the livestock farmer who shepherds their flocks of feather or fur or fleece through wind, rain and blistering heat, and is forced to sell their animals in a buyers market that downgrades the value of their stock at every turn. For the butcher who can dress an animal cleanly so nothing is wasted. For the baker who coaxes rise and flavour from three ingredients and fire.

My husband Geoff was a community baker for number of years, turning out 400 loaves and rolls for our monthly community markets. Oh my … traditional Viennese sourdough, Chelsea buns rich with walnuts and honey, golden farmhouse loaves that reached for the sky. Those breads took 3 days of work, and the last ‘day’ was a 14 hour marathon from 4pm to 6am on the day of the market. We charged to cover ingredient costs. His time was effectively donated (we both had regular jobs. We did this as a gift for our community). And yet people quibbled they could buy cheaper bread at the supermarket. Few recognised the skill, and love, and time.

No surprises, full-time bakers are revered as legends in our household.

‘The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker’ ... these aren’t simple people doing simple things. These are artisans. Knowledge holders. Often elders in systems older than the economy itself.

But we don’t treat them like that. The consultant charges $1200 for an audit no one reads. The dentist bills $350 to polish teeth already clean. We gush our gratitude like they’ve saved the day. We shower praise on the builder for extending the deck we don't need, but offer a cursory nod of thanks at the baker when they hand over a loaf of bread.

Before the turn of the 19th century, working-class households in America, Europe, and the UK spent between 50 and 80 percent of their income on food. As industrial agriculture and wage growth kicked in, that figure dropped to under 10 percent today. That food is now cheap is seen as a sign of society's prosperity, because we've got all that disposable income for other 'stuff'. But what it really means is that the people who nurture us have become invisible. As food has become cheaper, so has our respect for those who provide it.

And that’s not just unjust—it’s foolish. Because every time we overlook the skilled alchemists around us—the ones who sew, plant, sharpen, mend, cook, and lubricate our interactions—we push them closer to burnout, or out of our communities entirely. We lose food sovereignty. We lose generational knowledge. We lose the hands we’ll need when supply chains snap and supermarket shelves run bare.

And they will run bare. That's a truth part of you already knows.

If you are wondering what you can tangibly ‘do’ in this time of unravelling, I suggest consciously re-rooting a sense of value in skill, not spectacle. In service, not status. Stop pretending that those who work with their hands are ‘less than’. Name them. Respect them. Really see them. Look them in the eye and express gratitude. Teach children that the grower a quiet master of the soil. That the home cook is an alchemist. That caring for others is profoundly valuable. That real intelligence often smells like compost and has splinters in its fingers.

Because in the world that’s coming—and for many, the world that’s already here—it won’t be the lawyers, or bankers, or analysts who carry us. It won’t be the brands, or the suits, or the algorithm-whisperers.

It’ll be the ones who know how to knead, to preserve, to dig, to tend or mend, to make.

The hands that sustain us.

Solidarity & Soil

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I walked away from the algorithm’s choke-hold to work where it counts: hands in soil, words on the page, shoulder to shoulder and word to word with those adapting to climate chaos. This is fire-and-flood writing—scorched, storm-beaten, and stubborn. If it moves you, pass it on like a sandbag in rising water.

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