THE HUNGER GAP IS COMING (2 of 2)
Part two of two in reckoning with the near future
The hunger gap exposes how fragile even small systems become when knowledge and responsibility are held in one place. What follows is not failure but redistribution: a collective learning how to carry food, trust, and continuity through hands that are no longer singular, but shared.
The cycle of Harvest Boxes have been humming along for a few months now. On the surface, things look rosy. I am focused on our crops covering the hunger gap, and excited we are planning wider winter plantings.
And then.
Like stepping into an alternate reality I am suddenly surrounded by bright light, clinical beeps and pings, rubber wheels squeaking along hard, pristine floors. Voices huddle in murmuring groups. Everywhere, laboured breathing in and out. In and out. I am in the world of the hospital emergency ward. A long way from fingers in the soil, muddy shirts, sun on my back, wind in my hair.
Beside me, sitting with the patience of a saint, is Geoff. My soul mate. My life companion. The one who I share this strange and beautiful life.
He is suddenly blind.
Seedlings still grow. Rain falls. Sun shines. But in this moment I feel the life we’ve cleaved together spinning wildly on a pin head.
*
The weakness wasn’t in the crops. Nor was it in the growers. It sat quietly inside the structure itself. A structure I had created.
Writers have committed many words and sentences to unpicking the vulnerabilities of the industrial food system—how much rests on distant supply chains, fuel, fertiliser, and centralised decision making. What I had failed to recognise was that our own little experiment with the Harvest Boxes carried a similar flaw. Too much knowledge, too much coordination, too much responsibility had settled into one place. There was no distributed memory and now it was at risk.
Our Harvest Box system had developed with me at its core. I arranged. I organised. I poured over spreadsheets and seed catalogues. Coordinated each box schedule. Calculated the harvest amounts we’d need. Each fortnight I cleared my own grower workspace and got ready for the influx.
I was warned of the risk by a commune grower here on Substack, easily 18 month ago. ‘The group will sit back’ he warned. ‘Growing should never be solo.’ But, I let the warning slide. As a group we had stretched into new growing territory and everyone was having a good time.
Holding the whole system together was, to be frank, a shit tonne of work. Eleven households, twenty-two people fed. But, I had built it around myself, on the assumption that if I kept the pressure at bay, the other growers would stay for the ride. It felt like success and I foolishly presumed it would just tick along like that. The irony would only become obvious later.
Sure, I had documented what we were doing (there is a lot of planning that goes into growing at scale), but none of the other growers wanted to read my spreadsheets or documents. The standing joke was they could roll their eyes when I suggested as much, and I wouldn’t be offended. They were happy to just be given a list. To be told what to harvest. So I absorbed the responsibility. I wanted them to stay.
If we needed more, I planted more.
If someone had a gripe, I absorbed it.
If someone wanted to do less, I took on their share.
I let our own homestead crops of dried beans, grains, maize, and oil seed sunflower lapse, in favour of crops for the boxes. I was so singularly focused on making participation in this idea as easy as I could, I automatically enfolded any issue that might cause friction. I was committing a massive mistake.
The early sign should have been enough. I was tired, and I’d started talking to one of the growers about a meeting to discuss more collective responsibility for parts of the system.
Then the unexpected happened, and I had to pivot fast to the new reality of nursing Geoff’s eyesight back (a five month journey that is still unfolding). We needed an income again to make hospital travel possible. That meant more of my time. And, our life had to adjust to a new pattern. When you live as remotely as we do each trip is a week-long effort—a full day to prepare the greenhouse and garden, then it’s a day of travel from our homestead to the hospital. One or two days of treatment. Then everything in reverse. Five or six full days gone to dust. Every four weeks.
A hard truth was emerging. Once, a long time ago, when communities understood the seasons, communities—not individuals—planned, planted, and managed their crops with deep knowledge that food both takes time to grow and a team to grow it. The weakness I had created was there was no ‘team’. And one unexpected event now threatened the entire system. The question was no longer whether I could keep carrying it. It was whether the Harvest Boxes could survive without me holding every thread together.
The answer, at least in that moment, was no.
My garden continued anyway. It ignored crisis. My carrots and beets held their ground, and the weeds filled every space I did not reach. The soil did not pause for explanation. It kept what had been tended. It kept what had been left.
*
We sat around a kitchen table in the warm light of morning. Tea in hand, faces full of life and happiness simply to be sitting together. This group have become friends and we’ve had some highs this season.
The other grower had kindly arranged this meeting to discuss the Harvest Boxes going forward. But, I am sure he didn’t know the scale of what was coming. I felt terrible about that. I spent a week collecting my thoughts and carefully writing notes about everything I wanted to say. Then mulling over if I was ready to say it. I was fearful of causing hurt, and gutted that the whole system would likely fold.
As I shakily laid out our situation I registered shock around the table.
We were seven boxes into our current season. The produce was magnificent. The gardens were flourishing. Yet, I was explaining, the structure beneath it all was unsound. Mea culpa. For two years coordination between us, planting and harvesting decisions had been concentrated in one mind. I had not trusted this beautiful, extraordinary group to be co-authors in the system. And that central coordination point was about to fall over. I knew my words were a shock. Modern life has trained us to trust that someone else is coordinating things. And, it’s trained the coordinators to keep their mouths shut. Anything else is weakness. A failure. We’ve all become participants on a treadmill, rather than co-authors in a life. Frailty and risk.
Resilience is often imagined as abundance. I was discovering, resilience is not measured by what survives when everything goes well. It is measured by what survives when something goes wrong.
The group needed to make two decisions. Do we keep the Harvest Boxes going or close the system? If we continue, how? I was happy to keep growing crops, but had no more space for all the rest. My focus was now turned towards Geoff, without compromise.
I paused, letting the breadth of this news sink in. It was said. My heart was breaking but I also felt relief. The die was cast.
The group needed a moment to think so I consciously retreated into silence. Glancing outside I saw a pair of robins sitting in a nearby tree. Beyond them stretched the vast wilderness of this place. The next part had to come from those around the table.
And then magic happened. That special collective energy that forms when a group aligns.
Yes.
The Boxes would continue. Our community needed them. The growers needed them. Our collective future needed them. But with big changes.
No single person would hold seasonal continuity. The group collectively stepped into to the responsibility. They identified that we needed more labour—the growers were doing too much. We needed new coordinators. We needed to devolve the planning and the management to the group and this one, they recognised, was going to be tough. There was commitment and resolve. There was energy and there was love. Nobody bolted for the exit. Nobody suggested we stop.
The centre of gravity shifted, away from one person and toward the collective.
*
Six box cycles on from the meeting. Three months. We have new fantastic, enthusiastic coordinators. They bring a beautiful fresh energy. Someone else now coordinates the crop plans, and checks in with each grower monthly—what is growing, what has failed, what needs adjusting. We grow seedlings for one another—a shift in practice that also changes how the work lives between us. A new location for the Box distribution has been created. It is exquisite. I still rise at dawn to harvest my crops. But in the mist of early winter I pack my truck and drive to the Boxes’ new home.
There are six growers contributing now. Our produce is stacked high in crates—waves of greens threaded through with the reds and yellows of end-of-season tomatoes, the deep orange of carrots, the heavy purple of beets. It is the season of pears, and there is a kind of giddy abundance in the air. Shoulder to shoulder we wash and bunch, and pack each Box with enough fruit and vegetables to feed two adults for two weeks, without shopping.
I am one of those growers. I hold the history of this system in my head, but the present is no longer carried by me alone. We now know that keeping this going once the scaffolding of society falters will take continuity and a team. Feeding twenty-two people is impressive. Continuing to feed them is food sovereignty.
This lesson arrived in a way I would never have chosen—through illness and the ordinary unpredictability of a human life. The weakness in our hyper-local community system was not a lack of food. It was the concentration of knowledge, coordination, and responsibility in a single place. What emerged was something more fragile and more durable at the same time: shared responsibility, shared ownership, shared commitment. Knowledge moving between hands, rather than resting in one. Is it harder? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely.
*
In a few weeks Geoff and I will start our next journey into the deep world of ophthalmology. He has regained 95 percent of his sight. We can live with that. We can stay on the homestead. For one more season, at least.
The age-old predator of humankind is stalking—the hunger gap is always coming. It is not a metaphor. It's a season that comes whether we are ready or not, already forming beneath the apparent, easy abundance of summer, already written into the turning of the year. Plant where you stand. Feed who you stand with. Let responsibility travel through many hearts. Embed a food sovereignty commitment in your community—threaded, continuous, unbroken—in the wisdom of many hands.
Solidarity & Soil
Margi
READ part one: THE HUNGER GAP IS COMING (1 of 2)
READ part three: THE QUIET ARCHITECTURE OF SURVIVAL
From the homestead
(top left to bottom right) The Harvest Boxes being compiled | My dawn contribution of mizuna, beets, sugarloaf cabbage, and potatoes, washed, packed, and ready to go in the truck | Potatoes being dug | Winter crops in and growing | The next potato bed, growing strong | That same potato bed now under horticultural fleece to protect from frost | My ‘bestie’, Ginger, just generally saying ‘hi!’ | My shed manager. A brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) raiding the peanut butter I use for the mouse traps.
Winter is settling in to the slow quiet that marks this season. The garden has onions, sugarloaf cabbages, mizuna, sprouting broccoli, green macerata cauliflower (that won’t head until spring) kailaan, carrots, beets, garlic, leeks, eschallots, and many, many weeds!
Every day the sky is massive. Every day Geoff looks skyward and can see.
Life here remains quiet and beautiful.
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Thank you for sharing wisdom that has been earned through a very hard experience. It's something many of us need to hear and learn from. I hope your system continues as does the healing.
Beautifully done, Margi. You made it, for now.
Distribution of labour is the big organizing piece. Generally I take the approach that if I want something done right and on time, I have to do it myself. I don't have time or energy to find someone and teach them how to do it by the deadline. It's what I call the little red hen scenario: everybody wants to eat, but nobody wants to help. And of course, this can only be a temporary situation.
In one case, I had created a very large and successful project, where I was managing everything myself, and begging desperately to the group of 30 people that I was at the end of my rope and something had to change for distribution of labor. And there was nobody in the room with the competency or willingness to step in. But what happened is, we got pregnant, and at that point there was no alternative but to let go. It was only after I left that new people showed up with the skills and capacity to take up my mandate and keep it going. It could easily have died at that point, but thanks to new people circulating in, it's alive and well 20 years later.