Now, freshened from rest and with plenty of built up demand to participate, the plan is to complete four mobs in two months with two of the mobs organized as “mini-mobs” with several nearby locations getting mobbed simultaneously.

In August we returned to Spence’s Farm to do some of the tasks that we do best – pull weeds, make large piles of compost disappear and lay down mulch.

This past Sunday we split up to hit three location in Durham. The Interfaith Food Shuttle’s urban farm plus the home gardens of several long time mob participants.

Kristin and I attended the mob at Steph and Steven’s house, turning a lot full of English ivy and wire-grass into several nicely cleaned up and mulched garden areas.

I am excited to see many, many first time crop mob participants. Ever expanding and pushing the model forward, I am still in awe at how it all continues to come together and function so well.

To date there are active Crop Mob groups in 22 states in the US, 99% of which formed after the end of February of this year. At some point the originators of this new model of agrarian community building have to let go, get back to our work in the present – in our own community – and let evolution do its thing. And it is evolving; it is debatable how much leadership this idea needs on a national level. There is no doubt that a solid foundation and at least a minimum operational framework is needed. After that is established, all we can do is look on as the roof goes up and the furniture is moved in.

Crop Mob is a very sexy idea right now. As such it is subject to an intense scrutiny of its methods, its participants and its goals. “White, hipster slackers participate in a real life Farmville” might as well be the new media headlines. From what I have been reading lately, you would think that what started as a way to get young and landless farmers together has turned into just another urban fad for the fixed gear bike crowd. This is untrue and utterly ridiculous. Is there anything that a group of young people can do that can’t be turned into something that it is not?

Some recent comments on the online version of a story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (‘Crop Mobs’ thrive in farmville):

Hipster doofuses. Your parents play Farmville now, on to the next thing.

…there is more to experience than diggin’ in the dirt in a garden. I am just wondering why this hipster/feel-good activity is news.

Farmers do not get enough freebies from the government, they also get FREE Labor from the idiot taxpayers that subsidies them in the first place….WEIRD. People are stupid.

The best part is they do it once and they never come back. Instead, they run back to their homes in the city and wait for more government handouts. There is no such thing as hard work anymore.

Small farms are great, but do we really need a story about hipsters who have never done real work in their lives going on a feelgood, look-at-me fieldtrip? There are great stories of small produce farms (many of them owned Hmong, Mexican or Somali immigrants) who are providing much of our local produce…

Look at me! I’m “farming”. More hipster douchery.

…typical nonsense from the fringe that will disappear when the next fad is discovered.

WOW. I wish I had so much time on my hands that I was so bored I wanted to go work on a farm.

I honestly don’t know where the hate for this idea comes from. I wonder if the detractors tear apart every other volunteer activity that is discussed in the media? Are we really the only group that has to examine our privilege every time we set out to do a crop mob? Do we really have to take note of every participant’s motivation for showing up?

No, we don’t have to answer to anyone but the farmers we are working for and the community we have formed. The media eye will move on but we will not.

In mobs we trust…

The farmer Trace Ramsey, who is part of the Mob core as well as its documentarian, has watched the young-farmer phenomenon explode. ‘People are interested in authentic work,’ he said. ‘I think they’re tired of what they’ve been told they should accomplish in their life, and they’re starting to realize that it’s not all that exciting or beneficial from a community perspective or an individual perspective.’ At 36, Ramsey joked that he’s the old man of the project — remarkable considering the average American farmer is 57. But as people of all ages become involved, he said, ‘what started as a young-farmer movement is just becoming a farmer movement.’

Full story – Field Report: Plow Shares by Christine Muhlke

Guerrilla Growfair is a group of agrarian rebels, many with substantial farming experience, that get together to swiftly combat a big project. The group uses unconventional tactics in the form of ambushes and raids to attack its enemies who are less mobile, but larger in force. Enemies include, but are not limited to; wiregrass, Johnson grass, crab grass, infertile soil, and impervious surfaces.

The type of work done could range from installing a garden at someone’s house to cultivating a field for a farmer that is behind on planting this season. The goal of the project is not to offer free labor, but to unite the community for the simple cause of feeding everyone. There is a lack of cheap nutritious foods in certain areas of Raleigh and these areas are known as food deserts. In a food desert the only type of food you’ll find is fast and greasy. Our goal is simple… to erect an oasis in every desert.

The Guerrilla Growfair tagline? Lending hands on the lands.

I pull the lice out of their ears.  That alone makes us pretty tight.

Kristin has become attached to them, giving them their nightly belly scratching and making sure they have enough of everything that they need.  As I alluded to in a previous post, it is because of her view of the way these pigs live that she may be able to eat them when the time comes.  She has been vegan/vegetarian for thirteen years, about half her life, so it is a step that has not been considered lightly or without questions.

I spent some time as a vegan/vegetarian, some five years or so, but as the saying goes, “if you aren’t now then you never were”.  Or maybe that is a straightedge thing.  My reasons for that life were political and human based, focusing largely on the interactions of people in the food system.  Animal rights and treatment were a close secondary consideration but not the major thrust for action.  Living that life greatly informed my decision to eat entirely local and make a conscious decision every time I make a food purchase.

I have eaten meat for the last few years and, with very few exceptions, I know exactly where that meat comes from.  I have to allow some exemptions (such as the weekly free lunch at a church in Pittsboro), but I have to have a pretty good reason and it has to be from a local restaurant or store.

But in a few months, all my pork will have come from a few hundred yards away.

This brings up the issue of how to deal with ending the life of an animal who has shared your space and your time and your close interactions.  I haven’t had to actually address the feelings before simply because this will be the first time I have raised an animal with the intent to eventually kill and eat it.

I can say that the best way to avoid any attachment is to treat the animal simply as a machine, a machine that needs to be checked on once in awhile in order to change the oil or put more fuel in the tank.  This is how many farmers treat everything on their farm – human labor, soil, resources.  Since I am trying to live a new example, I cannot get away with treating non-human farm residents as inferior or not worth any extra effort.  They are not machines; none of the components around me is a machine although sometimes I fail to see that.

I need to know firsthand that I have created a space in which the pigs feel safe, cared for and unstressed and are able to fully enjoy being pigs.  This means mud holes and tall grass, real dirt and kind words.  It means that when it comes down to it there can be some sort of peace between the killer and the killed, that the sadness and harshness of the process of taking lives can be tempered in some way and that life up until the end can be human interpreted as “happy”.

Without trying to justify any action, we, as the users of this food, have to take responsibility for the actions needed to place a meat meal on our plates.  We cannot do that unless we know where our food comes from.

So I edited and added and doubled the length of the original.  It was eventually rejected for the compilation because there was not a personal story involved.  I am working to fix that by writing another bit on my own journey to this point, but the original essay will most likely have a new life as the preface to my photography book project.

So, here it is for your review, the new and improved New Blood For the Old Body, a “Farm or Die” screed for those of you stuck in Accounts Payable or the IT Department or some other place where you know you don’t belong.  Join us in the creation of a new agrarian experience…

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Many of us never meant to become farmers. We had our ambitions to enter the world as accountants or lawyers or teachers or some other clean, respectable professional. We never really thought about the origins of our food or questioned the intentions of those who screen out the realities of farming; we always knew that the supermarket shelves would fill themselves, food came in boxes or cans ready to serve and farmers were simply one dimensional photographs in the mix of a hot new marketing campaign. Sustainable and industrial agriculture held meaningless differences, no more distinction than competing national brands of light duty trucks or diet soda.

But then something happened. In the previously steady route of our lives, a shift occurred. The soil moved under us somehow, got stuck in the creases of our pants, in the ridges of our shoes, in the lines of our palms. Suddenly white picket fences, situation comedies and mutual fund returns didn’t seem so interesting anymore. The big ball game and the driving range became distractions from the reality of a new love affair. We got hooked on the possibilities of growing our own food and also providing that food to others.

The epiphany was likely different for many of us. Maybe a friend took us to a farmers market. Maybe someone had a plate of local hamburgers or collards at a picnic. Maybe the news of some global food disaster made us question the monocultures piled high on our plates. Maybe a real life farmer entered our life.

For a few of us, those with farming in our past – a childhood spent in the fields of the big farms or the family plots, throwing rocks into the hedgerows for little or no pay or watching over milking machines in the stench of industrial sized barns – there was no love, no kind of encouragement, no appreciation for our part in the dynamics of food production. We were simply limbs and calluses then, small gears in a giant cranking clock. We left the farm to pursue something else only to be pulled back hard when it became apparent that we could abandon everything that farming once meant to us. We could make it ours.

Still others came to farming from DIY and anti-authoritarian backgrounds, building urban community gardens or putting up food in anarchist collectives. Gardening always had a community aspect to it, but we wanted something more. We knew that we could do the work, that we had the right vision and skills. We just needed the access and the resources to get started.

Regardless of how we arrived at this point, here we are; we will call ourselves farmers from now on. We are transplants from cities, dropouts from university systems and ex-corporate shufflers. We are mothers and sons and grandparents, masters in communications, colorful documentarians, shy propagandists. Most of all, we are teachers and students inhabiting the same bodies and breathing the same air.

Our young and new farmer movement is made up of many itinerant folks, traveling to places we want to see, gaining knowledge we never thought we would need and forming the basis for our own theories on agriculture. Our commonality with the landed and the stable is the soil and its layers. More specifically, our bond is in the ways we approach that soil and our desire to grow food in a way that builds on a sense of the farmer never dying. The immortality is not functional but symbolic – if you imagine that you will need to use a piece of soil forever, you will never intentionally do it harm.

This intentionality is not a new idea, but neither is it very well known in the information age. It is buried in our collective past, not necessarily waiting to be discovered, but intact and beckoning nonetheless. To get to the guts of it, we are throwing away the agricultural methods of our parents and grandparents, even subverting our great-grandparent’s proud thoughts of survival amidst the coming surpluses. Things may appear as cobbled together bits of dust and weight and worn out shovels, but its functionality in an agrarian way of life is apparent with very little inspection.

We stand in the books and plots and ideas of the past, pulling out the rusty pages and diseased cells in order to build something practical from the obsolete and misinterpreted, rewiring the seed catalogs, rewilding the crosswalks, reconnecting the pastures to the kitchens.

So here we are, doing more than is required of us, daily pushing the boundaries of our bedtimes, our muscle structure, our hunger pains, our balance of minimalist living conditions with the reality of satisfying relationships. We don’t need justification for living this life, but that rejection of validation won’t feed or shelter our families or protect our chickens from roaming dogs. We have concrete needs – access to land, to capital, to markets – but we cannot ignore the bounty before us as we seek to satisfy these needs.

We have to live farming as it happens, at our level, at the pace that we can move. The weeds don’t and won’t pull themselves; the new beds won’t magically appear out of spilt potting mix or the crumbs of a quick dinner of sandwiches among the paths. Anyone who tells you that growing food is simple is a lunatic. Anyone who tells you that having animals lessens the physical workload is a liar. But we stick the possibilities of a simpler, easier way of life in the context of the larger ecology, the massive inebriation that defines the world and my generation. If we are to sober up, we need to get moving.

We are bridging eras, going about tasks the hard way but with newer tools and even newer outlets, burrowing into ancient methods and supplementing with our own big-brained flourishes. A generation of reclamation, telling our story to groups of people that may have never been inspired to so much as think about how a piece of grass might pop from a crack in the sidewalk. The whisper is that we are here to exploit those cracks, get our dirty fingernails scratched with asphalt and debris while attempting to save the disorientated souls of the material apocalypse. We young farmers have the double task of growing food for the community as well as being able to communicate about the process and our decisions in spaces that are new and possibly uncomfortable.

The pictures we take of ourselves hang in art shows and stand out in glossy magazines; our recipes are printed on cardstock and handed out at tradeshows; our words bring excitement to readers wishing that they too could participate in the riot that is small scale sustainable agriculture. This riot exists outside the handshakes and millionaires of the agra-political grease machines, knowing, with the certainty of the tides, that the transactions we despise will occur no matter how long we scream, no matter how far we march, no matter how many letters we write. It is not defeatist or abandonment of the successful tactics of the past, just recognition that we can do much better with the actual actions of farming in sustainable ways, demonstrating to the consumers and wholesalers and value-adders that we are successful despite their dismissals. We cannot change the culture without changing the culture; yelling and otherwise carrying-on never has set a sweet fruit or fed a piglet, and I will bet it never will.

We love this life – we have to – but sometimes we can feel that we don’t own it, that it owns us and grips us in a way that will never shake us loose. In those moments of weight we can only shrug, pull on the rubber boots and move deliberately until the fireflies speckle the whippoorwills’ breaths. Throughout all the highs and lows we can look at ourselves over and over again knowing that, if we stick to our ideals, we can do noble and appropriate work no matter what happens.

We are the new blood in the old body.

I have been a strong proponent of the young agrarian movement, writing essays, giving interviews, taking photographs. The Crop Mob is the physical realization of all those words and images, the sinew, muscle and breath behind the imagination.

With the Crop Mob there exists the possibility of something beyond what we usually perceive of as farming.

The idea is bigger than barn-raisings, more technical than workshops, more thoughtful than textbooks. It is guerrilla agrarianism in the information age. Maybe that isn’t an apt description, but when I watch shovels hitting dirt on a foreign farm with a crew assembled using email, social networking and word of mouth, it surely feels like it.

The Crop Mob is unstoppable, yet flawed on some levels.  Reciprocity from the farmers we have helped is greatly lacking.  We are all busy, yes, but if we are to keep donating our labor, the labor pool must continue to snowball and include previous beneficiaries of that labor.  On that end we can improve our pitch, farms can understand better what they are getting and everyone involved can get what they need out of the day.

We are not unskilled; we bring decades of combined experience in dozens of areas – bed building, fencing, transplanting, harvesting, permaculture, food/farm activism, media outreach – so we are capable of making substantial impacts in a handful of hours.

Where to from here?  The next step may be to franchise the idea or mutate it or trim it down or use it differently.  In the meantime we will continue to do what we have been doing – showing up and getting shit done.

We (Danielle, Gray, Kristin, Noel and Trace) at Circle Acres farm are planning a work weekend for May 22nd-24th.  We are also calling out for a Crop Mob on Sunday the 24th from 10-3.

We have plenty of camping space available for both Friday and Saturday nights.  Parking at the farm is interesting, so please fill vehicles to the max…

Here are some of the things we might get into -

- sheet mulching “lumps” for the pumpkin patch
- removal of privet and bio-char demonstration
- building sheet mulch beds
- prepping land for a living fence
- untangling and testing used drip tape
- plugging mushroom logs
- pulling new electrical wire in the house
- ripping out plumbing
- digging a gray water trench
- building a solar shower
- playing around with cob mixtures

For food, please bring snacks, drinks and whatever you think you might want to have on hand for the weekend.  We will cook for the Saturday dinner and Sunday Crop Mob lunch; we’ll do our best to provide for other meals, but any help is appreciated.

Please RSVP as soon as you can and let us know what days you will be at the farm.  Also let us know if you have any special needs, dietary or otherwise.

One last note – please leave your dogs at home.

I’m not sure which pie bakers ended up with dates, but I don’t think that was really anyone’s intent.

With pies filling bellies, it was time for the entertainment to begin.  A puppet re-enactment of the victory over the police, presented in three hysterical segments…

Then on to some anarcho-country folk punk from Dan Mac.

My favorite song from Dan was about liberals, their hypocrisy and how they are part of the problem and not the solution.  My distrust of the right is often eclipsed by my distaste for the inaction, posturing and verbal drooling of the left.

i’m sick of you
and your goddamned hypocrisy
if peace is patriotic
i’m starting a fight

they’re not my soldiers
and they’re not my astronauts
we can all be leaders
and we don’t need fuckin’ cops

clear cut the forests with hybrid machinery
Brutus and Judas have nothing on us
don’t say the “R” word, just write to your congressman
we’re here and profiteers, traitors of trust

The recent Obama selection of big-ag, cloned meat cheerleader, GMO loving, ethanol guzzling, bio-pharmaceutical conman, and all around jerkstore cowboy Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture illustrates the last verse perfectly.  When you trust a politician, sooner or later you lose.  Now we’re losing sooner – maybe there won’t be rainbows, peace on Earth and gold raining from the sky on January 20th after all.  Thankfully, we can still rely on each other instead of the so-called representatives.  Can we just call them “self-described representatives”?

Anyway, the last band to play was From the Depths.

Their set was energetic, but it was the crowd that made the show.  Animated and dynamic, many of the folks were pulling out some of the old dances, but I saw some new things during the show as well.

Intensity was not lacking…

During the From the Depths set, someone said that they voted for Obama because he promised to make punk lyrics understandable and audible.  They are going to hold him to that promise…

From that seed
A mighty root
And it grew

Yeah, capitalism is dead to me, but mine is a minority opinion.  I’ll dance on that grave someday, and my own grave too, thank you.  But what happens when people decide that a symbolic gesture is in order, a mock procession of ecstatic mourners cheering the burning hulk of centuries of mistreatment?  What happens when a funeral for capitalism gets disrupted by folks who simply don’t want to believe it is dead?

To back up, in late November Kristin and I were planning to go to a street party in Chapel Hill to celebrate the death of capitalism.  The plan was to have a funeral in the street and then dance in the same street.  But that night was cold, so we decided to stay home, stoke the wood stove and get under the blankets.  We figured the industrialists, et al wouldn’t miss us at graveside.

Many other folks thought it too cold for a funeral as well, but eventually enough people showed up to actually make the party go on.  The cops didn’t like the idea, started shoving and pressing and yelling and spraying and doing all the things that annoy all the people like me who have any sense of the rights and responsibilities of anti-authoritarian living.  Just try to get your dancing condoned in the streets of Chapel Hill!

Police Chief Brian Curran said his officers dealt with the situation appropriately. He said police do not condone dancing in the street and had not issued a permit for the protest.

As the clash went on, several un-arrests were made, but one person was taken to jail.  It is that one person that brought about the need for another party.

Nick Shepard, 24, the manager at International (sic) Books on Franklin Street, was the only person arrested. He was charged with assaulting an officer.

This is where the story pretty much starts for me.  I love knowing that if I were in a similar situation, a hundred people have my back even if they don’t know me very well or know me at all.

Friday night Kristin and I went into Carrboro for a benefit event billed as “Punk ‘N Pie”, a date auction where the winner of the pie gets a blind date of their choice with the pie baker.  After the auction would be a re-enactment of the defeat of the police using puppets, then a smashing of a capitalism pinata and finally a bunch of bands.

Yeah, we made a pie – a chunky, buttery, local sweet potato pie made with Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes, local honey, local eggs and sweet cream butter from Homeland Creamery. No, it wasn’t a vegan pie, but I wanted it to be different and supportive of local farmers.  Local fat is hard to come by unless it is from a creature.

There were a dozen or so other pies on the table when we got there, many with multiple bids on them.  There was the dumpstered pie with the added slogan “Let’s Paint the White House Black” with a black flag decorated on the side.

There was the giant apple pie with a heart cut out…

…a vegan pot pie and several cookie pies.

Then there was the “Let’s Make a Pie Together” date pie…

…and a Mud and Flowers pie that was really a pie pan filled with mud, leaves, sticks and flowers.

The auction raised several hundred dollars for a legal defense fund for Nick.

Kristin won our pie despite some other pretty high bids.  So I got that date going for me.

More to come…

An outsider would question our motives as would some cynical old-timers or jaded sustainable agriculture veterans.  I wouldn’t even bother with those folks.  My main thought is not on convincing the skeptics that our agenda is one of filling a need, but rather my main thought is Where do we go from here?

Three months out of Wilmington and it is finally settling in that I am in a very different place.  Things move quickly here and things get done by folks who say they will do them.  I can feel some of my own cynicism fading away as I leave behind some of the vapidity of Wilmington, its slow moving, energy-sucking ambivalence flaking away like dead skin.

I am starting to warm up to the people that spin around in my daily interactions.  I’m trying to build the sorts of friendships that emulate family.  The Crop Mob is helping me with some of my apprehensions about new people and my own motives for entering a new world as an automatically standoffish person.

I have had a hard time, wondering how I would fit in when my experiences with building community in Wilmington often met with horrible failure.  I came into a ready made yet evolving community, ready to take my place yet unsure of what that place would look like.

It seems that my role here could be one of role model or experienced advice giver, but mostly, in the first few months, my role has been that of a lost explorer.  Things that I know how to do – cook, forage, dumpster dive – have been lost temporarily as I try to figure out the basics of living.

Cooking without anything resembling a kitchen has been frustrating; washing dishes without a good source of water makes cooking more of a chore than it needs to be.  What that has to do with the Crop Mob is beyond me, but it does affect my interactions.  It has also made my first impressions harder to shake.  Adah (pictured above) has tooled on me about my peanut butter and white bread lunches, but for me that meal has been easy, quick and comfortable in this time of transition.

Now that some of those issues are worked out, I feel like I can join this community in a functional capacity, sharing what I know and accepting learning opportunities as they present themselves.

And yet I am still not a talker.

To bring it back to the Crop Mob, the rhythm of the work is often set with old camp songs.  The one I have heard at both mobs is about sweet potatoes and biscuits -

Sweet potato biscuit that’s what I said
sweet potato biscuit dancing through my head
went to the cook’s table askin’ for some bread
found me a biscuit but the cooks was all dead

Sweet potato, sweet potato biscuit on the run
gotta find me a biscuit, gotta get me some of them
Sweet potato, sweet potato biscuit on the run
gotta find me a biscuit, gotta get me some

Standin’ on the lookout since the day before last
saw a line of biscuits stretchin’ into the past
Jesus on the hillside you know what he said
he said take this biscuit this sweet potato bread

Standing on the banks of the river wide
hop on a biscuit and catch yourself a ride
ride to the devils house all the way
share a biscuit with the devil on the judgment day

Sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit
sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit

sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit
(whispered) sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, (shouted) BISCUIT!!

The reality is that the work of farming requires a lot of time, and extra time is not always available to pursue the sort of friendships and bonding with other area young farmers that make the experience more fulfilling.  Farming might not be as sexy as the New York Times sometimes makes it out to be, but can definitely be as fun as it looks.  However, it can also get lonely and monotonous.

Fortunately there is enough social thread around here to keep everyone together, whether it is through interactions in sustainable ag classes, conferences, or the newest idea around here – crop mobs.

A crop mob isn’t necessarily a new idea.  Migratory groups of farm laborers, starting with “hobos“, have been a part of the American landscape for quite some time.  And if you attended high school in the United States you might remember reading The Grapes of Wrath, the Steinbeck novel about traveling farm workers.  Yeah, poor traveling farmers have been on the road a century and half.  That doesn’t seem to be ending even as the number of farms available to work on diminishes.

So what makes it different this time around?  For one thing, the idea of economic hardship as the driving factor has been removed.  Most everyone involved is likely enduring some sort of financial or structural ruin in their lives.  I don’t have running water, but I own land and make a mortgage payment; another lives in a tent, but lives rent free and worries very little about buying food.

We all have our problems, but none of them are sufficient enough to demand that we wander around the country doing meaningless labor for horrible wages.  We demand and get better treatment and farm in the places we want to farm, for the experience it provides.

We farm because we want to, not because we need to.  At some time or another we were infected with a desire to give and take from the dirt, whether it is the red clay of Chatham County or limestone infested soils of Western New York.

What brought this group together was the need to establish a community of people going through the same sorts of movements, many of which keep folks separated during most days.  Classes, part time jobs, internships, harvesting and living far apart from each other keeps us in our own little bubbles.

This new crop mob goes where it is needed, does the work that is needed, creates the community that is needed and gets us out of those bubbles.

Tidal Creek Co-op produce manager Trace Ramsey bills himself as an anarchist, but his desire to pull up stakes and help build a self-sustaining farm with four friends is part of an organized plan.

Ramsey left his Tidal Creek position last week to the dismay of customers who, for the past five years, relied on him to keep the cooperative stocked with fresh local fruit and vegetables. Now, on 12 acres in Chatham County, he’ll raise animals and grow organic vegetables, working the land without mechanical tools.

- Continued -

The anarchism behind the local Be Your Own Hero movement is about decentralizing leadership and giving everyone a say in group decision-making.

…

“I think everybody is an anarchist, to some extent,” (Kristin) Henry said. “There are things they can do every day that are positive and community oriented, that are from the heart.”

Staff photo | Paul Stephen

Be Your Own Hero Festival Now Accepting Submissions

The 2nd Annual Be Your Own Hero (BYOH) Festival will be taking place in Wilmington, North Carolina September 27th and 28th, 2008. Submissions for workshops, info sessions, skill shares, and musicians are currently being accepted until August 15th, 2008. Volunteers are also needed to help out on the day(s) of the event and/or to join the BYOH Fest Planning Squad.

Please send workshop submissions to herofest@gmail.com with your name, email, phone, organization/collective (if applicable), proposed workshop title & short description, materials needed, and time needed. All other ideas, volunteer availability, and inquiries may also be sent to herofest@gmail.com. We welcome all subjects and we encourage all people to apply, especially those who do not fit neatly into the status quo!

In 2007, Wilmington NC was home to the first Be Your Own Hero Festival, an all day radical Do It Yourself (DIY) Festival held at the Soapbox Laundro Lounge. The Festival included a Really Really Free Market, potluck, workshops, info sessions and live music. 2007′s workshops included: DIY parenting (a radical concept), Basic Bicycle Repair, Truth in Recruiting / Promoting Peace, Social Activism & the Info-Radical, Radical Menstruation, Food Politics, Trans 101: Becoming an ally to transgender people, Unconventional Action: Organizing against the DNC/RNC, and DIY DJ Workshop. Bands included: The Brothels, The Nothing Noise, Gator Country, Prize Winners Collective, NED, and Ghost Mice.

For more information on the Be Your Own Hero Festival and Collective, visit www.beyrownhero.com or contact herofest @ gmail.com.

_______________________

Be Your Own Hero Fest Workshop Submission Form

Email to herofest @ gmail.com by July 31, 2008

NAME:

EMAIL:

PHONE:

ORGANIZATION / COLLECTIVE:

PROPOSED WORKSHOP TITLE:

DESCRIPTION:

MATERIALS NEEDED:

TIME NEEDED: choose from 45 minutes, or 1 hour and 45 minutes

An article in the New York Times details a growing trend in local eating, a trend that many would call the Lazy Locavore movement. More to the point, this trend is based on disposable income more than laziness, and injects an unneeded class distinction into local foods.

The article picks up the false argument that local food always costs more, therefore it should be in the realm of the upper classes to purchase it or have it grown for them. Installed gardens (with maintenance packages), home deliveries of pre-cooked local stews and personal chefs may unnecessarily become the new faces of local eating. Attempts to build community based, income-irrelevant food systems have to stay above the class divide and focus on ways to bring local eaters together and make local food attainable to anyone who wants it.