Artist as Family: Mapping Our Menu

Friday, 5 February 2010

Mapping Our Menu

For the next three years, Patrick will be a student again, undertaking research for his doctoral thesis in the areas of ecology and poetics. Part of his research is to document our family's transition from being oil dependent to as self-sufficient as we can be in terms of water, energy and food.

We have solar panels, water tanks and bikes. But what about our food?

We have been spending a lot of time in the garden talking about what it will take for our family to become self-sustaining in terms of what we eat. So, to determine how far we have to go, we decided to mark the beginning of our journey by spending 24 hours eating the food we have growing here in our garden or provided by our chickens, and the public food we are able to forage locally. No salt and pepper, no butter, oil or any condiments. We only drank our own rain water. We didn't drive anywhere all day and we didn't spend any money.

7:06 am

7:08 am

7:10 am

7:13 am

7:20 am

7:26 am

9:32 am

9:35 am

9:48 am

11:07 am

11:35 am

11:45 am

12:39 pm

12:44 pm

1:24 pm

5:12 pm

7:46 pm

7:50 pm

8:13 pm

8:27 pm

As you can see, we by no means went hungry, though we all lacked energy throughout the day, had headaches at one time or another, and felt lackluster.

Patrick: I experienced a mild depression along with a headache. As the head gardener in the Artist as Family, I know how much work it takes to generate our own food, and this challenge - or experiment - really emphasised the enormous task we have of becoming self-sufficient.

Zephyr: Just before lunch I had a nap!! I haven't done that since I was three years old.

Meg: I had a meeting to attend in the afternoon. While I was sitting in it, I couldn't help but feel that the issues that were being discussed that I normally feel are vital and worth discussing, were completely irrelevant compared to the imperative issue of finding food for one's self and one's family.

40% of greenhouse gases come from industrial agriculture (supermarket food): pesticides, fertilisers, tractors, harvesters, packaging, transportation, refrigeration, lighting etc. Food prices are only going to rise courtesy of peak oil. Communities that start to plan for energy descent now will be better off in the long run. What the Artist as Family is learning, is that relocalisation is a several year transition.

1 comment:

Maria29 March 2010 at 09:35
This is a really interesting blog, and I long to be part of such a project.
I've done the raw diet, or partially a raw diet (vegan style,) and when the body clears out toxins that have been housed in your bodies for years, you feel sickish and sluggish until all's cleared out. You'll feel clearer, lighter, healthier, and your immune system will improve the more fresh food you eat. Your energy will be up! You'll see. :)
Thanks for bringing this awareness of growing your own food to folks!

Maria in Florida
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About Us

Hello! We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr. We live in Daylesford, Australia on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University on Djaara peoples' country.

We base our creative practice on our concept of permapoesis, which simply means permanent making or regenerative living – an antidote to disposable culture. We practice an art that participates in what it represents; an art of social warming in an era of global warming. Food ethics and politics are central to our practice. Generating food that brings human and ecological health and global justice is our creative call to arms, within the sphere of the local. We teach a unique skill set of radical neopeasant homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs). We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, poets, artists, video makers who also make music, but mostly we're a family who belong to a bloody great community and therefore we're much more than the sum of our parts.

Past and current projects

Artist as Family have conducted a number of fruitful projects in the past including '17 Days' (2009), commissioned by the Lock-up Cultural Centre in Newcastle and 'Food Forest' (2010–), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, our work was featured in the international anthology of ecological art, 'Art & Ecology Now' (2014), and we wrote the Art of Free Travel (2015) about our 400 day cycle adventure to Cape York and home again in Central Victoria, which was shortlisted for an ABIA in 2016. We continue to give talks to sustainability groups, art schools, university students and community organisations. We teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs) from our home, at Tree Elbow University, which is the site for The School of Applied Neopeasantry in Daylesford, Victoria.

17 Days (2009)

'17 Days' involved foraging for anthropogenic waste along the coastline and throughout the city of Newcastle. Day after day we carried out the same simple task of walking or bike riding to collect countless bags of rubbish. We swam, played in the sand, picnicked, rested, communed with locals, gazed (as inlanders) in awe at the sea and picked up other people’s discarded refuse. After 17 days we had amassed a monumental pile of industrial food and drink packaging, which we exhibited at the Lock-up Cultural Centre as simply: the everyday detritus of hypertechnocivility as collected by a family on holiday.

Food Forest (2010–)

'Food Forest' is a public artwork that doubles as a community garden, a work that aims to foreground biodiversity and demonstrate that materially art can be generative, can be a resource unto itself, rather than just an extractor or exploiter of resources to make market desirable products. In other words art can be generative contiguous with ecological functioning. Food Forest is therefore a work that attempts to blur the traditional western line between art and that estranging term ‘nature’.