The Mayan elders have told Chita that we are no longer living in the present. The future has begun, and there is no more time. We must live with our ears and our hearts close to the earth, and food is one of the most important aspects of this because as Chita says, “food is medicine.” By this she means that food has healing potential, but even more so, food is power. “Medicine”, a term frequently used by native peoples, is synonymous with the particular kind of power a person carries in the world which often relates to his or her life’s purpose. Clearly, Chita’s medicine is the growing and cooking of nourishing food.

They say that Boulder, Colorado doesn’t see a lot of homeless people. It is, after all, an affluent community where on the one hand, homelessness is not prevalent, but where on the other hand, homeless from other communities might be drawn precisely because of its affluence. Yesterday, as I was stopped at a busy intersection in Boulder, I saw a man carrying a sign that read “Laid off, father of five, out of food.”  The man did not look like a chronically homeless person. He was well dressed in casual clothes wearing khaki pants, a clean shirt and jacket and a baseball cap.

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Some people have called Slow Money: Investing As If Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered an economics book that reads like poetry. I’m not surprised because I had the privilege of hearing author Woody Tasch expound on the content of his book and answer questions at the Bioneers Conference at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on October 16. Unlike the usual mind-numbing lecture from an esteemed economist, Tasch’s presentation was poignant, sometimes funny, but always passionate.

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