If not reading for this project, I have been reading many of my own personal selections just for myself this summer (and let’s be honest, also for my rationale/book list/colloquium). I recently finished Dan Barber’s The Third Plate, a nonfiction work that profiles a host of farmers deploying innovative but ecologically-based agricultural practices that are good for the land and good for the people. Barber, chef and co-owner of farm-to-table restaurants Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, comes to the conclusion that farmers, chefs, and consumers all have a role in the struggle to cultivate a different kind of culture and consciousness around eating that will truly pave the way for a transformed American food system.
A key moment for both Barber and myself in coming to this realization happens during a conversation with Wes Jackson, farmer and co-founder of the Land Institute (a sustainable ag nonprofit). Barber is explaining to Jackson the elaborate crop rotations and organic practices and biodiversity of one family farm in the Finger Lakes region of New York, confident that it is an upstanding example of sustainable agriculture. Jackson is not convinced and responds simply, “Because it won’t last… sooner or later someone is going to show up and do something stupid to degrade the land. That’s been the history of agriculture.”
The takeaway here is that agriculture is inherently extractive and any one intervention that claims to ‘solve’ the dysfunctionality of the American food system—whether it’s urban agriculture or farm-to-table cooking or organic foods—won’t last, because there is not a steady history or sustained culture surrounding any one of these farming and eating practices, but more importantly, there is no sense of widespread solidarity attached to these interventions because of our broken relationship with the land and with food.
This reading got me thinking about an aspect of my research that is potentially lacking. I’ve come into this project with the assumption and belief that urban agriculture is a public good—not a panacea for all food issues, but a step in the right direction toward a resilient and local urban food system in Dakar. While I think that I have effectively theorized and established background on why urban ag has so much potential and how it can be more transformative with policy recommendations, I’m not sure that I’ve asked the question of Will this last? Or will someone show up and do something stupid to degrade the land?
My rudimentary understanding of teranga leads me to say, yes, this will last. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to work this concept into my paper, but I will briefly explain here.
Teranga is a Wolof word (a native language in Senegal) that loosely means ‘hospitality’ in English, but as you can probably guess, so much gets lost in translation. In the words of Pierre Thiam,
Teranga is much more than just hospitality. It’s a value. If there’s a set of values in Senegal, teranga would be the most important one. It’s the way you treat the guest. It’s the way you treat the other, the one who is not you. That person becomes the one to whom you have to offer teranga. You have to treat him with so much respect. You have to offer him what you have. You have to invite him to sit around your bowl.
Championed first by Léopold Sèdar Senghor in the founding years of the nation and widely adopted today, teranga informs everyday life in Senegal and is naturally built into cultures of eating in the country. Meals are always communal in that food is prepared on a single plate for all guests to gather around and share, and it’s not uncommon to be invited over for such a meal, even as a tourist or passing traveler. Thiam adds, “When you share your bowl, your bowl will always be plentiful.”
In sum, teranga invokes not only hospitality, but respect, generosity, selflessness, reciprocity, and community. It is this distinct cultural value that provides the social foundation for everything else, including ways of eating (and therefore ways of farming), that have evolved around this underlying worldview.
My point in bringing this up is to say that it is not just policy or technological innovation that is required to transform a food system, but imagination and cultural consciousness, too. There is already a strong sense of solidarity present in Senegalese food cultures that will allow practices like urban and agroecological farming to thrive in an enduring way. The antidote for someone showing up and degrading the land is a deep reverence for unity and giving and mutuality that teranga demands from the people. The sense of community that urban agriculture fosters and sustains aligns so well with the existing lifeways of teranga, and so the long-term growth and presence of localized urban farming is sure to last.