The Solitude Farm in Auroville is a ‘food forest’. This is one of the few English terms that is difficult to express in German through a compound word (Esswald?). We do not have such a thing, and find it difficult to think about it too. An orchard that we would allow to grow wild with other edible annual plants and shorter-lived plants until we had a dense jungle consisting entirely of edible plants… I am looking for a word for that. It is the opposite of a ‘food desert’; we have no compound word for that in German either. It means a neighborhood with no shops selling fresh food. The only things in urban ‘food deserts’ are gas stations and kiosks selling bags of chips and sweets, long-life sliced bread and chemical cheese.
Tamil
Krishna gave a short talk. His enthusiasm for the project he has pursued for over 20 years was unmistakable, passionately palpable. Krishna is from England, speaks fluent Tamil, often had to search for English words for Tamil words. Tamil culture has not only grown dear to him; he seems deeply rooted in it. And precisely this is his central message. We have knowledge thousands of years old about what grows in the environment we live in, what we can eat, how we can prepare it, what nutritional energy value the plants have and what healing effects can be achieved with them.
Grandmother’s knowledge
Our grandmothers have this knowledge; we would still have it somewhere within us too, only forgotten. Nature, if we let it and guide it a little only here and there, has more to offer us than our chemical inventions. His central message: Activate the old knowledge, let nature do its work, handle the fruits responsibly, communally and ecologically….
Krishna draws inspiration from Masanobu Fukuoka, a pioneer of permaculture. He met him many years ago in Japan and saw his “do-nothing farming” with his own eyes; he carries his spirit onward. You may enter his food forest only barefoot; every child would once have known that. As he talks, roaming through the small forest of 1 to 2 hectares, he picks leaves, eats them and names them with Tamil names. His voice almost breaks with enthusiasm for the abundance the small forest offers. Most of the plants came on their own. He does not know the word weed. A friend in Auroville took a piece of land that had been so depleted in the twentieth century that it was nothing but a stony desert and turned it into a food forest within 5 years. It was a great deal of work, he said, but worthwhile and sustainable.
Through a food-box system, farmers can live substantially better in this way, and the community and nature fare better too.
Learning
A group of students from Pondicherry were there that day with their lecturer. They wanted textbook knowledge. ‘Use your campus to grow vegetables for the canteen, encourage your students not to eat at the fast-food chains just outside the campus, ask your grandmothers. The knowledge is there, you just have to use it,’ was his answer. Otherwise, of course, he would be happy to offer various workshops on practical approaches.
The old woman who was born here on this land and sat on the ground in the background understood no English. She knows what to do.
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