The hungry gap

Complicity and convenience

I would love to know, have you heard of the hungry gap?

Every year, the local farm I get my fruit and vegetables from writes out to customers to notify us of the hungry gap. Every year they note that new customers are surprised that this is a thing.

This time of year in this part of the world the new plants are still growing and last year’s are finished. From March/April to May/June (weather dependent) there is a gap in the locally-grown produce available. Traditionally, we are told, people relied on the last of the stored root vegetables, and foraged spring greens, and preserved fruits from the previous summer.

Today, we are so disconnected from food, from the seasons and the cycles of growth which sustain us that many people have never even heard of the hungry gap. When you can buy strawberries and lettuce for Christmas dinners why would you know about this?

The hungry gap reminds me of what it really means to live closer to the land. It is not comfortable. It is deeply challenging.

The lives we live are so incredibly coddled. Our complicities in pollution, in child labour, in unsafe work practices and abuses of the land and its peoples are bought so easily with convenience.

One of my favourite writers asks: convenient for whom?

In her book, Movement Matters, Katy Bowman explains how everything “convenient”—a tea bag, a pair of car keys, a laptop—is a symbol for the ways we’ve outsourced our movement to someone or something else. The people who grew the tea, processed it, stuffed the teabag, and sold it in a box so we don’t have to go out in the fields and pick the leaves ourselves is just one example of thousands.

My lovely local farm lets me know that I will have fewer leafy greens for a few weeks until the new growth catches up with our endless demands. I am quite sure that they still get complaints from some. I wonder if people cancel their subscription, outraged at being cheated of a few weeks worth of variety. I hope that many more instead look forward to the unbridled pleasure of the lettuce fresh from the ground, complete with caterpillars and ladybirds.

I think of the many people around the world who are starving. Those in Gaza, facing an unnatural famine. I think of how this world, our only home, could feed us all if we would only respect her. If we would listen to her rhythms and trust in the abundance to come.