“I’m just a regular person who thinks everything is out of control.”
This is how Woody Tasch, author of the new book Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered and founder of the burgeoning Slow Money Alliance, began his talk last week to a group attending Boston’s Slow Food meeting.
The topic on hand: How to bring money back down to earth. Literally. How to slow money down from its dizzying (and destructive) speed where all it takes is seconds for “collateral” to get parsed into pieces, distributed as “debt” that no one is responsible for, or understands where it actually ends up. The world of finance has been like playing a high-priced game of “Musical Chairs”—with no chairs. And in this world, there is no place that’s “here.” Investing is perplexingly abstract and has little to do with place or relationships. Externalized this way, few grasp the implications of financial dislocation, of a financial system where money is nomadic and wanders un-rooted—until, as we’ve witnessed with the meltdown, the game ends abruptly and we’ve all landed on our butts wondering where the chairs went.
In this blog, I’ve talked about the current “redesign” of capitalism led by leaders such as Bill Gates to John Mackey. From creative capitalism to conscious capitalism there’s another to add to the discourse: nurture capitalism. It’s the new strain of capitalism being promoted by Woody Tasch a guy who cares about soil, farming, food, money and and new ways of thinking about how they all go together. Tasch is ex-chairman of the Investors’ Circle, a network of angel investors, venture capitalists, foundations and family offices that have facilitated the flow of over $100 million to hundreds of early-stage companies dedicated to sustainability. He’s now got a new mission on his mind.
Tasch’s Slow Money Alliance is about redesigning a segment of the market so it’s not, as EF Schumacher famously said, “an institutionalization of irresponsibility.” It’s about designing ways to mobilize capital to invest in small food enterprises to create viable local food networks—that support local food communities and soil fertility. Quite simply, it’s about creating a food system where you can buy a clove of garlic that comes from the farm in your own state, not from one 7,000 miles away in China. Not because “locavore” and the precise calculation of food miles is all the trend these days; but because to choose not to design a sustainable system is to continue to threaten the very thing that sustains us: our soil and the people who extract food from it in sustainable ways in order to fill our bellies.
How many minutes of the day do you spend thinking about soil fertility? I would venture close to none. The opening of Tasch’s book is an eye-opener as to why we should, if not care, at least expend a few CPU cycles thinking about the importance of something so banal as dirt. A litany of grim statistics about loss of soil fertility (“It takes roughly a millennium to build an inch or two of soil; it takes less than forty years, on average, to strip an inch of soil by farming in ways that are more focused on current yield than on sustaining fertility…) and the direct implications—for our stomachs and the necessary act of eating—of a continuation of this trend, are packed into his preface.
What’s refreshing is that Tasch directs the conversation of sustainable agriculture away from a parade of possible technological fixes (better synthetic fertilizers, smarter seeds, more efficiency, etc) to the financial fix needed to address this problem:
The problems we face with respect to soil fertility, biodiversity, food quality, and local economies are not primarily problems of technology. They are problems of finance. In a financial system organized to optimize the efficient use of capital, we should not be surprised to end up with cheapened food, millions of acres of GMO corn, billions of food miles, dying Main Streets, kids who think food comes from supermarkets, and obesity epidemics side by side with persistent hunger.
Speed is a big part of the problem. We are extracting generations worth of vitality from our land and our communities. We are acting as if the biological and the agrarian can be indefinitely subjugated to the technological and the industrial without significant consequence. We are, as the colloquial saying puts it, beginning to believe our own bullshit.
Tasch’s book, part factual spreadsheet part poetic diatribe, consistently asks us to reexamine the, uh, feces of thought we’ve been buying all these years. Last week he quieted the room when he asked: “What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?” It’s a brow-furrowing question without a set of easy answers or platter of puffy platitudes. And it’s a larger set of issues Tasch and his Slow Money Alliance are addressing: How to effectively keep money local. Rooted. Attached to place.
These ideas have a direct lineage to and share DNA with those of Slow Food, an international movement out of Bra, Italy which I wrote about in a previous life for Fast Company magazine. It’s no surprise that Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s founder, wrote the forward to Tasch’s book. Now with over 100,000 members in 132 countries, Slow Food is still countering, as they say on their web site, “fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.” (italics mine) It’s a conversation that’s been perpetuated and fortified by food luminaries such as Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan and Marc Bittman.
A paragraph from the article I wrote about Slow Food echoes much of Tasch’s current sentiments and stresses the imperative of designing alternate systems of food production:
Over the years, Slow Food has evolved from a gourmet organization concerned solely with exalting food and drink to a movement with a mission to promote food diversity and to prevent the extinction of domestic animals, plants, fruits, and vegetables. In the Slow Food worldview, a loss of diversity — driven largely by our obsession with speed — means a gain of one thing: a bland, new world. “At the beginning of the century, for instance, there were about 200 varieties of artichokes in Italy,” says Sardo. “Now there are only about a dozen. Each day, we lose several varieties of vegetable or animal species. Not only does that have huge gastronomic implications, threatening the diversification of taste, but it also has profound ecological implications.”
While Slow Food addresses this relentless commoditization and standardization of food from a cultural imperative rooted in the importance of diversification (and a fair amount of outrage at the deterioration of the pleasure of eating by the blight of fast food purveyors), Tasch is focused on rethinking how we fund modern enterprises. Of the $500 billion of professionally managed philanthropic money in play, for instance, only 100th of 1% (so roughly $50 million) is currently invested in sustainable agriculture. Slow Money hopes to bring some balance to this equation. Like Slow Food—that aims to “offer people an entirely new food-production-and-distribution model, an alternative to the current big-scale, industrialized model”—Tasch and his merry band of venture capitalists aim to: “Create local capacity to invest local capital in local food systems—as a way to build a complimentary set of economic activities to counter the buy low, sell high, profit maximization methods of our current economy.”
I had a distinct feeling of déjà vu listening to Tasch—like this conversation has spent a long time weaving and winding its way through the zeitgeist. But is was a welcomed experience. I left the conversation with Tasch thinking about, of all things, Deep Throat. It was his advice, if you want to gain insight into how things truly work, to “follow the money.” In this case, it will be interesting to see if money directed in a “slow” way can give us a new understanding of different ways of structuring our world. Give us different ways of producing and consuming food. There’s no reason the design community cannot lend its formidable talents to this dilemma and help rethink the intersection of food, farms, (soil) fertility and money as if it mattered—because it does.
If you’re so compelled, visit the Slow Money Alliance site, read their guiding principles and sign up. Tasch’s goal is to get 1 million people to sign his alliance. And if you’re really compelled, head to Santa Fe this September for the first national gathering of the Slow Money Movement.
