Hilda Labrada Gore (bold text) of the Weston A. Price Foundation interviews Zen Honeycutt below:

Welcome to the show, Zen.

Thank you so much, Hilda, and thank you so much to your audience. This is fun. I love it.

I’m excited to talk about growing food. I know you moved to a place where you now have some land and you were telling me that you’ve started a three sisters garden. What does that even mean?

It’s a Native American, indigenous people to the United States tradition and perhaps South America as well, not sure, but what they do is they plant on mounds. They plant 3 or 4 of the same type of corn. They plant squash around the corn so that it prevents little raccoon feet. You know how squash is prickly so raccoons don’t like to walk on it. It prevents them from getting to the corn. It also is a great ground cover, so it prevents weeds.

After the corn has grown up for a little bit, maybe six inches or something like that, they plant the beans and the poll runner beans climb up the corn and they use that as a natural trellis. It’s three sisters working in harmony to grow food together then the beans put nitrogen in the soil, which corn is a nitrogen-hungry crop. They all work together to grow in harmony. It’s a beautiful tradition from Native Americans.

This is a beautiful starting point for our conversation because you have a new emphasis with this Neighborhood Food Network of having people work together in harmony to grow our own food. Now, I know you’ve been in the Moms Across America group. You’re the head of it for a while and you all have been focused on removing toxins like glyphosate from our food. Why this shift to growing our own food?

Yes, we have for several years now. Moms Across America, we call ourselves a national coalition of unstoppable moms but we are for mothers and others. We provide actions and solutions to create healthy communities. Our focus has been to transform the food industry and health in America and beyond. While that is still important and we have a whole testing program initiative that we invite people to donate to test the current food system, we have basically lost our patients with waiting for them to do something about the government and the food industry. We’re seeing that it’s important to do something else as well to be independent from the current food system.

It is good to take our health and our food into our own hands but talk to us about the problems with the food supply. I’ve heard rumors that they’re going to be issues down the line.

There are multiple issues. Access to food is one of the largest concerns going on simply because of climate change. No matter what you think is caused by, it is happening. Farmers, especially in the Midwest where it’s dryer or flooding or having problems growing food, of course, there are growing populations that are migrating. Those areas where they’re migrating to will need to have more food and in most cases, they don’t. Food prices are increasing. Scientists and farmers were correct and they’re predicting that they would increase up to 30% by some food types in 2022, and they did. They’re predicting 3% to 400% in the next 3 to 4 years.

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I don’t think my income is going to be increasing by 3% to 400%. For me, it makes sense to start growing some food even if it’s berry bushes, green vegetables, potted tomatoes, or anything that will supplement the food that’s coming into our household, which we need a lot of. We have three teenage boys. To get started feels good. It feels safer and wise. In addition, I mentioned the food industry, the problem with the current food system is it’s basically not being regulated.

Previous administrations, all of them, all kinds, have decided that the GMO food manufacturers genetically modified organisms can govern themselves. Basically, they can regulate themselves. Our current government is not looking at food safety testing for genetically modified organisms. Clearly, the EPA is failing at regulating glyphosate and thousands of toxic chemicals in our food supply. It’s miserable.

The system is broken. They have been bought out by these large corporations and they’re not doing their jobs. We, mothers, simply feel like many people want to take matters into their own hands and start a parallel food system. This is what the Neighborhood Food Network is based on. It’s people coming together to have food security on their streets with their neighbors.

Let’s define that a little bit, this Neighborhood Food Network. I know it’s a pilot program. What does it consist of?

It was inspired by Neighborhood Watch, where you get your neighbors together. The policemen’s requirement is that if you have at least one representative from 50% of the households or more, a policeman or two will come out and educate your neighbors on how to prevent crime. Now, we don’t have parameters of it has to be 50%. If you get 1 or 2 of your neighbors on your street to come together, we encourage you to have a meeting.

First of all, download our invitations, go door-to-door, knock on your neighbor’s door, and meet them, which is to be a big step for a lot of people in the first place to meet your neighbors. Invite them to a meeting in your front yard, back yard, at the end of a cul-de-sac, a block party, whatever you want, and share with them what the Neighborhood Food Network is. We give you the outline for that first meeting. You basically share that the goal is for everybody to come together, talk, strategize, organize, and mobilize to create food security.

That could mean more people growing food and organizing that. For instance, when I lived in California. There was a woman who had a lemon tree on her street, on our street and she gave away at least 300 or 400 lemons. It would’ve made no sense at all for everybody on our street to have a lemon tree. If you get together with your neighbors and you coordinate a little bit on who’s growing what already and who might want to share or swap with other people, then you’re creating a community, unity on growing food.

Zen, I like this already because it gets people together, getting to know each other, and it’s apolitical. In other words, everybody wants to eat and how non-threatening is that? This is a great way to get people together and to get growing.

One of the positives that we have on our list is that you can bridge the political divide. You’re not going to care if somebody is a Democrat or Republican if you’re hungry in the future or if there is some type of crisis and they come at you with a basket full of food. Also, for people who don’t want to grow food, we’re going to ask for people to put those people in charge of accumulating a list of local small farmers, CSAs, and co-ops where they can buy their fruit from not a long distance away and support those local small farmers.

I know the Weston A. Price Foundation has already been working on this for decades to connect people with local farmers. That’s why I’m so excited to share with your audience because I think that the leaders and the facilitators of your network are already doing this. They may not be doing it on their street. They may be doing it in the larger community.

I love it so much. I also like this Neighborhood Food Network is doing some handholding. The fact that you said, “We have invitations that you can print out.” I was like, “That’s nice,” but that’s not where it ends. That’s where it begins. Talk to us more about what you envision and what you want to provide with this Neighborhood Food Network.

We do provide the first invitation you can download, print out and bring to your neighbors. We have the first meeting and a flyer that you can run your meeting by with this outline. We also have resources on our website, videos you can play, how to find out what your garden zone is, and how to find out when to start growing things and planning things. We have a Monday night call for the Neighborhood Food Network at 8:30 Eastern Time. It goes for about an hour sometimes. We have a gardening expert every week to talk about a particular thing.

For instance, container gardening, how to start a compost, or setting up water systems. You can bring your questions and it’s free. There are a lot of gardening networks out there and some of them are quite expensive. We wanted to make sure that there was something available for people who need a little help and want it to be free. Now, we’ll feature gardening experts that you could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to be your personal coach or to come set up the garden for you or a food forest. We want to make sure that people can get started, have the support to do that, and connect with people in your local community as well.

The goal is for you to find a local gardening expert that you can connect with so that your neighbors have support on your street. You may be that garden expert. If you love gardening, you may be the one, but you can also find a local gardening expert through your local garden stores or the extension. A lot of people don’t know about this. Most counties have an extension, which is an extension of universities that support people in farming and gardening. The point is to get connected with these people.

Zen, this sounds wonderful but I have to be honest with you. I can picture my neighbors being like, “No, thank you.” What happens if I knock on all these doors and these people are like, “We don’t want to plant with you. We don’t want to do anything with you.” There’s no sense of community and connection or pulling together in the same direction. What would a person do in that case?

What we’re counting on is that our neighbors will start to become curious, especially if you bring them some extra food or if you do have a farm stand with free food. You start meeting neighbors on your street. You can connect in many different ways, but through food is one of the best ways. I have found that we gain many other resources and benefits by doing this. You learn about other resources available like a great guy who can help build fences or I’ve shared a resource for unsprayed hay and straw that we use to feed our animals or to grow potatoes with.

You can share resources and connect with other local mom-and-pop businesses by connecting with your neighbors. It has you feel safer, more connected, and more unified. That’s what we need now. We need hyper-local compassion, creativity, and unity. We need to stop looking for big government to solve our problems because they’re causing way more problems than we need now. We need to look each other in the eye, share our experiences, how we can help each other, and benefit each other. I think that’s what we need now in the world.

Read the rest of the interview at www.westonaprice.org

Visit Zen Honeycutt’s websites: momsacrossamerica.com and neighborhoodfoodnetwork.com

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