My Vision of Positive Peace

I received a copy of Sandor Katz's The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World from my wife for Christmas, and I was delighted to find the following passage within the book's introduction:

Food is the greatest community builder there is. It invites people to sit and stay awhile, and families to gather together. It welcomes new neighbors and weary travelers and beloved old friends. And it takes a village to produce food. Many hands make light work, and food production often gives rise to specialization and exchange... 

Reclaiming our food means reclaiming community engaging its economic interconnectivity of specialization and divisions of labor, but at a human scale, where people and infrastructure are, and that is mostly cities and suburbs. "Sustainability" or "resilience" cannot be remote ideals you have to go somewhere else to fully realize. They are ethics we can and must build into our lives however we are able to and wherever we find ourselves.

This passage speaks to me because it very clearly articulates my vision of how food relates to concepts of community and establishing positive peace.  If we understand the absence of peace as being some deficiency in needs as presented by psychologist Abraham Maslow, then we can also understand the important relationship that food maintains with peace... if there is no food then there is no peace.  If we understand the critical role that food plays in peace we can use it as a central point in a conflict "provention" strategy.

As I work to establish my understanding of community building and proactive peace building, I think that food provides us with an essence of commonality that can help level the playing field.  We all eat.  Sure we may eat different things, and the bourgeois may be more privileged in their diets than the proletariat, but food gives us a solid foundation to share, communicate, and create communities of abundance.  Food gives us a building block, a gathering point from which we can satisfy one another's basic needs while watching new life emerge.

All this being said, that's my central focus in my peace building studies because it ties my interest in community with our cultural heritages embedded in our food all the while creating an entertain "theme" for peacebuilding that satisfies an existing community need.