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Growing Mondays: Practicing
There can be no justice without joy
Jo Hunter Adams
June 01, 2026
Hi! I'm Jo, writing from Heart & Soil homestead, a 1-acre homestead in the Far South of Cape Town, South Africa. Every week I share inspiration and education for your growing journey. Thanks so much for reading!
Welcome to Growing Mondays, where I talk about growing- vegetables, fruits, animals and ourselves.
There is no justice without joy
Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, died recently. This post is in his honour.
He argued that criticising problems with the food system sometimes left a void. Instead, he argued, we can actively engage and promote slow food ways, and the practice of experiencing taste.
Petrini, based in Italy, was a utopian dreamer. And we find ourselves in cynical times, where such dreamers seem either delusional or excessively privileged. But the value of utopian dreaming is that we can escape cynicism and imagine something different, from wherever we are.
Sociologist Ruth Levitas argues that “utopia as method” doesn’t seek to imagine utopian futures as a blueprint— as Marxism has shown to be fraught— but rather as a thought experiment. A way to stay open, and keep us away from cynicism.
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
Tortoises arrived naturally to our farm and started breeding early on. They are territorial, and so each seems to have a particular garden as their territory. They eat a lot of strawberries....
What our farm, and the Lochiel smallholdings more broadly, can be and do is to try and represent and practice an alternative. By practicing alternatives, we create memories in our brains and bodies of what can be possible. We create real muscle memory, and brain connections, and I’m that matters.
We can all do this today! It’s ok if we do it badly. Our seedling starting journey has been pretty average, and the quality of our seedlings is not nearly as good as the purchased versions. And yet…It’s amazing and joyful.
There is so much power in the doing, rather than the consuming. In fact, there is so much power in being open to the attempt, even when we’re imperfect.
If food was no longer obliged to make intercontinental journeys, but stayed part of a system in which it can be consumed over short distances, we would save a lot of energy and carbon dioxide emissions. And just think of what we would save in ecological terms without long-distance transportation, refrigeration, and packaging--which ends up on the garbage dump anyway--and storage, which steals time, space, and vast portions of nature and beauty.
So here’s to the attempt to practice the better, in honour of people like Carlo Petrini!
I appreciated this graphic from Fix the News which charts the disjoint between what goes viral and what drives action. I wonder if collective action, over many years, is central. Slow and steady rather than rapid and viral. And you can use this knowledge to be part of sharing news that drives action: Plant a tree, plant a seed, grow a vegetable, gift something to a stranger.
Jasper making it hard for Hana to focus on her drawing.
Free soil workshop with Peter!
Peter Haynes has generously offered to teach a free soil workshop here on the farm on 20 June, from 1-2:30. Space is limited, so if you book a space you absolutely cannot cancel.
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