The customer does not exist

A figure that, in my view, ought to be dismantled: between those who grow food and those who buy it there should be no hierarchy, in either direction.

In the way I see this work, selling occupies a secondary place. Our job is to work with the ecosystem to produce food, and that food naturally has to reach someone who will eat it; but whether it gets there through an exchange of money is only one of the possible forms. In the past I have been lucky enough to work in settings where food was grown and shared with no money changing hands at all, and since then I have seen both my work as a grower and my work as an educator as an opportunity to blur the line between customer and producer.

A community has fundamental needs, ranging from survival — food, energy, shelter — to expression and art, and each of its members takes on a part of that whole. In this sense we are all in the same boat. The distinction between those who produce and those who buy is legitimate, and I have nothing against it; but it remains an artificial construction, and it should not harden into a rigid, inevitable dynamic.

No hierarchy, in either direction

Capitalist, consumerist culture has taught us that the customer is always right: a sovereign entity who, simply by walking into a business with money in hand, acquires the right to demand anything and to receive flawless service. I do not share that idea. Whoever comes to the farm to buy vegetables is a person like me, and there is no hierarchy between us. If one really had to find one, it would be me who holds something the other person needs: the food. One could object that they too hold something I need, the money; but selling vegetables is hardly the most profitable or efficient way to earn a living, and someone looking for good food will struggle more to find it elsewhere than I would to find an income elsewhere. The point, though, is precisely that the hierarchy should not exist in either direction.

It follows that the way I relate to the people who buy from us can seem rather unceremonious to a conventional trader. To those who ask only for small courgettes, I reply that the courgettes we have are the ones on the table; to those who find our prices too high, I show, as courteously as I can, the prices at the supermarket, which are rarely lower. Buying is a political act, but it does not confer the right to treat the people we buy from as servants.

What a vegetable’s price leaves out

The other side of this relationship is that much of what we produce does not appear in the price. A bunch of turnips does not cost twenty cents more because we pollute less, because we build up organic matter in the soil, because we make the place where the neighbourhood’s children grow up healthier and more beautiful; and yet that is a cost too. It can be repaid in many ways: with kindness, with patience in front of a crooked carrot, with a story, with a jar of honey, with a conversation from which I learn something I did not know, sometimes by paying a little more than the asking price, or by taking out an annual subscription instead of buying by weight each time. For our part, when we grow more than we can sell, we share out the surplus across the subscription boxes, beyond what has been paid for. Seen this way, the CSA, the subscription or the prepaid card are not tools for bending the buyer to the farm’s needs, but an invitation to work together in ways that are efficient for everyone, and that take externalities into account.

During farm visits I often point out the irony of saving money on vegetables only to spend it in other forms: in taxes to repair environmental damage, in supplements to make up for the poor nutritional quality of industrial food, in medicines for the digestive problems that the same food helps to cause, with everything we now know about the link between gut and brain. The group always agrees, even though in a crowd of forty or fifty people there is certainly someone who, knowingly or not, reasons exactly that way.

A category of thought

Some time ago I put up a sign on the farm that said, more or less, this: the customer is a category of thought and does not, in reality, exist; by enrolling ourselves in that category we fool ourselves into thinking we can demand anything, like a queen at the court of France or a three-year-old with every whim in the world; on this farm there are no customers, and for anyone who insists on playing the part there is plenty of room at the court of France and at the local nursery.

I admit the same mechanism works on me. When I am the one buying, I sometimes forget all this and think that money can buy anything, even people’s dignity. Perhaps it is easier for me to remember because I talk about it so often: at the Antica Macelleria Dini, for instance, the only butcher in Florence selling grass-fed meat, from mountain farms where the animals eat nothing but grass and hay, and also one of the pick-up points for our CSA. There, the exchange of money becomes entirely secondary: it is the only place where I find that quality, the price is what it is, and we both leave satisfied, with a mutual respect born of doing the same work for the same community, and of respecting each other’s work and what it costs.

Anyone who grows a garden knows a further confirmation. We happily eat the carrots we grow ourselves even when they are crooked or a little tough, and we eat without hesitation vegetables that, at a market stall, we would pass over. With money in hand we want the perfect carrot; when we know the work behind it and what is inside it, we appreciate it even when it is imperfect. This is the proof that the customer is, precisely, a category of thought, and a mental superstructure that, in my view, ought to be dismantled.

The same service for everyone

On my courses I try to persuade fellow growers to treat buyers differently: not worse, but as equals, as people capable of understanding even a refusal. A favour granted to whoever pushes hardest would have to be granted to everyone, and it would not be fair to reserve it for those who raise their voices rather than for those who turn up quietly every week and ask for exactly what nobody else wants. The service must be the same for everyone, and it also rests on a transparency that ought to go without saying: explaining how we grow, where we buy our seeds and fertilisers, which tools we use, a full list of which is available on our website.

Those who do not recognise themselves in this approach will find a colleague happy to treat them like royalty, and that will be good for both. We work with around fifty regular households for 33 weeks a year, and in Florence we can count on a very large catchment, so the rare departures are filled by word of mouth. I am aware that anyone working in a smaller rural community does not have the same margin, and has to proceed more carefully, building awareness gradually; and we too, before welcoming a new household into the association, go through several steps.

I do not expect everyone to adopt this approach: I offer it as a prompt. I would, however, like to know how this figure is experienced by those on either side of the counter.

This post is the written version of a live video (in Italian) recorded during the delivery round.