OurGoods

Valentines Day = Compost and Candy Making

Paper + potatoes = soil!? Yes. It’s true. Most of your organic waste (non-plastic, non-oily or animal-based) can be mixed with paper or sawdust and left alone for a few months to become great compost. You can add it to your plants or to street trees- it adds nutrients and keeps good soil out of landfills. Amanda showed everyone how to do it. You can look here to find out how or come to Trade School and check out our indoor composting! Here’s the PowerPoint presentation at Amanda’s class (22mb).

Me: Why do you teach at TradeSchool?

Amanda: Teaching composting is a great passion of mine. I am fascinated by the alchemy of organic materials turning from paper or food or wood or cardboard to dirt again. It is a really satisfying thing to cultivate dirt, just as growing flowers and vegetables, or a good friendship can be. Also, composting is unbelievably wholesome, and we need a little bit of that now and then, I think! I like teaching at Trade School because the people who comes to my classes are always enthusiastic and diverse. Its a good challenge to make dirt cultivation seem appealing to someone who doesn’t know about it yet.

Because Trade School operates by barter, I had to be thoughtful about what teaching composting is “worth” to me. In other situations, I would have just done it on a volunteer basis even though I think its a really important skill. But I think an interesting thing happens when we test valuation in our society and in our social relations without using the “all-homogenizing” dollar. When you barter with a skill or for help or work, every exchange becomes a gift. I tried to think of things that kind of tapped into some of my desires, things that I think would lose their value actually, if money was exchanged for it. Like for instance, I wanted to be wooed by a guitar player. My teaching is a gift and someone’s contribution is also a gift, so at the end of the day, not only have we all just exchanged ideas and information but we have further strengthened our social relations. A lot of economic theory totally ignores or diminishes this aspect of social exchange within economic exchange or in business, and prefers to discuss economics as a much more mechanized process, which some would argue is somewhat narrow.

I was surprised at how touched I was about the exchanges I had. I was serenaded by a trombone player once, given fresh bread, homemade baked goods, mix cd’s, organic vegetables with recipes, sheet music for the piano, essential oils. All the trading makes a person feel more generous. I was heading home with all my gifts after a class one night and I was sitting next to a pretty desperate guy on the subway. I gave him my newly gifted oranges and he was so happy about it. I probably wouldn’t have done that if I had just paid a bunch of money for the oranges, but I was so uplifted by the Trade School vibe that it changed my usual behavior.

Through teaching at Trade School I have started a worm trading network. Some composting can be done in apartments with a special worm species. People who have worms already have something of value just by feeding the worms their leftover food scraps. They will make more worms with little effort. Through the network, the “wormless” population can get in touch with the “wormed” population to barter something, like business card design, carpentry, a sweater, etc for starter worms. We hope to make this a permanent network.

Honestly, I think that this bartering experiment is very successful in part because it works within a very glutted economy. We live in New York City and there have been many years of prosperity quite recently, there is so much at our fingertips right now. I’d be interested to see how well something like this works in communities with very little resources to start. Probably just as well but I just don’t have any experience with it.

That being said, most people are doing with a lot less money right now. That doesn’t  mean that the skills people have acquired are at all devalued on a social level, or that their abilities and contributions to society dry up just because a person is unemployed or can’t pay for things. Trade School works with this unfortunate situation in a way that passes on dignity through participation even if they have no money to put up for learning something useful or for something that brings joy to them.

I’d like to see this system work really well with like a dentist, or a doctor or a tailor or mechanic.

Me: Why do you think OurGoods or TradeSchool could change the world?

Amanda: This system is inherently cooperative, and built on resourcefulness and kindness. Trade School / Our Goods is a structure for those human things which are highly evolved yet, I would argue, are undervalued. If this could change the world, it might ease some of the class struggles we deal with by making money a little less important and give space to valuing people face to face. But, then again, because no surplus value is being extracted, in the way money can be made simply from having or circulating money over and over again in a Capitalist system (i.e. stock market, or labor exploitation) it may have no effect whatsoever on class relations. One could argue that class relations exist because of a less than even distribution of commodities and money in the first place which bartering will not fix.

Sometimes, it is easy to think that one doesn’t have anything to offer when you look around and realize you don’t make as much money as other people or when you feel devalued in the workplace or in a relationship. If though, a skill or a talent or just showing up becomes something of value, then that could ease a lot of pain in people’s lives, I think.

Me: Why do you think OurGoods or TradeSchool could fail?

Amanda: I wonder if the issue of scale might become a problem. How big can the network be before parts of it becomes impersonal, non functioning, neglected? Or if people way undervalue themselves and work too hard for what they are giving and burn out or begin to feel negative about it?

Later that night, Athena led us through toffee making.

As Athena writes: The recipe calls for equal parts of chocolate, honey, sugar, and butter. Those ingredients were put in a pot over a medium-low heat, and stirred so that the contents melted into eachother. Everyone took turns stirring (making sure not to burn the bottom) until the small bubbles started to pop. Once the bubbles started, We stirred for another 5 or so minutes. (The more you stir after the bubbles begin, the harder the toffee will be. The less you stir the more soft.) Ours came out chewy. After the stirring was done, the toffee was poured onto a cool lightly greased surface.

The toffee cooled and while it did we ate soup. By the time we were done soup, The toffee was cooled enough to cut into pieces, and sample what we did together while wrapping what we didn’t eat in foil.