During my last visit to my family farm in Kenya last year, I showed up loaded, as always. This time I wasn’t loaded in money, but in all manner of goodies, and lessons to boot!
In many ways, the goodies and the lessons were too intertwined to be distinguishable. One example turned out so perfectly that it sounds like a drumbeat to me. I will tell you why.
I grew up on a farm for a significant part of my early life. When I finally caught that proverbial “midnight train to Georgia”, I figured that I was going into the future, where life was much simpler. I never for one minute thought that I would be back in the farming business again. I was fully convinced that life in the city was much easier, more fun, and admittedly, more civilized. Why would anyone want to work like a beast of burden in the village while the city life was always beckoning, with its flashy lights and limitless possibilities?
It never occurred to me that my thinking was the main logic behind colonialism, that my country Kenya had emerged from less than 15 years prior. The British wanted a future that rested on someone else’s back.
I obviously didn’t know better then. Now I don’t only know better, but I also do better. Doing better starts with actively and consciously decolonizing my thinking and my food. That is a taller order than most people would fathom.
That is why I carried organic fingerling potatoes in my luggage. I was keen to introduce a new variety of potatoes to my village. I obviously had more organic seeds with, me but I consciously chose to talk about potatoes, for its historical & symbolic effect.
Potatoes are a staple, and a colonial relic in my village. One of those colonial practices includes the planting of only a single type of potato. After a while, that variety would go out of style, and another one would be introduced and hold the monopoly. I know all too well what a dangerous set up that is. Even worse, I noticed that farmers would sometimes split one potato, and plant small pieces, to increase the number of “seeds”. That practice was prevalent in Ireland just before the Irish Potato Famine. The slicing of seed potatoes is the equivalent of inbreeding. The pollen from the same potatoes might end up pollinating the other potatoes sliced from the mother potato. When a virus hit the country, it wiped out the entire potato crop in Ireland. The tragedy of the potato virus was exacerbated since the Irish were growing only one type of potato.
The Irish starved, and that starvation triggered the biggest exodus from Ireland in its entire history.
In the urban areas, potatoes and corn form the majority of the food consumed. Fish and chips is the poor man’s lunch that harkens to our colonial relationship with the British. My home village is the potato basket of the major urban areas.
In comparison, the same virus hit Peru, but nobody even noticed. That was due to the fact that the Peruvians were growing over 400 types of potatoes.
It doesn’t take a genius to see the potential danger lurking in the shadows of my village. Though I didn’t have 400 unique types of Peruvian potatoes to carry, I decided to start with one: the Fingerling Potato. I planted the 1 pound, 8 ounce bag, or about 680 grams of seed potatoes in December of 2022. There were probably 15 potatoes planted that day. Today, 6 months later, we went back to check on the experiment.
We couldn’t have been more surprised. For one, a single one of the fingerlings potato plants had a massive potato that was over half a pound. Secondly, the original potatoes we had planted produced many times more potatoes. In the past six months we had left the newly planted seeds almost entirely alone. We took very little care of them and did not spray anything. The rain was no where close to being sufficient, but we still managed to harvest a decent amount.
Finally, I was amazed by the three attractive colors of the potatoes. There was the white ones; then there were the brownish red ones and the most wonderful purple ones. It was easy to mistake the purple fingerling with a purple sweet potatoes. I am not a big fan of potatoes, in fact I don’t eat potatoes, but I am also practical. If someone else is going to eat a potato, it would be prudent that he or she does so with the least harm to the environment with the toxic chemicals and chemical fertilizers. It’s also wise to fend off anything that could potentially crash our food shed. I am also a firm believer in futurism and I have no way of predicting what discoveries can be found for the use of the Fingerling or it’s extract. It’s better to have it and not need it instead of the other way round.
After the harvest was done, I looked at the biggest potato that came from the small fingerling potato; it was pleasing in my sight. I immediately thought about the bees that must have pollinated them. I wonder whether those little pollinators could tell the difference between a death worshiping “fiat potato” from an organic, pure variety, as, to us humans, they’re all potatoes by name. We will probably never know for sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Perhaps they could detect the difference. Assuming they did, it is logical to assume that a new dance was invented to communicate the message. I would call that the pure Fingerling bee dance.
I only wish I could have been there to play the drums for the bees, while they did their Fingerling Dance. My whole focus would be to wake up my family, and the whole village, and tell them about the wonderful abundant possibilities on the other side of our colonized food system.
A logical way out of that colonial fakery is to giver it a finger. After all that Finger is a major part of the Fingerling Drum Beat. The Fingerling Drum Beat is all about giving life and nurturing justice. Anyone with doubts can visit my village and taste it.