Offshoot Launches Today!
Thanks for Joining Us to Explore The Unanswered Questions about the Food System
Today’s the day! We’ve migrated our newsletter over to Substack, so you’ll be receiving updates from this email from here on out. Tomorrow, you’ll get our first official Substack newsletter in your inbox, and after that, you’ll get instalments every two weeks. We wanted to send this over to all of our subscribers to give folks migrated over from our old newsletter a chance to decide if they would like to stay subscribed and update them about the shift.
What is Offshoot?
A couple of months ago, the six members of the A Growing Culture team met in person (many for the first time) to talk about the upcoming year—to dream together about what visions we want to bring into the world. One of the insights we came to through that process of dialogue is that there are so many unanswered questions about the future of the food system. It’s an amalgamation of different economic structures, practices, values, vested interests, and potential pathways, and it’s incredibly complex—even for those among us who are spending our lives exploring these questions.
Within the team, we’re constantly discussing, debating, and sharing resources amongst ourselves to come up with the finished narratives we put out. But we’ve realized that if we truly want to build a culture of support for the radical vision of food sovereignty, we must bring people into those conversations directly, creating the space for you all to dream with us. After all, that’s what movements are. We don’t have it all figured out. Often, we look back on a post we made a year ago and marvel at how much our understanding of a given issue has evolved.
When we put out these finished narratives, after having endless conversations internally, it risks becoming dogmatic because it seems as though we have access to some kind of knowledge that others do not, which isn’t true at all. We’re just six people who are deeply invested in a future where diverse, just food systems can take root around the world. We come to the conclusions we do about the things we post through reading books, articles, and talking to one another—all things that are accessible to everyone.
That’s how we came up with the idea for this newsletter: we want to create spaces for all of us to talk through some of the unanswered questions about imagining systems beyond the ones we have now—together. We hope this will become a space for conversation, connection, and ultimately, liberation. We hope you’ll join us.
What to Expect
You’ll get a new instalment of Offshoot in your inbox every two weeks. In it, you’ll receive a piece of longer-form writing on a given topic, as well as recommendations for resources we’ve read amongst ourselves, and updates from A Growing Culture on any upcoming events or ways to get involved. Every few weeks we’ll also be launching a segment called Ask A Growing Culture, where we will (attempt to) answer any questions you have about food systems, agriculture, food sovereignty, or our work. To submit a question, email info@agrowingculture.org with the subject like “Ask AGC.”
A Note on Open Access
You’ll notice that there’s the option to subscribe and pay a monthly fee for this newsletter. Free and open-access information is one of our core values at A Growing Culture, so our content will never be strictly behind a paywall—ever. That’s why the content that free and paid subscribers receive will always be the same.
We are a 100% reader-funded newsletter and depend on your support in order to keep it going (there’s a real person spending hours each week writing this!). We thank you in advance for your support.