Here in the Mohawk River Valley, September gives us a vivid encounter with both abundance and scarcity.

At the Schenectady Greenmarket, local farmers offer produce in astonishing variety—food grown with care, brought to market by people whose work connects us to the land. Nearby, unhoused neighbors seek shelter in the public library, a place of books, imagination, and one of the foundations of our democracy. The Greenmarket's Food Box program, like the library's practice of making books and public space available to all, reminds us that even in an economy organized largely around buying and selling, there are still places where generosity and the commons are alive.

Over the past month, local advocates have helped bring renewed attention to food insecurity and the local consequences of changes to SNAP. We see some of the symptoms: food pantries struggling to meet demand, neighbors seeking shelter in public spaces, and increasingly urgent conversations about hunger and housing.

At Electric City Community Grocery, we know that food insecurity and housing insecurity are complex, interconnected challenges. We also know that visible symptoms can pull us toward arguments about who is responsible, who belongs, or what should be done about the people we see in crisis.

What if, alongside responding to the immediate needs in front of us, we became more curious about the conditions beneath them?

• What are the root causes?

• What would it take to change them?

• And what common ground might we discover if we began there?

Remembering Three
(R)evolutionary American voices

This month, we honor three very different American voices offer some intriguing company for that inquiry:

• Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026),

• Dolly Parton (January 19, 1946 – August 25, 2026),

• Gloria Steinem (March 25, 1934 – September 2, 2026),

Each crossed boundaries that others might have expected them to stay within. Each, in a different way, challenged conventional ideas about whose work matters, what constitutes an economy, and how people and places flourish. Each, true to their authentic voices, contributed to the revolutionary, evolutionary work of our American experiment of self-governance.

Berry asked us to look closely at our relationship with land, locality, work, and stewardship. His writing challenges an economy that measures value primarily through money and efficiency while neglecting the relationships and living systems that make life possible.

Parton demonstrated the power of imagination, enterprise, generosity, and economic agency. She built institutions as well as songs, creating jobs and opportunities in her home region and using her success to expand possibilities for others. Gloria Steinem recognized this boundary-crossing power early on, celebrating Parton in Ms. magazine in 1987 for using her business acumen and creative gifts to help working women, poor communities, and people in her native Tennessee. Steinem wrote, “If feminism means each of us finding our unique power, and helping other women do the same, Dolly Parton certainly has done both.”

And Steinem herself continually asked us to notice whose work, experience, and power have been rendered invisible—and what becomes possible when those labors and their impacts are brought into view.

Their approaches were different. Their answers were not identical. But perhaps they share an invitation:

Look beyond the categories. Look beyond the immediate symptoms. Look for—and account for—the human capacity, relationship, resource, or possibility that has been overlooked.
 

An economy that accounts for affection

Berry gives us a particularly provocative word for what might be missing from our conventional economic thinking: affection.

In his essay “Preserving Wilderness,” from his 1987 compilation Home Economics, Berry argues that an economy that fails to account for affection fails to account for value itself. For Berry, affection is not sentimentality. It is what moves us to know a place, care for it, protect it, and imagine its future.

That idea feels worth sitting with.

What happens when we ask not only:
What does this cost?

but also:
What do we love?

What & whom do we care for? What do we want to leave better than we found it? Who are our neighbors? What kinds of work help people belong? What kinds of ownership help communities flourish?

Those questions take us somewhere different from the usual poles of our public conversation.

And perhaps that is where Home Economics becomes an especially interesting title for his essays.
 

Three Invitations of Home Economics

Home. Economics. What if economics began with the things we need to sustain a home—not simply a building, but a place where people can live, work, eat, care for one another, develop their gifts, and belong?  What if we powered our economy through the currencies of love spanning generations?  We conclude this month’s Food for Thought with three invitations. 
 

The Mad Farmer's invitation

Berry's poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” offers a mischievous, paradoxical invitation to step outside the logic of an economy organized entirely around consumption, crude competition, and calculation.

It begins by questioning the pursuit of “the quick profit” and then turns toward a radically different kind of liberation: love the world, know your neighbors, ask questions that have no answers, plant trees you may never see mature, and do something every day that “won't compute.”

It is an unusual manifesto. It doesn't give us a policy platform. It doesn't tell us which camp to join. Instead, it invites us to meet a troubled world with imagination, humor, love, and action.

Read the poem in full → [Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front]

What might it mean to do something that “won't compute”? 

As we respond to immediate hunger and housing insecurity, what if we join Berry, Parton, and Steinem in asking what kinds of land, labor, ownership, care, and community could make scarcity less inevitable?

What if we practiced an economy rooted not only in transactions, but in relationships?

What if we measured prosperity not only by what we accumulate, but by what we are able to care for, share, repair, grow, and pass along?

What if we understood the work of building a community grocery store as part of that larger experiment?

We won't solve these questions quickly. We probably shouldn't.

The Greenmarket took root in 2008. The vision for a downtown grocery appeared in Schenectady's Vision 2020, the comprehensive plan adopted in 2008. Community members kept organizing. The Electric City Food Cooperative incorporated in 2013. Years later, the fences are finally going up.

Good things take awhile.

Maybe some of the most important work of building a more abundant community does, too. 
 

The (r)evolutionary invitation
to grieve and wonder

September is also a month that asks us to remember not only lives lived long with love, but lives cut short by hate. 

Twenty-five years after September 11, we carry both the memory of lives cut short in terror on that day and of the violence and grief that followed—including the hate crimes directed at Sikh, Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and other communities in its aftermath. For Valarie Kaur, that history became the beginning of a lifelong inquiry into what she calls Revolutionary Love. A Sikh father and family friend was the first person murdered in hate violence that she encountered after 9/11; in his memory, she began organizing to tell untold stories to help shift perceptions and policy, moving from hate to belonging.

Kaur asks us to consider what happens when, rather than allowing grief and fear to harden us into opposing camps, we allow them to deepen our capacity to wonder.

She writes:

“Love is labor that returns us to wonder—it is seeing another person's humanity, even if they deny our own. We just have to choose to wonder about them.”

This isn't a call to excuse harm, abandon boundaries, or avoid hard truths. Kaur explicitly distinguishes revolutionary love from sentimentality and describes it as a choice to labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us.

And this is where Berry's affection, Parton's generosity and joy, Steinem's insistence on seeing people's power, and Kaur's revolutionary love begin to harmonize.

What if wonder is not the opposite of action, but what makes wiser action possible?

What if seeing another person's humanity helps us move beyond the identity traps that make it difficult to see one another at all?

What if love is not the soft alternative to serious work, but a form of sweet labor?

Kaur writes that:
love can be taught, modeled, and practiced;
that joy is the gift of love,
grief is the price of love,
anger protects what is loved, and
wonder is the act that returns us to love
when we think we have reached our limit.

That feels like an invitation worth carrying into the next 250 years of American democracy. 
 

The Dolly Parton Encore:
Let's Keep the Gift in Motion

Which brings us to Dolly Day—September 25, 9/25.

What if we marked the day not simply by celebrating Dolly Parton, but by keeping her particular combination of creativity, generosity, enterprise, and joy in motion?

Earlier this month, a local newspaper published a guest column reflecting on Dolly's life and legacy: The Dolly Parton Encore: Let's Keep the Gift in Motion. The title captures something that feels especially resonant here: an encore isn't simply a repeat. It's an invitation to keep something alive by carrying it forward.

So perhaps Dolly Day can be less about a single day than a small experiment in keeping the gift in motion.

What is one thing you could do to put more love, joy, generosity, creativity, or belonging into the world?

Give a book. Share a meal. Buy from a local farmer. Thank someone whose work is usually invisible. Invite someone to the table. Make something beautiful. Plant something. Help someone. Listen with curiosity. Give someone your attention.

Or do something that “won't compute.”

And then—keep it moving.

The point isn't to solve everything in a weekend.

The point is to practice the world we want to inhabit, and to let one small act become another.

And perhaps that is the deeper work of a community grocery, too: responding to what is needed now while patiently building something that will nourish people for generations.

Good things take awhile.
 

Food for Thought Meal Planning 

If you're still hungry, or want to store up morsels for another rainy day, we have more nourishing food for thought for you!

If you have a few minutes, read Berry’s 1973 poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” 

If you have a few minutes more, read Berry's “The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment.” The latter was published in 2024 and declares that “to be sane in a mad time / is bad for the brain, worse / for the heart.”

For future food-for-thought meal planning: 

Gloria Steinem: Dolly Parton's Unique Feminist Power — Steinem's 1987 Ms. tribute to Parton, newly revisited by the magazine.

Dolly Parton: 9to5: The Story of a Movement — the organizing story behind the song and the movement that inspired it.

Wendell Berry: The Unsettling of America — a 50th-anniversary edition was published this year.

Valarie Kaur: See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love — the book and body of work behind the idea of revolutionary love and the Revolutionary Love Project

Although the word “manifesto” shows up in at least three of these offerings, none of them offer prescriptions.  Rather, they all invite us into inquiry, action, and creative, authentic expression. 

What does it mean to be mad in a cruel world?

What acts of wonder, love, and care can we invoke to disrupt its predictable patterns?

And what might become possible if we practiced those acts together—patiently, joyfully, and with love for the place we call home?
Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of home economics: not simply how we manage a household, but how we create the conditions for a home—how we decide what and whom to value, how we share what we have, how we care for the land and one another, and how we build an economy that helps life flourish.

Abundance and scarcity are not just material conditions we manage for survival. They are also ways of seeing the world that shape what we choose to cultivate together.

Good things take awhile.

And perhaps this is the work: to keep the gift in motion, and to keep making a home together. One cooperative action at a time.