We were lucky to catch up with Beth Neff recently and have shared our conversation below.

Beth, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My current project is as the co-founder/organizer of a social arts practices laboratory in St. Louis, MO. My oldest daughter and I, along with a few other collaborators, founded MARSH (Materializing and Activating Radical Social Habitus) in 2018 to design and explore emergent models of human scaled generative social practices. We were curious if and how creative/artistic projects, practices, performances, and collaborations could generate new ways of thinking about economies, communities, relationships, and the ways in which we occupy physical and public space. We believed it might be useful to link our respective experiences in food activism and performance art with others who were interested in “performing” a less extractive and exploitive paradigm for meeting human need.

Since establishing our home and project in an 1850s-era mixed-used building in the severely disinvested Carondelet neighborhood of St. Louis in 2018, we have organized a consumer and workers cooperative that operates a non-profit sliding scale natural-foods grocery store, a network of neighborhood gardens, a sustainable commercial kitchen, a produce subscription program, an online catalog, and three community event spaces.

When I was starting out as an organic farmer and as manager of both a food cooperative and a farmers market, just growing food locally and without chemicals was a radical act. Not enough attention was paid to equity – in land access, food access, in opportunities to participate in decision-making, in community design – nor to the role of creative grassroots solutions to intransigent problems. The consequences of this oversight have been dire, especially as they impact agency, sovereignty, and human and planetary health. The work at MARSH focuses on rectifying some of those inequities by real-world testing of systems of mutual benefit that place principles over profit. The next stage of this immensely satisfying project is to engage our neighborhood in the creative design of a community Climate Charter that expresses our hopes for the role of art and collaboration in building climate resilience.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I suppose most people’s personal histories are defined by a combination of perceived turning points and “lessons learned”, so I will try to describe some of those.

I majored in anthropology in college and my worldview was significantly influenced by the revelation that the way we move through our lives and the beliefs that guide our assumptions (habitus) are fundamentally formed by culture and experience rather than some set of universal truths. I was ardently curious to know more about those cultures and experiences for other people, and that curiosity focused specifically on their relationship with food. I wanted to know (and still do) what people eat and why. I have had the incredible privilege to focus my career on that passion.

After college and a few years working at an historical flour mill run by a county park (and subsequently becoming pretty obsessed with bread and baking!), I had the first of my four children. I was determined to breastfeed my daughter and found that good information about that was difficult to come by, that the medical profession seemed to not only have little helpful knowledge but to be actually hostile to the endeavor, and that the most critical factor in success appeared to be the support of other nursing mothers. With my anthropology background, I was fully aware that human mothers had been nursing their babies for millennia, and that nothing had critically changed about our biology or our ability to sustain another human. This experience led me to several conclusions that continue to drive my work. First, traditional knowledge is at risk and its preservation might be critical to survival. Second, existing systems are highly corrupted by capitalism (competition, profit, exploitation, extraction). Third, experience has high value, especially when contexts are created where it can be shared with others.

Just before my first daughter was born, my then-partner and I purchased an old farmhouse and a couple of acres on the edge of a small town in northern Indiana. My partner had a rural background (I did not) and saw the potential for growing our own food and even expanding to a small commercial garden. I was an immediate convert and, as my children grew, I gradually began selling more and more produce from our garden, eventually making my living (after a divorce) as an organic market gardener, then also manager of my local food co-op’s produce department, then as manager of a brand new indoor year-round farmers market. In those early days of the organic industry – even before federal organic standards – the producers I worked with used the power and potential of their experience, their values, their collaboration, and their creativity to create entirely new systems of food access and economic exchange. Those years of organizing producer networks solidified my convictions about working for mutual benefit and using cooperative principles to guide any enterprise with which I am associated.

After all my kids left home, I was ready to make a transition. I hadn’t lived in a city since my childhood and was very interested in urban farming, food justice issues, and climate resilience. My oldest daughter had been living in New York City and was also ready for a change, and my younger daughter had settled in St. Louis, so we decided it made sense to start a new project here. I have been extremely gratified by the role that MARSH is learning to play in our community, but it hasn’t been all smooth and easy. In addition to working 60-70 hour weeks and navigating a relatively unfamiliar place with intense historical conflicts, tensions, and issues, it can be humbling to recognize that what I thought I “knew” either doesn’t apply at all or is of no interest to the particular individuals I’m working with. So, I try to hold on to the “lessons” (in quotations because they are never learned once and for all and have to be revisited on a constant basis). I think I know that everyone is a product of their own experiences and has built their beliefs, practices, and assumptions from them: they will, by definition, be different than mine. Yet, everyone is capable of change – both themselves and the world around them; I couldn’t do the work I’m doing if I didn’t believe that.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I think I’m responding to this question less because I think there is such a thing as “non-creatives” (I don’t) than maybe from a bit of defensiveness around the way farming and designing sustainable economies could be considered creative. For me, the operative concept is “design.” Conventional farms are designed around very structured outcomes, mostly production and profit. Organic farms, on the other hand, are focused on complex interactions with soil and water and pollinators and wildlife and air quality and human food consumption and even aesthetics, to name a few. Thus, the design of organic growing is highly individualized to the people who are doing it and the location where it is being done, requiring a high level of creativity. From there, it becomes much clearer that sustainable economies would use the same set of values and criteria, asking not just how much can be earned but what the implications are for the well-being of everyone and everything involved. To replace existing systems and achieve healthier people and a viable planet, we’ll need a huge amount of creativity.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Learning from other people.

Contact Info:

• Website: marshlife-art.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marsh_stl/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MARSHlifeart

Image Credits
Beth Neff