Who Counts Our Votes?

On money, belonging and the world we hope to make

“Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”

— Anna Lappé

I first came across these words around 2010, and they have stayed with me through thick and thin, influencing countless decisions about how I spend money, where I shop and whose livelihoods I support.

I think about them when I buy something from a small family business, visit a local producer or choose to spend a little more on something made close to home. I think about them when money is scarce, too, and I find myself weighing what I would like to support against what I can reasonably afford.

There are complications, though, within the idea of voting with our money. Some of us have considerably more votes to cast than others.

What happens when the world we want is one in which everyone can afford to eat well, keep warm and enjoy some of the pleasures of living? I have never quite resolved that question. It might be one of those questions that is worth living with.

The journey of a gooseberry

Earlier this year, a woman came to our home in rural Aberdeenshire to collect some gooseberries. She wanted her son to taste them. They were a fruit she remembered from her own childhood and she hoped to share that experience with him.

I found that quite emotional. A fruit that grows in abundance in our garden had become a means of passing on a memory. It was a small connection between generations, made possible by a handful of gooseberries.

She left some money through our free shop, where donations can be made but aren’t necessary. I took that money and spent it locally, buying eggs and onions from Flok and garlic scapes from Gamrie Gardens. A deliberate decision.

The gooseberries had grown in our garden, the money had come from someone who valued them, and now it would find its way into the hands of other people growing and producing food in our area. I liked the thought of that money travelling around our community, helping to sustain the people and projects that make it somewhere worth living.

Although a tiny transaction in economic terms, it contained something of the world I would like to inhabit.

What can a transaction mean?

There is something interesting, I think, about the language of voting. We tend to think of voting as an occasional civic act, something we do in a polling station every few years. Lappé invites us to consider the political and social consequences of our ordinary economic lives.

Every purchase participates, however modestly, in sustaining a particular way of producing and distributing things. When I buy from a local grower, I am contributing to the possibility that they can continue growing. When I support a family business, I am helping to sustain someone’s livelihood and perhaps a little of the character of the place where I live.

Of course, the connections are rarely as simple as they appear. A supermarket employs local people. Affordable imported food can make an enormous difference to a household struggling to make ends meet, or a household where a person needs convenient food without all the chopping and boiling. Small producers have bills to pay, too, and their prices must reflect the work involved.

I sometimes feel guilty when I buy something very cheaply but then I remind myself that I also want to cast a vote for a world in which ordinary people can afford the basics of a decent life. I think that matters just as much.

The free shop

When we established our free shop at Netherbrae, I was thinking about many of these questions. Living somewhere with a productive garden changes your relationship with abundance. There are weeks when the gooseberries seem endless, when the rhubarb grows faster than we can use it, or when the cucumbers arrive in quantities that challenge even the most enthusiastic preserver.

There is pleasure in growing food, and there is another sort of pleasure in seeing it leave the garden with someone who will enjoy it. The free shop has become a way of allowing some of that abundance to circulate.

It also makes me think about the ways communities have traditionally exchanged resources. Food has always travelled between neighbours, relatives and friends, sometimes through trade, sometimes as gifts, and often through arrangements that sit somewhere between the two.

Such exchanges create relationships. They allow people to participate in the life of a place.

I wonder whether this is part of what Lappé’s quotation asks us to consider. Perhaps the world we want is shaped as much by the ways we allow things to circulate as by the things we choose to purchase and share.

And what about the non-monetary votes we cast with sharing our time, attention and skills?

The world I want to vote for

I would like to live in a world where local growers can earn a decent living and where people can afford to buy what the growers produce.

I would like family businesses to thrive, villages to retain their shops, and communities to have some influence over how their food is grown and distributed.

I would like people to have the means to make choices that reflect their values, while recognising that circumstances often determine what is possible.

These are big aspirations to carry into a supermarket or a farm shop. And yet I return to that little journey of the gooseberry money. A woman wanted to share a childhood flavour with her son. Our garden had something to offer. The money she left helped me buy food from people producing it nearby. For a small moment, I could see the connections between us.

Sticking points

One part which troubles me about voting with money is that much of what sustains our communities happens beyond the exchange of money.

I find myself increasingly aware of the time, labour and skills that go unrecognised or undervalued in the world around me. I wonder how we have arrived at some of the ways we measure their worth.

Consider a single mother working in a nursery, caring for other people’s children while someone else is paid to care for her own. Her employment provides an income and the opportunity to contribute towards a pension, although the work itself may be modestly rewarded. The care she provides at home is equally important to the lives of her children, yet it carries no wage or workplace pension.

There are many reasons why people choose paid employment, and the independence, relationships and opportunities it brings can be enormously valuable. But I find the economic distinctions between these forms of work fascinating, and sometimes troubling.

We depend upon so many kinds of labour to sustain our communities. Some are well rewarded financially, while others, despite requiring considerable knowledge, skill, time and responsibility, receive relatively little recognition.

That creates a tension within Anna Lappé’s idea of casting votes with our money.

If the amount we can spend determines the strength of our economic voice, then the value society places upon our work impacts upon how loudly that voice can be heard.

Someone with considerable wealth can cast many votes through their purchases. Someone contributing enormously through work that is poorly paid, unpaid or largely invisible may have very little money available to express the same values. Yet both are participating in the making of our society.

Money is one way of expressing our hopes for society. Our time, love, attention and skills are ways of expressing those hopes too. I wonder what we might discover if we began to notice all the different kinds of votes being cast in our communities, including those that never involve a financial transaction.

Who counts the seeds passed between gardeners?

A handful of saved seeds might cost almost nothing, yet sharing them is an act of hope. It offers the possibility of another harvest, another gardener learning something, another household growing a little of its own food. There is local resilience in that exchange, too. Every seed saved and shared helps preserve the knowledge and practical ability to grow food within our local communities.

I think of these as votes for the kind of world I would like to live in. Small acts that, when repeated between people and across generations, can contribute to something much larger. And I wonder how many such votes are being cast around us every day, largely unnoticed.

I think of a toddler attending a family funeral, whose presence brings moments of warmth and togetherness to people grieving someone they love. The child has no understanding of the contribution they are making, yet their presence matters.

Or an older person, long retired from paid employment, who remembers the birthdays, family stories and names of relatives who died decades ago. They carry a history of relationships that helps hold a family together.

How do we count these contributions? How do we recognise the value of someone whose place in the world can no longer be measured by their economic activity, or someone too young to have entered that world at all?

Perhaps some of the most meaningful votes for the kind of society we want are cast simply through the ways we belong to one another. In the ways we connect with each other. Care for each other.

My great aunt was possibly one of the oldest people in her street but she still collected pensions and papers, posted letters, picked up a loaf of bread for somebody who was unwell. Not formal volunteering but she was trusted and able where others were not. 

A local legend in her headscarf and tweed coat, always with a packet of cherry flavour Tunes in her pocket and coins for the children. Always busy. Caring for her frailer sisters. Visiting everyone who needed checking on.

But she would still have been that wonderfully distinctive woman if she'd done none of it. Our worth as people isn’t in what we do, it’s in who we are.

But what we do contribute towards creating our world matters whether it’s financial or not.

Don't read Anna Lappé's quotation and feel that, because you have little money, you have little influence over the world you want to live in.

You still have a voice. You have knowledge, skills, kindness, experience, time when you can spare it, and ways of connecting with other people.

And even when you have none of those things to give, your worth remains unchanged.