Food as Leverage
Food is the first reason most people stay where they are. Every system knows it. You can quit a job, sell a house, or cancel a subscription, but you can’t stop eating. That’s the point of control.
When you don’t grow food, you have to buy it. To buy it, you need income. To keep that income, you have to play by the rules of whoever signs your paycheck. That’s the chain. Every step between you and your next meal is a hand that takes a cut.
Grocery stores look like freedom because you have options. You can pick a brand, a flavor, a diet. But none of it changes who owns the food supply. All of it comes from the same narrow group of producers, processors, and distributors that decide what’s grown, how it’s grown, and how much you’ll pay. The store doesn’t give you choice. It gives you dependence dressed up as convenience.
When we started growing food, the power shift was instant. It wasn’t about the cost. It was about the fact that no one else had a say in it. We didn’t need permission to eat. A dozen eggs from our chickens didn’t require wages, or shipping, or marketing. It just required care and consistency. That’s leverage.
Leverage doesn’t mean isolation or self-reliance in the fantasy sense. It means cutting the number of people who can punish you for wanting to live. It means that when prices jump or supply chains break, you can step outside of that panic because you’re holding some of your own answers.
That’s what makes food so powerful. It’s not about survivalism or nostalgia. It’s about independence in its most basic form. Food gives you leverage because it’s one of the few things the system can’t replicate without your cooperation. They can manufacture substitutes, but they can’t feed you directly without your labor or your compliance.
Every jar of food you can preserve, every chicken you raise, every garden you grow pulls one thread out of that net. It’s not about replacing the grocery store. It’s about changing what the grocery store means to you. You stop being a captive audience and start being a participant again.
That’s the point of our farm. The book Exit Farming isn’t about running away. It’s about taking back ground that should never have been for sale in the first place. Food is the first way to do it. Once you control what feeds you, the rest of the system starts to lose its hold.