Magical Musings by Dr Demeter

I picture Demeter walking through a supermarket at 9pm, under fluorescent lights, past strawberries in winter and bread that tastes like air. Nobody looks up. Nobody asks what it cost. Somewhere, quietly, a field goes infertile and a farmer sells up and a child grows up without knowing what season it is. In the old myth, when Persephone is taken, Demeter stops the grain and the world panics. In ours, Persephone was taken slowly: seed by seed, skill by skill, soil by soil, until we forgot she existed. And still, the body remembers. The earth remembers.

“That’s why I became Dr Demeter, as a vow to re-weave the life giving food system: from underworld commodity to living soil, from abstraction to relationship.”

— Dr Demeter

My PhD work, ‘Con Viv’, began with a simple unease that grew sharper the more I looked: why are we surrounded by food, yet so many people feel under-nourished, disoriented, and unwell? Why do rural regions thin out while supermarkets “boom”? Why does “efficiency” so often create fragility? The deeper I researched, the clearer it became that modern food has been redesigned as a commodity pipeline. Value moves away from place. Decision-making becomes distant. Costs are hidden in soil loss, water loss, biodiversity loss, and the quiet exhaustion of farmers and families.

But there was another layer I couldn’t ignore, the layer modern policy language struggles to hold. Food is not neutral, it carries vitality. It shapes perception, holds culture and has consequences beyond the measurable.

Biodynamics entered my life as a practical doorway into that deeper reality: the farm as an organism, compost as a living intelligence, timing as a form of listening, preparations as reverent attention rather than superstition. Biodynamics gave Con Viv a depth-organ. It brought me into a grounded living anthroposophy that starts with observation, care, and responsibility, not abstraction. It taught me that fertility isn’t an input; it is relationship made visible over time.

Demeter, in the myth, is the boundary of reciprocity. When relationship is violated, fertility withdraws. Not as punishment, but as truth. Life cannot be endlessly extracted. And if we’re honest, we can see the modern version everywhere: the underworld isn’t below us anymore, it’s in the supply chain. It’s in the way soil is treated as a substrate, seed as intellectual property, and food as a product detached from place and season.

So my work has become one body moving through many layers. Seed libraries keep diversity, memory, and sovereignty alive in the palm of a hand. Magical Farm is where theory meets weather, labour, animals, fences, and the daily reality of rebuilding fertility. Peach n Pear is the everyday convivial layer: local circulation, seasonal trust, food with a face and a place. Community garden gates, swaps, workshops, and shared meals are cultural infrastructure, the mycelium of belonging that makes local food possible. Food policy work is the deep plumbing: changing the rules so regeneration is viable, not heroic.

And now Grow Small, Feed All is the invitation made public: multiply small farms, rebuild local processing, redirect resources toward the people holding fertility, and bring nourishment back into relationship with place. Alongside this, Living Earth College is the educational hearth I’m shaping, a place to learn the literacy of living systems, to practice freedom with responsibility, and to make anthroposophy practical enough to cook with.

I write as Dr Demeter for the highest good: to keep my own vow clear, to serve Con Viv with integrity, and to help restore the conditions for life to keep giving. May we stop pretending abundance is automatic. May we remember it is a relationship. May we build food systems worthy of the earth’s generosity.

With love and life ‘con viv’

Dr Demeter