Things Grandma Said

Nicole’s grandmother Rose, long departed but still very present, had several phrases that lodged deeply in the minds of her descendants. “Plenty Enough” is inspired by Rose’s way of speaking and of being in the world.

She uttered those words often. “That’s plenty enough,” was a way to express gratitude for what was available. In moments, of particular delight, she might add: “Ooooh, that plenty enough good.” The words were way of living and loving well with limits.

Humans — especially the young ones — love to push limits. So, sometimes, when Grandma Rose was short on patience and less than fully pleased, she’d offer the words up as a warning: “That is plenty enough.” (And if you failed to pick up on the shift in intonation, she’d quickly follow up with a much sharper and louder interjection in Italian: “Basta cosi! “ For the unfamiliar, “That’s enough!”

As a child, the phase was too familiar. Utterly unremarkable. Not a phrase Nicole paid much mind to until it stopped being said in her presence. But as Nicole’s career started angling in the direction of social, environmental, and food justice, the words “plenty enough” echoed at odd moments, demanding her attention.

Confounding Contradiction or Prescient Wisdom

For some, placing these two words together seems plain contradictory: Are we talking about amazing abundance or simple sufficiency?

Those two concepts aren’t as far apart as we often imagine them to be. But contemporary cultures of consumption really want us to keep pursuing plenty, and to feel in our bottomless hearts that what we already have is never quite enough. This way of orienting toward the world — toward our lives — leads to discontent and destruction. The psychology of insufficiency is effective at getting us to reach and strive, to work harder, to buy more — but it is pretty terrible if we want to find contentment, experience gratitude, and receive what life has to offer us.

What might happen if we remembered that ENOUGH is plenty? If we allowed ourselves to feel contented with enough? These questions have relevance in so many areas of life, so many aspects of our work, and across so many sectors. And they are especially relevant when we get to thinking about food and farming.