Stone Soup

An ethos and invitation for action-making in a situation.

This action is a response to Sarah Prosser’s story “Mapping a better world”, 2021.

Stone Soup is a folk story in which hungry strangers convince the people of a town to each share a small amount of their food in order to make a meal that everyone enjoys, and exists as a moral regarding the value of sharing. In varying traditions, the stone has been replaced with other common inedible objects, and therefore the fable is also known as axe soup, button soup, nail soup, and wood soup.

It’s a parable of community, a trickster story - a trick of the most wonderful variety, a tribute to the commons. The stone is of course a pretext for bringing other elements together and the substance of the story, the magical synergy that transcends additive arithmetic in the way it elicits a willingness to contribute and to commune.

We take this transnational folk story, Stone Soup, as an ethos and invitation for action-making in a situation:

Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the very hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire.

One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making “stone soup”, which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit garnish which they are missing, to improve the flavor.

The villager, who anticipates enjoying a share of the soup, does not mind parting with a few carrots, so these are added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not yet reached its full potential. The villager hands them a little bit of seasoning. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient.

Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by travelers and villagers alike. Although the travelers have thus tricked* the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty meal which they share with the donors.

Situation = time + place + people + others

Futurefarmers asks you to image your “stone” and work from there.

You can replace the word stone with any object you wish.

We invite you to enter humbly with nothing more than a stone.

Yes, you, the traveler, the visitor, guest. Yes, even if you are working from your own neighborhood.

You need to enter with fresh eyes and Stone Soup will be your vehicle for this.

Remember it does not have to be a stone.

To orient you, we offer some ideas (pebbles).

1.

Find a material. Start with one. Simple. Imagine its potential.

2.

Begin your travels.

3.

Depending on the material, you will begin to interact with people or collect other materials that build upon your first material.

4.

Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for “help”.

5.

Imagine where you want to go. If you want to make soup and you only have a stone, tell people you wish to make soup. If you wish to make a Bakehouse, but you only have a canoe with holes in it, tell people you want to make a bake house. You will be suprised what will come together. You will be suprised who will appear, skills and wishes will begin to engtangle.

Be prepared, but operate without assumption or pre-supposition.

Let the material and the situation guide you.

6.

And following are a list of “fellow travelers” who have also borrowed from Stone Soup as methodology, a process or a way of engaging in a situation.

Fellow travellers

- Lewis Hyde, The Gift

- Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

- How to Make Stone Soup : Principles and Notes of a Literary Stone Soup {link}

- Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins

Inés Ballesteros & Michela Dal Brollo, Stone Soup, Belgium {link}

Inés and Michela use food and our food culture as an artistic medium, thus questioning our social and physical environment. Equipped with no more than a portable oven and some kitchen utensils, they start conversations with Stone Soup about making a dish as a binding agent. The ‘Living Equipment’ is a set of multi-purpose and self-designed travel equipment that grows and changes during the research process. For example from a canopy, to a portable pyrolysis oven, hectograph printing kit, multifunctional cargo bike, herbarium, audio / video recorder, cabinets for samples, food library etc.

The ‘Living Equipment’ is also a multifunctional medium used to perform in our daily meet needs, make installations, exchange, collect and archive during the itinerant research Stone Soup. The ‘Living Equipment’ wants to establish relationships with the spaces, the situations and the landscape that we encounter.

Dong Song, Throwing a Stone

Throwing A Stone is a performance starting from 1994, I picked up a stone randomly in different places, wrote on the stone the time I found it, threw it far away, and then walked to find it. I wrote another time on the stone when I found it, and threw it away again, and then walked to find it again – until I could not find it anymore. When all the thrown stones were gone, I recorded every process on another stone, and hence presented “stone-text”. These are not stones that I threw away; therefore, I call it the text of “Throwing a stone”.

Gary Coates, Stone Soup: Utopia, Gift Exchange & the Aesthetic of the Self-Consuming ArtifactStone Soup

Stone Soup provides us with a model of the utopian story as a self-consuming artifact. Utopia thus considered is neither a plan nor a place: it is a dialectical process of always and all ways transcending nature, self and society. In the language of this paper, utopia is what happens when we are consumed in the act of making and sharing stone soup.

The gift economy is the dominant form of material exchange in tribal bands, extended families, small agricultural villages, and other face-to-face communities. Social relations in gift economies are based on the interrelated obligations to give, to receive and to reciprocate. Unlike exchanges in market economies, in which there is no expectation of any form of relationship between the trading partners beyond the actual transaction, all gift exchanges express and imply the continuation of interpersonal bonds based on mutual obligations. According to Lewis Hyde, whose book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, is the definitive work on the topic of gift exchange, “the gift must always move” if it is to remain a gift and give its increase. It is only because of the arising of reciprocal relationships that the gift is able to remain in circulation.