What Would It Take?
There's a certain category of question that, once formed clearly, is difficult to set aside.
It isn’t the dramatic version of the question, but the kind that returns at inconvenient moments and is difficult to dismiss once it has formed clearly.
In some ways, it’s quite simple.
What would it actually take for a household, on a Caribbean island, to produce a portion of its own food that meaningfully changes its dependence?
Not everything, and not independence, but enough to matter. Enough to reduce exposure in a period of growing uncertainty.
Searching for an answer offers a way to reduce exposure, lower reliance, and increase sovereignty in ways that extend well beyond nutrition.
I came to this question the way most people come to questions that end up reshaping their lives: not all at once, and not entirely by choice.
I had moved from the UK to Grenada with three children, a journalism background, and a longstanding habit of paying attention to how systems work and what happens when they don't. Food kept coming up. Not as a crisis, the shops were stocked, life was normal, but as a structural condition that, once I saw it clearly, I couldn't quite unsee.
Nearly everything eaten on this island arrives by ship. That means it depends on fuel, foreign exchange, stable supply chains, and decisions made far beyond the region. When all of that holds, the arrangement feels unremarkable. When it shifts, even slightly, the effects arrive quickly.
I was no longer looking at this from the outside. I was dependent on it. And I had children to feed.
That shift, from understanding a system intellectually to living inside its vulnerabilities, is where this book begins.
What This Looks Like In Practice
Hold Your Ground: A Household Guide to Growing, Storing and Sustaining Food in the Caribbean is a practical guide to building a working food system on a small piece of land in a tropical environment.
Specifically, the kind of land and climate found across the eastern Caribbean, volcanic, fertile, humid, uneven, and already producing things whether you intend it to or not.
It is not a book about survival. It is a book about capability. The difference matters. Survival is reactive. Capability is something you build quietly, over time, before the pressure arrives.
The book moves from the philosophy of household food sovereignty to the practicalities of reading land, laying out a system, choosing crops that actually carry weight, managing soil and water through wet and dry seasons, storing and preserving what is produced, and keeping a system running month after month.
It is written for people just like me - with zero background in farming backgrounds but and who need a framework as much as they need instructions.
The crops at the centre of it are not the ones most people start with. Not tomatoes and herbs. The foundation is cassava, breadfruit, plantain, sweet potato, yam; the crops that produce in volume, tolerate variation, and in some cases store in the ground until you need them.
Around those, legumes that improve the soil while feeding the household. Vegetables and fruit that complete the diet. Herbs that make the food worth eating.
The system it describes is one that becomes easier over time, not harder, because it is designed to sustain itself.
A Working System In Progress
As of April 2026, the manuscript is complete in its first full draft. The structural spine, all twenty-two chapters, is written.
What remains are the narrative layers that will bring it fully to life: the scenes and lived detail that make abstract concepts felt rather than just understood.
The nutritional charts and yield anchors that allow a reader to trust the claims being made. And the final editing that tightens what is already there.
After a couple of years languishing in the forgotten corners of my Google Drive, this is no longer an idea waiting to be written. I'm pleased to say it's a book in the process of completion. The target is publication later this year.
Why This Matters Now
I've always believed in having a Plan B but conversations around being prepared tend to get you labelled as a bit of an oddball so I try not to discuss such topics too often.
Living on the frontlines of the climate catastrophe forced the issue of resilience upon me. As the mother to two young girls, I have no choice but to figure out how we will thrive in an age of instability.
And while I may have hoped for a few more years to get my house in order, the crisis in the Middle East has raised the stakes cery quickly.
It's now not just the foil hat wearing folks who are talking of lasting shocks. In April, the International Rescue Committee warned that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz poses a greater threat to global food security than the Ukraine shock of 2022.
Not because of wheat this time, but because fuel, fertiliser, shipping, and humanitarian supply chains are simultaneously disrupted. The World Food Programme reports a twenty percent increase in acute food insecurity since 2020.
Small island states such as Grenada where I reside, almost entirely dependent on imported food, connected to global supply chains by a thread of shipping routes, are among the most exposed places on earth to exactly this kind of disruption.
This book was not written in response to that news. It was written in response to the structural condition that makes that news so consequential. The crisis confirms what the work already knew.
The question is no longer whether food systems are vulnerable. It is what a household can actually do about it, in practical terms, from where they are.
That is what this book answers.
If You Want To Follow Ths Work
The book is one part of something larger, an ongoing inquiry into what it means to reorganise a life around land, and around questions of how to live in a way that holds.
If that inquiry interests you, The Field is where to begin. It is not a newsletter in the conventional sense. It is occasional writing, fragments of thought, and voice notes from the ground here in Grenada. It's closer to a letter than a feed but with no fixed schedule just the work, as it unfolds.