This is such a beautifully laid out analogy! I love the highlights section!

Please bear with me here, but we have been very successfully using the 'low-hanging fruit' strategy to mitigate theft.

Our small town is full of food! We joke that even the beggars are chubby. Its because we live in an agricultural zone, and some low hanging fruit is never far away.

Some larger land owners are offended by this. Recently, one of the biggest decided to cut down all the guava trees that bordered his farm for generations. Ledis tells me she remembers snacking from them as a kid while walking 3 hrs to town with her family.

The lack of these trees in no way mitigates people's hunger, they just have to walk further or deeper to find food. I believe this is cultural, a deeply socialistic (regarding food at least) culture makes sense in a geographic dead end like our mountain valley, there'd be no one to save landowners from hunger riots here!

Since the biggest land owners don't actually 'live' here, it doesnt seem like a problem to them to plant hundreds of acres of zero food (coffee is inedible). They are sure we little people (plankton, minnows, dolphins) will work things out between us.

While seeing plenty of evidence of 'hunger theft' starting out, we continued planting our food forest! After all, I can't be sure if its an armadillo or a human who pulled up those mantioc, but both are hungry and basically unwilling to negotiate.

We now have such replicating foods as sugar cane and bananas placed strategically near the enterances. More guavas are coming (what a slow tree! Think twice before cutting down one of these, the next tree will feed a much older version of yourself, or your kids!)

How does this relate to your story? I think the low hanging fruit is all the community driven work done with ulogs, steemgigs, thealliance, etc. Sure, once and a while somebody will walk into the middle of your garden and start grabbing golden raspberries, but then we will blow the trumpets.

They will eventually learn that its best to grab the low hanging fruit, propagate the seeds, learn new techniques, and maybe one day have their own uniquely beautiful garden! And many more will never steal or even feel like they need to.

I love you!