the body of the Lord:: Farm Bill

Interesting piece in Gourmet Magazine about the Farm Bill: a huge piece of legislation that (among other things) has the US government paying farmers to produce more & more, leading to lots of craziness like further use of pesticides, loss of biodiversity and intense environmental damage, unfair rigging of the global markets, and small family farms disappearing -- over 5 million gone since the 1930's.

For more, here are basic overviews of the Farm Bill world from Oxfam and Bread for the World; & the Wall Street Journal reports on lobbying efforts from big farms.

why farm? why food?

Wendell Berry, from "The Pleasure of Eating":
I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act.

Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as "consumers."

...How does one escape this trap? Only voluntarily, the same way that one went in: by restoring one's consciousness of what is involved in eating; by reclaiming responsibility for one's own part in the food economy.

...Eating with the fullest pleasure -- pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance-- is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest:

There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.

the body of the Lord:

Farm Bill

1 comment:

why farm? why food?

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