the body of the Lord:: Mass

Locally grown license plates!
"By purchasing this plate, you help preserve 520,000 acres of open space and the beauty of Massachusetts, our heritage, and local farming families. You protect 13,545 jobs and the value local agriculture has on our economy while reaping fresher and better tasting food. And you help shrink our carbon footprint by reducing the distance our food travels to market (normally 1,300 miles)."
So great. The cow looks like it's eating a basket of tomatoes, though. Or flowers?

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:

Mass

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why farm? why food?

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