the body of the Lord:: big ideas

At the farm, we've been talking a lot over the past few days about more people having access to local organic food, and how to do that. How to make good food affordable, while keeping farmers afloat financially. and we're stumped.

Seems like either we subsidize the farmer so they can sell food for less, or subsidize the eaters so they can afford to buy it. (Wait, don't we already have farm subsidies in this country?)

Or we could change the food system, and do away with artificially cheap food that's grown at great environmental cost and often at the expense of workers' rights.

Winter project, anyone?

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:

big ideas

1 comment:

why farm? why food?

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