the body of the Lord:: White House lawn = 5 acres of hunger relief

The latest article from Michael Pollan, in today's NY Times Sunday magazine - a Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief. It's a summary of where we are in food & farm policy in the US and what the next president can do. Lots of interesting policy recommendations, like loan forgiveness for culinary school graduates who work for two years in public school cafeterias, cooking healthy and local food.

Also, I learned that Maine has a pilot program subsidizing shares from CSA farms for elderly residents. I wonder if many CSAs here are equipped to take food stamps? Would be a small but effective solution for hunger in a lot of communities.

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:

White House lawn = 5 acres of hunger relief

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why farm? why food?

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