the body of the Lord:: blah

Home sick from the farm yesterday & today. Slept in this morning til 7:45, which is 2 hours later than I usually get up, and I'm realizing I have a whole day to do not much.

This week has been very rainy & overcast. Everyone else is putting in the eggplant and the hot peppers. And there's a ton of weeding and tractor cultivation to do.

This morning on our local NPR I heard a brief story on local farms in Massachusetts - pretty nice, although not much to it. (You can sell produce direct to the customer and that's a better model! People are into local food!) The station's weekly hour-long piece on Boston-area news, Radio Boston, is also about CSA farms, and looks interesting. They're asking if sustainable farming is sustainable economically, which is a tough question.

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:

blah

1 comment:

why farm? why food?

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