the body of the Lord:: women on farms

The Smithsonian magazine has a history piece about city women recruited to rural America to work on farms, during World War I. (Makes you wonder where the rural women were - doing factory assembly lines in the cities?) Very military-like rah rah set up, it sounds like. They had some nice cheers:

Don’t be a slacker

Be a picker or a packer

WLA, Rah, rah, rah!

It's fascinating how much surprise gets expressed by the public, according to the article, from the folks receiving the women workers. They can use tools! They wear pants! In my short time farming here, women are all over the place -- most apprentices I see at our eastern Mass. farmer gatherings are women, and some of the best farms in this area are managed & staffed by women. Not a shock anymore, at least in our small-scale organic circles.

(From Kendra, who was in my Lazarus group. Check out her book reviews!)

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:

women on farms

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why farm? why food?

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