the body of the Lord:: MEAT.

Ben Ali died this week -- the owner of Ben's Chili Bowl, a greasy spoon in Washington DC that's one of the more historic and amazing black-owned restaurants in the east coast, serving food guaranteed to make you a little sick. With joy. I was first introduced to it by this guy, when I was a lowly DC intern in 2004. Beef & pork sausage! With more meat on top!
In other news, our farm piglets we raised since the spring were "taken to market" a few weeks ago, and just returned to us for selling to our CSA members and to the public. Some tasty local meat, that only recently we were saying hello to on our way out to the fields. A little sad, but in all seriousness, quite amazing to see this process up close that most Americans were a part of in generations past - raising and caring for your food of all kinds, with thanks.

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:

MEAT.

1 comment:

why farm? why food?

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