the body of the Lord:: rock stars of farming

I am visiting a friend in Vancouver, British Columbia this weekend, and it's spring here. Everything is green and flowering. Boston is still a grey & brown blah, with sand all over the roads still, from winter snow plowing and general grossness. So nice out here!

And just as exciting, I realized at the end of my flight that I was sitting next to Joel Salatin! Hero of the CSA/local farm/sustainable food movement. He was coming out here to speak at a poultry conference. We had a nice chat about how to access farmland in New England and what I want to do with my life. Super nice guy. (If only I was a chatty person who starts off the flight by saying hello to my neighbor, instead of waiting til we were at the gate. Boo.)

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:

rock stars of farming

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why farm? why food?

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