food by proxy
As Mr. Wendell Berry has famously said, ‘Eating is an agricultural act’. If you live, you eat. And if you stop eating, you won’t live long.
Which is to say that we have no choice but to be agricultural beings.
For most of history, for most of the race – all the generations up to the late nineteenth century – this was a fact so evident as to require no words. To say ‘I am a farmer’ was substantially synonymous with the statement ‘I am human’.
Our own age, however, and increasingly over the past one hundred years, has enacted its farmerhood by proxy, and so long is the chain of middlemen and processors between us and the men and women who grow the plants and tend the animals that are our food, that we have forgotten to feel any complicity in the act, and raise our glasses or our fists to bless or curse its provision under the mistaken impression that it is farmers who decide how our land will be used, our food grown.
We buy cheap, or buy fad, or buy fancy, never considering that our choices are forming the national food system. And when our food has made us weak or sick, or when it is not there, we look to the government or the agricultural industry for a legislative or technological solution.
But every bite we take, every day we remain alive on this earth, we, and not others, are enacting our agricultural decisions. It is no one’s job to provide us with bread (ask St. Paul), and if instead of growing our own food we choose to put our daily labor at the disposal of other people’s designs in exchange for cash, and then to use that cash to pay yet others for the bread we require, we still bear responsibility on every level for the means and methods that produced the bread.
How do we choose to take responsibility for our daily existence? By proxy? or personally? The responsibility is unavoidable.
Modern industrial farming is on a collision course with disaster, the only question being which will come first, the collapse of our nation’s soils, or the collapse of our national health.
Meanwhile small, holistic, regenerative, human-scale farming is just as possible as it has always been, waiting for families to take up the tools and begin again. And there is a small but rapidly growing tide of individuals and families who are making the move to the country; or digging up urban backyards and planting gardens, building shelters for small flocks of chickens, and raising rabbits and pigeons; or partnering with small farmers in their own neighborhoods to access real food grown in ecologically and economically sustainable ways. These are people who are not content to go on eating degraded food until the trucks stop, the soil blows away, or all the children are auto-immune, autistic, or obese. They are forming communities, online or on the land, and those communities are building a culture of small farmers.
We’re three generations past the living tradition of the independent family farm, and few or none of us have inherited a working knowledge, even a working surmise, of how such a project is to be carried out. It might - to many, it does - look like an insuperable burden.
It is not.
Today on our farm we raise 90-95% of what we eat, and, which is just as important, what our animals eat, while renewing the soil in the fertility it requires so that we can go on doing this - without help or permission from our government, our culture, or the industrial agricultural monopolies. So we know there is much that can be done by the untrained, the inexperienced, the city-bred, not necessarily to effect a change in any wider arena, but to put into use small parcels of neglected, abandoned, damaged land to provide excellent food for our families, while improving that land so it can go on feeding us, better and better, every year into the future, as far as we can see.
And it’s a good life.
We hope you'll join us at Leondardo's Renaissance Coffee Shop tomorrow, Wednesday, at seven p.m., so we can talk more about it.