We lose our health--and create profitable diseases and dependences--by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, make for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems. The drudgery of growing ones own food, then, is not drudgery at all. (If we make the growing of food a drudgery, which is what agribusiness does make of it, then we also make a drudgery of eating, and of living.) It is, in addition to being the appropriate fulfillment of a practical need, a sacrament, as eating is also, by which we enact and understand our oneness with the Creation, the conviviality of one body and with all bodies. Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 13:34:59 +0000
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