Community Feast

It doesn't really happen in isolation.  Food, I mean.  Food is the paradigmatic communal good.  At all points along the trajectory of its existence – from the planting of seed to the breaking of bread – food is meant to be shared.  The bread and the wine, they make for communion long before the hungry arrive at the table.  The bounty of hunt and harvest, they literally make the community, and the work of building starts long before anyone comes to the feast.  The feast is, in truth, the celebration of what has come to exist in the very process of its making:  community itself.  No feast, no community.  And no community, no feast.

The breathtaking tragedy of the modern industrial food system is that it breaks this bond.  From the single-cockpit crop duster spraying glyphosate and destroying the microbial bonds that make for healthy soil, to the drive-through burger consumed alone on the highway, the system by which the vast majority of North Americans obtain "food" (one can argue it barely meets a proper definition) severs our ties with each other and with the earth in a bewildering number and variety of ways.

How did we arrive here? This story has been well documented by a small army of journalists, historians, economists, health professionals, and others – not to mention a good number of farmers and ranchers themselves* – over a period of decades now.  And there is little, if anything, of value I can add to their body of work, except to observe one particular unifying theme: that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  I hazard this cliché as one summary of this body of work – notwithstanding the usually sound editorial bias against clichés (due to their tendency to obscure more than they reveal) – because it is precisely the cautionary nugget I need to bear in mind as I take the next logical question as the organizing principle of my life:  So where do we go from here?  How do we get ourselves out of this mess?  What does the work of redemption look like, in practice, on the ground, in the ground?

These questions are worth inhabiting.  Their answers are worth living toward.  And even from the wilderness into which we have unwittingly wandered, we can make out the essential contours of the land of promise, where we gather around the table to feast, to celebrate the ties that have been formed to make the feast possible.

*In addition to the resources mentioned yesterday, I would also recommend – again, merely as a starting point, because the body of work has burgeoned in recent years – Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture (2018), by North Dakota farmer and rancher Gabe Brown.