Blog Watch: Grace and food

Telling the Stories of Consumer Products « Our Earth/Ourselves.

There is a limit to the ways in which we can force the land to yield more—even though we are still trying, with such schemes as vertical farming. Without healthy water and soil, food will not grow. It comes to market from somewhere and the way in which this happens is a story we need to hear and to tell.

If that story is one of abundance and diversity and continuance, it is also a story of grace. Thus, Wendell Berry once remarked, we should not eat any food we are not willing to pray over.

By contrast, most modern stories of the food we eat are profoundly lonely ones— for humans are their only actors. And in them we are only consuming, not sharing. No one takes seriously the cartoon cows that appear on milk cartoons. We know humans made them up—just as we assume that humans can make up our food—as if we did not need the cooperation of the land to do this. READ MORE ...