Off the farm

In Environmental Ethics today Wendell notes the rapid historical decline of farmers in the U.S., whose numbers in the last half of the 20th century dropped by more than half. Fewer and fewer of us have direct personal memories of farm life. That's dreadful, if living close to the land that feeds the nation and the world, and thus learning to know and love it, are conditions of a healthy food ecology and sound environmental sensibility.

My dad, like his before him and on back to the first generation of Olivers to receive a grant to farm a parcel of rural mid-Missouri (Montgomery County) land back in the 1840s, grew up on the family farm. He left to study veterinary medicine, after serving a hitch in the army in the 50s. 

My earliest memory, age three, is being seated between him and my grandfather in an old pickup truck rolling down then-hilly and twisty Highway K en route to our new home and his new veterinary practice in St. Charles County. His clinic was in the basement of our home in O'Fallon. There's a Wal-mart there now, and the highway leading to it has been flattened and widened. It doesn't look like home anymore.

I have many fond subsequent memories, through the 60s of my childhood, of visiting my Uncle Glenn at his farm near the old home place. Later he'd own the original farm and for a time my dad owned my Uncle's old place. I remember climbing in the corn silo, riding on the giant combine and tractor, loading hay bales onto a flatbed trailer, looking into a pitch-black night sky, imagining what my dad's childhood must have been like. 

 I now know no one who farms.

And so in class we'll ask: 

• Can we be "a healthy people in a healthy land" if we remain literally and emotionally detached from hands-on agriculture, not knowing or particularly caring where our supermarket commodities come from or how they got to us?
• Do you think patronizing large grocery chains like Kroger and Publix necessarily implicates us in supporting "bad [industrial] agriculture"?
• Have you ever participated in CSA? If not, do you intend to?
• Do you agree that industrial agriculture "cannot use the land without abusing it"? 
• Is violence inherent in the (industrial agriculture) system? 
• What does "stewardship" mean to you?
• Is the "market value" of land irrelevant, from an environmental standpoint? 
• What is the true source of "abundance"? 
• What does it mean to be "landed"? Can an urban apartment-dweller be landed?
• Is anything "inevitable"?
• What would or could you do if forced by war or some other cataclysm to "live from [your] home landscapes"? 
• Is it wrong for a few powerful people to own and control the land? 
• What does it mean to you to acknowledge that "eating is an agricultural act"? 

That last line, the one that captivated Michael Pollan ("The Wendell Berry Sentence That Inspired Michael Pollan's Food Obsession") and led him to his distinguished career as a food philosopher, will be our catalyst to ask if we do or should feel obliged to follow any "food rules"? 

For Pollan, "eating is an agricultural act" offers more insight into how food relates to the world than Thoreau or Emerson's words ever could.

Perhaps more than any living writer, Michael Pollan has convinced America that food is a story—and that there's pleasure, health, and good conscience in untangling farm-to-fork narratives. For many, books like The Omnivore's Dilemma have been a gateway to more mindful eating, a path to heightened curiosity about farming and the natural world, a road to the conviction that we really are what we eat.

But what got Michael Pollan thinking about food? In a recent interview by phone, Pollan explained his transformation from Harper's editor to a writer about gardens—and from there corn fields, supply chains, and food rules. When I asked him if a particular text has guided the ethos of his work, he pointed to a line from Wendell Berry's short manifesto, "The Pleasures of Eating," that urges us to be curious and make connections... (continues) 

The Maira Kalman-illustrated edition of Food Rules is great, but Rule 1 is problematic if you had my grandmother and have a taste for, say, sushi and Indian. But I get the spirit of "Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."

Rule 7 reminds me of my old Hoosier-Tar Heel friend's running joke about Diesel Fried Chicken: "Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline."

In CoPhi we'll talk Epicureans and Stoics, anticipating Thursday's Wendell readings--one of which I'll have to raise a small dissent over. Seems to me Wendell's view of Rationality, at least as he articulates it in one of our essays, targets hyper-Stoics. Or Vulcans, but not the sensible rationalists who do love the land and want to think sensibly about it. 

We have to find a way to bring Sympathy and feeling into the domain of what Wendell calls The Rational Mind, to the exclusion of neither. We can't leave Reason and Sympathy at loggerheads. 

That should be a Rule too.