From Field to Fork: a reflection for harvest-time

"The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live. The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on. We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it. It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women. At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers. Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table. This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun. Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory. We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here. At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks. Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite." Perhaps the world ends here by Joy Harjo

When I first heard that poem a few weeks ago, the picture it paints of life revolving around the kitchen table touched me profoundly and it took me back to my childhood on the farm. The life of my extended family revolved around my grandparents' kitchen table. We laughed and cried and sang and argued and gossiped and celebrated and grieved at that kitchen table. Our family bonds were made and strengthened and sometimes broken beyond repair at that kitchen table. And most of all we shared food. Sharing food is the most fundamental act of human bonding. We eat to live, but we also eat to love, and, in my family, we love to eat!

I learned about the cycles of life and death around that kitchen table. My Granddad tended the kitchen garden, and my sister and I helped with sowing and planting in the spring, watering and weeding through the summer, and harvesting in the autumn – all types of beans, peas, potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbages, cauliflowers, strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, apples, pears, plums. After bringing in the mounds of produce and dumping them on the table, Granddad would disappear, and we would help Nana prepare the food – shelling peas and beans, washing potatoes and carrots, and chopping everything ready for the pot or the pickling jar. We plucked chickens from the farmyard, skinned rabbits from the fields, and gutted fish from the river. We made pies and jams and chutneys.

Nowadays, I live in a suburban house with a small north-west facing garden, and our experiments with growing food there have met with very limited success. But the fruit bushes we planted a couple of years ago have done really well and this year we had a bumper crop of raspberries, so we made jam, something I hadn't done for many years. It tastes wonderful, even if I say so myself. There's something special about eating food from our own garden. I know how lucky I am to be able to do so.

The American farmer poet Wendell Berry, in his essay The Pleasures of Eating wrote, “People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater.”

In this essay, which is now 30 years old, but still pertinent for today, Berry asserts that eating is an agricultural act and critiques industrial food production, which processes food so that it no longer resembles the plants and animals it originated with, and creates a disconnect between land and eater. He suggests 7 things to eat responsibly: Participate in food production as much as you can; prepare your own food; buy food produced closest to your home; when and if you can, deal directly with local food producers; learn about industrial food production ; earn about best gardening and farming practice; learn about the life histories of food species. 

Looking at this list (and this is no way a criticism of Wendell Berry – all these things are valid and I try to follow them as much as I can myself) what strikes me is what an enormous amount of privilege there is in being able to make such choices. When I buy food, I try to imagine the lives of the animals and plants that have gone into that food, and ask myself if I am comfortable with being a part of that cycle. This leads me to buy as much organic and free range produce as I can afford. I am lucky to be able to do so. So many people in this country and in the world simply cannot afford to make such choices about where their food comes from. I feel there is something very wrong with an economy that puts people in this position. And I also think of the human lives involved in bringing food from field to fork, like the migrant workers who pick and pack the food, working very long hours in very poor conditions for very poor wages. What bearing do my food choices have on their lives? Eating, it would seem, is not only an agricultural act, but also a political one.

Berry concludes, “A significant part of the pleasure of eating is one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes...  In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”

Eating is not only an agricultural act and a political act, but also a sacred act. At Hucklow Summer School this year, I noticed that one of my ministerial colleagues began every meal by quietly holding her plate and bowing her head in thanks before eating. It reminded me of my version of 'grace', which I rarely say, “I give thanks for this food. I give thanks for all the human hands involved in bringing this food from field to fork. I thank the elements – earth, air, sun, rain – that nourished the life forms who died to nourish me. I honour their lives and their rebirth in my body, in the knowledge that one day my body will return to the earth and be reborn as fuel for other lives. Amen.”

The way I eat is, I realise, an important part of my spirituality. The sacredness of food is part of an ancient understanding of the sacredness of life. Rabbi Arthur Waskow wrote, "In the deepest origins of Jewish life, the most sacred relationship was the relationship with the earth. Ancient Israel got in touch with God by bringing food to the Holy Temple... we affirmed, not in words but with our bodies, "We didn't invent this food; it came from a Unity of which we are a part. The earth, the rain, the sun, the seed, and our work -- together, adam and adamah, the earth and human earthlings, grew this food. It came from the Unity of Life; so we give back some of it to that great Unity."

Eating is an agricultural act, a political act, and a sacred act, an act in which we are intimately connected with the earth, with the lives and deaths of the beings we share our planet with, with the mystery, the great Unity. As the American poet William Carlos Williams wrote, “There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but of the body of the Lord.” Bon Appetit. Amen.