thought for food

Darwin Catholic makes a pointed Thanksgiving observation about how far removed most Americans are from the source of their food:

. . . we modern Americans would do well to recall that food comes from somewhere — and indeed that it either comes or it doesn’t. One may talk of rights to food and shelter and medical care and such all day long. But at the most basic, human level: our existence and comfort depends on those who till the soil . . .

And what I would like to observe is this: Farming is skilled labor.

When I read about the history of education, it seems like what usually gets published is the history of literacy.  The underlying assumption is that if a child isn’t taught to read and write, he isn’t taught.

Don’t mistake me, I am enormously in favor of the widespread practice of literary skills, and have the bookshelves and the blogs to prove it.  But at the end of day, I know two things:

-I can’t eat books.

-I don’t know how to farm.

And from this, I make two further conclusions:

– Farming is, on the list of human pursuits, priority #1*.

-Farming is a skill that needs to be taught.

This in turns tells me that all those generations of people who taught their children how to grow food, but never did get to the business reading and writing, these were people with their priorities in order.   People to whom the rest of us owe an enormous thanks, for it is their diligence that gave us our existence.

I am concerned that my generation knows so little about the growing of food.  The SuperHusband & I both have grandparents who grew up on farms; as adults though they practiced other professions, they continued to grow a significant portion of their own food.  The same can be said of several of my neighbors — like my grandparents, they either have very large gardens in the yard, or else own a second parcel of land they cultivate for food.

But this skill and practice has not been handed down.  My parents gardened occasionally — they knew how — but not so much that they taught us.  Our generation wants to have a garden, and we’re pretty happy if we get a few tomatoes out of it.  It is a skill we never learned as children, and don’t integrate into our lives as adults.  We seem to always be finding some other activity is more important.

We aren’t starving as a result.  Specialization of labor has done what it promises: those of my generation who do know how to farm, do it amazingly well — well enough to feed the rest of us with no apparent difficulty.  And I’m all about specialization of labor — I haven’t got the body for farming whether I wanted to do it or not.  (And I like doing other things anyway.)  But still, I think we are, as a society, over-specialized to the point of being a bit impoverished by it.  It’s a poverty we don’t notice, but I think it is there all the same.

*Alongside the worship of God, of course.  The two seem to go hand in hand rather naturally . . . wow, almost amazingly joined as, say, the body & soul that make up a human being.  Go figure.