I sometimes ask myself (and sometimes my husband asks it for me) "What in the Hell Are We Doing All This For?" Why do we commit the time to building this market? and What difference does it make?
I've been arriving at some answers lately, and I'd like to share them with you. According to Wendell Berry, "Eating is an Agricultural Act." This idea seems obvious when you sit down with farmers to share a meal as we do at this Harvest Celebration Dinner. However, eating is more than that. It is an act of community as well.
In this world we've outsourced so many parts of our lives, including energy, consumer goods, jobs, transportation. We send our needs out to the world and they are met by people from the farthest reaches of the planet. Perhaps our food is the most outsourced of all. Indeed, hundreds of hands touch our food before it reaches our table.
Our food begins in foreign fields. It travels through the battlefields of oil nations, through the board rooms of geo-politics, and the currency counting houses, until it arrives in the deep freezers of big box stores before dropping into our grocery carts.
Yet at this farmers' market, we reclaim our food system that have been broken by outsourcing. We have built a Community that takes back our outsourced food. Our food begins with the farmer who has one hand on the soil the other at the market. We as customers have one hand at the market and the other on our table. Our food producers hold one hand to the farmer and the other to our market. We find their food and reach from their space at the market to our own table. We have made an incredibly short chain in our food network.
The network of this community extends in many directions, including to our photographer Matthew Novak of Farming the Legacy, who records our community and shows us what we are.
Through this food network we have built connections to growers of our food. We learn where our food comes from, we gather at a market to buy it, and we share the experience of gathering our food. We bring our children to the market to work, to learn, and to play. In this way we teach and understand our values of food and where it comes from.
Tonight with this Harvest Celebration Dinner we experience this visible, knowable chain from the earth to our table. We honor the few hands that take food of the earth to the tables of our families. And we celebrate the community that we've built. It is a pleasure to have you share this meal and this community.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
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