I said before that I’d have guest writers write about food from time to time. This week’s contribution is from the gnome. I have been interested in the meaning of food and nourishment for awhile (hence, this blog) and have thought/researched/worked on papers about food ethics, creation, and community, but most of what has really jazzed me about food, community, and creation is thinking about it with the gnome and good friends over the years. The gnome is a brilliant guy, with several degrees, the most interesting (and recent) of which is a Masters in Church History from GCTS. He also has a giant laugh, a gleaming smile, and enjoys snobby beer, his friends’ cooking, riding bikes, books and coffee, and thinking and living on the deep side of the pool. Here, he tells about what he’s been learning from a recently discovered friend of ours- who he calls- S. H. S. H. is one of those beautiful friends who you stumble upon and within weeks feels like family.
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THW is finishing her next to last class in seminary this week, so she asked me to publish something on her blog so that her loyal readership would not get bored and/or despondent in her absence. So I thought I’d talk a little bit about our mutual friend S.H.
We met S.H. just a little while ago at church and discovered that though we had a rather shocking amount in common (like New Urbanism, Wendell Berry, and intentional Christian communities), he was so much cooler than us that it was unlikely that we were actually going to be friends. As it turns out though, he is quite willing to be friends with people less cool than he is, which is a major boon for us. He is one of those remarkable people that inspires you to be into something simply because he loves it so much and describes it with such beauty, sincerity, and passion.
One of the things that S.H. loves is urban farming. Now I myself have never been interested in farming. I am a city slicker through and through. I suffer from a certain degree of agoraphobia. I feel exposed and unsafe when there is not an adequate sense of enclosure due to buildings, tree canopies and the like (which is, incidentally, why I never feel safe in the suburbs), so I have never done well in agricultural environs. But here is a new thing—the idea of cultivating a very small plot of land (no larger than a quarter acre) in the middle of a standard city block so that you can provide organic food for your family and perhaps your neighbors as well that doesn’t cost a billion dollars.
When Tish and I got married, she insisted upon eating organic food. I protested—but it will cost so much money to buy organic! At first I relented on the grounds that I would rather pay that money to a grocery store now than pay it to a doctor later when I was diagnosed with cancer from all the chemicals in conventional food. Recently, however, I’ve begun thinking a lot more about how our current industrial food production practices allow us to become mere consumers of food (“Eating is an agricultural act,” Wendell Berry writes, but we would never know it because we have no connection at all to the land, and therefore no sense of the ecological and human cost of the food that we eat). And this reflection, along with eating food that S.H. has grown himself, has led me to be all the more in favor of organic food—but organic food grown locally. We need to know the ecological and human cost of what we are eating, and the only way this is really possible is by eating food that has been harvested by people you know. This is part of the cost of discipleship—the worker is worth his wages. But urban farming adds levels of coolness to the benefits of eating locally—the satisfaction of craft, the ability to grow your own food in the neighborhood you love, and the ability to practice charity and kindness toward your less fortunate neighbors by sharing your food with them.
Nourish Blog'zine 