Izy's Out of Standard challenge over at Real Toads this week is to consider the mechanical harvest. This coincides with my sister having recently seen the documentary Fresh, about a grassroots movement away from industrial agribusiness, back towards whole foods, small local harvests and kind conditions for the food and animals we grow to eat. This movement understands that Wall Street bankers have taken over determining how the world's food is grown, and the impact is detrimental to our lives. To put it mildly.
The last 50 years has been all about pesticides and mass production, toxic-contaminated "soil", pesticide-related cancers and salmonella, trauma endured by the warehoused fowl and animals we "grow" in cages. Not to mention GMO's and processed/refined "foods" that have no nutritive value whatsoever. And we are ingesting all of this when we eat. No wonder illnesses have spiked as a result. Check out Izy's eerie description of driving past a mechanical harvest, over at Toads.
The bottom line seems to be that we have spent fifty years moving away from whole foods and small farms, only to realize our future health depends upon our return to the ways of our grandparents. The Fresh movement is encouraging us to do just that, to return to production of whole foods which will be locally distributed and consumed. We can grow our own in our backyards, or support local small farmers and buy local. Thankfully, we have this choice.
Take me back to the land
of my ancestors,
out to the barn in the early dawn.
Cattle softly lowing,
milk in glass bottles
clinking on the porch,
porridge
with an eye on the sky,
to make sure we get the corn in
while it's
still dry.
Tanned men tossing bales of hay
as if they were pillows,
kids catching them
up on the truck-bed,
stacking them high,
to store in the hayloft,
putting another season's
cattle fodder by.
Let me and my sister walk through
the cornstalk rows,
as we did
when we were small,
green fronds way over our heads,
as the water trickled down
the dusty rows
on hot summer mornings,
those days when the skies
were always blue,
and the peace
of the land
was all
we knew.
I will wander through
the green pastures,
singing,
and the cows will start
to lumber after me,
clumping downhill
in the loam,
thinking I must be there
to sing them home.
The pig in the paddock
snorffles our table-scraps,
rooting happily in the mud.
We call him Bacon,
which horrifies me,
and puts me off breakfast.
They try to convince me
that rabbit is chicken
at supper,
though I sit, suspicious,
glowering,
in my place.
I never did like eating
anything
that had a face.
Take me back
- take this whole world back -
to times when
I was young,
when the world
and our food
was whole,
when Wall Street didn't
make our food unreal,
and we didn't ingest chemicals
at every meal.
We have come so far
from our grandparents' day,
only to discover
they had
the prescription for living
right,
doing it their way.
