"It isn’t natural for people to keep having sex all the time and never have babies.”
I can’t find that quote on the Internet, but I know that back in the 1980s, when she was having her babies, rock goddess Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders (at least I think it was her) was quoted as saying something like that.
That line kept coming to mind this June as I spent every spare minute with a hoe in my hand, waging war on the weeds in our blueberry field. While I worked, I kept a radio close by, which kept reporting the latest food safety scare. This time it was the attack of the killer tomatoes. Before that it was the fresh spinach from hell. Before that it was revenge of the peanut butter. And there is always the old standby—mad cow disease—that has lately been causing street protests in South Korea.
As I chopped, I kept thinking. Chrissie, as usual, was onto something about sex and babies. And maybe it is equally unnatural for us to keep eating and eating and never actually dig in the dirt. In the natural scheme of things, pleasures come with responsibilities. Sex, sooner or later, brings the burden of child-rearing. And, again if nature takes its course, child-rearing brings the pride and pleasure of children and, if done properly, decades of untold sacrifice.
On both fronts, we’re starting to learn the hard way that when we divorce our pleasures from our responsibilities, we defy nature at our own risk.
Today, we in the United States are more removed from our food supply than our species has ever been. Our food is genetically modified, factory farmed, pre-emptively medicated, industrially processed, hermetically sealed, and shipped thousands of miles—the better to exploit the countries with the cheapest labor and the lowest health and safety standards. By the time it arrives at our table, it is an artificial abstraction—a package containing next to nothing that seemingly comes from nowhere. (Of all our foodstuffs, only seafood is required to label its country of origin.)
With the food chain so complicated (by distance and scale) and concentrated (in the hands of a few giant processors, wholesalers, and retailers), the inevitable errors—human or mechanical—are bound to take on a catastrophic scale.
A couple of our neighbors have small family-owned and -operated dairy farms. If the world made sense, they would supply their milk directly to consumers in our home region. If a bad batch ever slipped through, the damage would travel no further than Louisville, at worst, and the story would be over within a day.
But the world doesn’t make sense. Our neighbors sell their milk to huge national corporations that process it at a few big plants and ship it to retailers all over the country. So it is that one local mistake can, overnight, become a national public health crisis.
CATHOLIC WORKER CO-FOUNDER Peter Maurin used to preach that the foundations of a healthy Christian life were cult (liturgy and prayer), culture (literature and art), and cultivation (agriculture). I used to think that was one of Maurin’s eccentricities, an anachronistic notion rooted in his idealized French peasant childhood. But in the light of today’s globalized madness, Maurin’s medievalism has started making sense. Now my family has a five-acre patch of land on which we’ve planted fruit trees, blueberries, and a slowly expanding vegetable garden.
We don’t kid ourselves that this is an economically rational move, though it should at least pay for itself someday. And if we are ever able to supply healthy fruits and berries to a few people in our tri-county region, it will qualify as a corporal work of mercy. But for now, our digging in the dirt is something more like a spiritual discipline—an extension of our family’s “cult.” It’s a way for us to maintain conscious contact with the natural processes that nourish and sustain us.
The trick is that those natural processes require our active cooperation to produce the balanced and healthy life that is each person’s purpose and birthright. n
Danny Duncan Collum, a Sojourners contributing writer, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, Kentucky.
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