Food for Thought

This inquiry of mine into life on a few acres outside of a metropolitan area has led me to explore places and ideas I didn't know I was going to.

I forget what I've blogged about. I wonder how much I've been thinking about I have communicated and to whom. I feel like I'm starting my sentences in the middle, but worry that I'm repeating myself. Oh well.

Originally, I was under the general impression that organic food was good simply because we weren't polluting our bodies with herbicides and pesticides, I didn't give much thought to the soil. Then reading Scott Chaskey's This Common Ground, I was shocked by thought of 5 acres of farm land being without a single earthworm. Then reading Bromfield, the picture gets a little clearer, and you see how bad farming practices rob the soil of living things (bacteria, worms, etc.) and organic material (stuff that used to be alive) and minerals and nutrients... all which work together to produce healthy plant, animal, and human life.

Bromfield hit upon something in 1944 that others are now only beginning to hit upon (though in a different way) some 60 years later. He connected the degradation of the soil with the degradation of society. His argument was that land that had been robbed of its nutrients and life could not provide adequate nutrition for quality life in the people it fed. Corn that is grown with chemical fertilizers on land robbed of its life does not contain the nutrients and trace elements that corn grown in live, healthy soil has.

He points to families that, through the generations, whether out of ignorance or indifference, farmed their land to death. The original members of the family were healthy, respectable individuals. As the generations passed, the family became poorer, trying in vain to maintain the same productivity from the land that their predecessors attained. In the end, they gave up farming and became migrant workers or moved to the city. The New Deal tried to provide jobs to some of these families by sending them to other parts of the country to work the farms that were still productive. However, after a life of struggle and malnutrition, these workers weren't as productive as those that grew up eating off fertile land.

I can feel the same thing on a smaller scale. In the morning, if I don't eat a proper breakfast, I don't feel so good. I am sluggish and slow, and have a hard time thinking clearly. How much more so for those that have never eaten good quality food in their entire lives?

I remember wandering through a discount grocery store, looking at the products, and wondering how any of this cheap, ultra-processed food could be remotely healthy for a person. And if this is the only food that poorer families can afford to buy, then how are they supposed to have the physical and mental health to truly improve their lives? Isn't it funny that we have to have academics tell us that children need a good breakfast before they go to school in order to learn properly?

Anyway, I was going to mention that this all ties in spiritually as well, but am not going to address that until my next serious blog post... maybe...