Autumn Abundance is strong
We’ve still got tomatoes and peppers and basil right to the end. I can’t believe it. The big squash is coming this week so you can pick your favorite from the pile.
If you have market bucks left to spend, it would be great to do so at this market. Otherwise you are welcome to come to the Farm Store any Friday or Saturday through 2025. They will expire at the new year.
“Eating is an agricultural act.” – Wendell Berry.
This quote is the poster child for the sustainable, slow food, farm to table movement. For good reason, too. It’s concise and honest. Eating really is an agricultural act. In college, while studying sustainable agriculture, Isabel heard this a lot, but it wasn’t until recently that she was motivated to read the entire piece. Well, it came from Wendell Berry’s The Pleasures of Eating. We highly recommend you read it in its entirety. This paragraph stood out to me the most:
“Food in the Mind of the Eater: When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.”
He goes on to say that this ‘cultural amnesia’ is crucial for the food industry to keep operating in its unethical, highly efficient, low cost methods. The business of major food corporations is “to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.” We are being sold the very thing that is crucial to our survival. We encourage all of you to be active consumers. Lean in, be involved in food production in some way, make food for one another, and don’t give up on local food because of the change in season! There is still so much abundance on the farm during fall and winter.
