The random farmers near the roadside make me wonder. They make my mouth water because I came from a family where you went outside to pick your supper, washed it and then put it on the table. But these berry, egg and vegetable offerings next to commercial centres also make me uneasy - they shouldn't have to sit in deserted parking lots all day to get their produce to people. When farmers aren't in the grocery store, and aren't at the Farm Market, something is wrong.
I don't say this to upset any of the fine people on the Farm Market Board of Directors - they've worked hard to get a building and keep things going during times when food wasn't the blockbuster issue it seems to have become lately. But we desperately need to have fresh local food at our Farm Market - not just for farmers, but for our bodies (not to mention the body politic).
But all this talk of food and the issues that surround it - corporate control of meat and grain production, obesity and diabetes, the death of cooking and the family meal, the separation that most people have from their food producers - really makes me think about the body and how uncared for it is nowadays.
For example: we're continually blasted with images and exhortations to buy food that is terrible for our bodies and for the planet. And we're told it's a "treat." No, it's not. My mother's rasberry pie or string beans from the garden or real strawberries or a homemade cookie is a treat.
We don't send kids outside to exercise and run around anymore, we don't go out dancing with our friends and spouses, we don't walk anywhere and we wonder why our ten year olds look sickly, our twenty year olds have back pain and everyone is depressed. It's because we don't give proper consideration to our bodies anymore. Using the phrase "my body" in most social situations will immediately make people suspect you are a wacko of some kind. Too bad.
When I think back to my childhood, most of my good memories have something to do with my body: the smell of working men in my family coming in for supper (sawdust, hay and motor oil), the taste of food picked off the plant and eaten (carrots rinsed with the garden hose and devoured), long uphill bike rides and flying downhill on the other side, swims in the brook and lake, the homecooking of numerous aunts, mothers and grandmothers, mud pies, sandboxes, swing sets, sunsets, horses, long stories after supper.
These are treats and not of the high-minded philosophical variety. They are the things that form culture, keep us civilized and make us truly human. I feel sad that we've lost the body. I think the mind can be a terrible tyrant if it runs the show all the time. A mind can be convinced of anything if you put the right message on 'repeat.' The body is an ecosystem with its own internal balance. When the environment of the body is off-kilter, it colours everything we see, hear, taste, touch, feel and think.
Until we make peace with our bodies, we will never solve our overconsumption problems. As goes the body, so goes the nation, perhaps....
2 comments:
Thank You for this post....My father is a farmer...and I have grown up in pastures, corn fields, and on the backs of horses....I try with every grain in my body to teach this culture to my children. (take them fishing and swimming rather then throw $ at Carneys...have them pick cucumbers for quarters) It is tho increasingly harder to instill in them the importance if caring for ourselves in a realistic and healthy way. In the next few weeks I will teach not only myself, but my two growing boys that a womans body knows how to birth, just as it knows how to be a mother...and will do this at home....and so your interpretation of nurturing our bodies...spoke to me in many ways...thanks!
The older I get the more I realize less is really more. I think raising gentle men and courageous women are some of the most important things we can do to heal the world we live in.
I hope your home birth is peaceful and draws your family members into a greater appreciation for the strength of the human body. We all owe our lives to the bodies of others, either our parents or the people who work everyday to feed us. Pretty amazing when you really think about it.
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