Putting a trend to the test

To those who are in tune with current trends in our culture, it’s not much of a surprise to hear that we are interested in local and organic food, in making things from scratch, and in all manner of time-sucking interests and practices that were, for the most part, not taught to us when we were children. Examples are many and readily available: the surge of interest in “artisanal” ice cream, the addition of the nearly meaningless term “natural” on food containers, and the commonality of the reusable shopping bag.

Although I’ve been distinctly inclined to the from-scratch mentality since I started shopping for my own groceries as a sophomore in college, part of me has hesitated to fully throw myself into my relatively new interest in gardening because I fear that I am being unduly influenced by a trend. Let’s face it: I have enough trouble embracing fashion fads, which are of relatively low cost in money or time. So putting oodles of time and money and heart into something that’s going to pass soon, which I’ll look back on with pity for my impressionability, is not something I want to do.

Nonetheless, at each new step of involvement in this vein of things, I discover in myself new passion, the kind of which I had nearly thought myself incapable. Yet, I am finding that I hold convictions of absolute good and bad, beneficial and harmful, when it comes to the mainstream modern lifestyle, especially as it pertains to food and land production. I’m not usually a super-opinionated person, so this has been interesting. But then, everything about this complex of living holistically (gardening for food, food from scratch, community and physical health in it all) keeps on making sense.

About a month ago, I decided to resign myself to the fact that I really care about this stuff and start truly learning about it—not just in the current, trendy practices, but also in its history and deeper ramifications on our society. To begin my education, I turned to Wendell Berry, a fellow completely unknown to me just months ago. I discovered him not in the form of his many zealous essays, but in a thin tome of poetry called Sabbaths, which are the reflections of Mr. Berry as a farmer, thinker, and writer, on Sabbath days over the course of several years. I was captivated by these poems because they reflected the things that I love about nature, wild and tamed.

Poems are a bit ethereal, though, and so after finishing the volume, I ordered the first book of essays Mr. Berry wrote about agriculture, entitled The Unsettling of America. Thus far (I’m about half-way through it), the book focuses largely on the shifts in agricultural practices and policies in the first three quarters of the twentieth century (it was published in 1977). Reading this book has been a bit uncanny; it’s one of those rare scenarios where you read something and you find that it at once articulates beliefs you hold but have never expressed, and fills in the gaps of your own knowledge of the causes and effects of these beliefs.

Some friends and me have been learning, over the summer, about the power of questions. “Questions,” said my friend Linnea, “are creative.” We find that, as we learn to look carefully at our lives and our culture, we can ask how and why things are as they are. Why did we grow up in suburban homes, eating (in my case) meals out of boxes and bags? How did farming become so big-business? What are the effects of that on our everyday lives, the way we live, our health? Have these things been beneficial to us?

It’s a scary thing to question, to make a habit of questioning. I’m only beginning to learn. And yet it has beautiful gifts to offer. When I question, I find out what I believe, what I know, and what I don’t know. Laying down the prideful assumption that I know it all or even can discover all, I learn to see things that before were invisible to me. I also become more comfortable with mystery. Guided by questions, life can be more intentional, and hence more impacting, because as questions are raised, and answers are found or attempted, new paths can be forged into uncharted territory.

So it is that I’m beginning to ask questions about land, food, health, and communities. Maybe it’s the asking of the questions that can distinguish a fad-follower from a true believer.