BIRDSEED: October 2009

"But the poet's task, Kafka says, is to lead the isolated human being into the infinite life, the contingent into the lawful. What streams out of Mimnermos's suns are the laws that attach us to all luminous things. Of which the first is time.

Although he scarcely uses the word, everything in his verse bristles with it. Time goes whorling through landscapes and human lives bent on its agenda, endlessly making an end of things. You have seen this vibration of time in van Gogh, moving inside color energy. It moves in circles (not lines) that expand with a kind of biological inevitability, like Mimnermos's recurrent metaphor of the youth of humans as a flowering plant or fruit. These plants grow as the light does, for their life is one long day 'knowing neither good nor evil (fr.10) until the sun slips over the rim and everything goes dark. He does not use the words for dark, but substitutes events: death, old age, poverty, blind eyes, empty rooms, vacated mind. It is as if the darkness invents these evils, which arrive for no reason except the light has gone. When you pass from sun to shadow in his poems, you can feel the difference run down the back of your skull like cold water. 'And immediately then to die is better than life.' (fr.2)."

Anne Carson, Plainwater

while driving across the united states, i felt something happening to my feeling of disunity and disconnect as an american. with every person we encountered, whether right, left or in between, in the south, the center, the wild west, and the northwest, i felt my cynicism dissipate. which is, needless to say, confounding, in the sense that i spent most of my late teens deeply passionate about change, and then allowed myself to become increasingly apathetic about the future of the nation. but as we traveled down south, through pennsylvania and the virginias, north carolina, west into tennessee and arkansas and up into missouri, through nebraska, iowa, south dakota, wyoming, montana, idaho, washington, and oregon, i was given a panoramic glance at the glorious and diverse landscape of this country; furthermore, i was given a renewed sense of responsibility and hope. the united states is worth saving, and it is worth transforming.

corruption & greed run the united states, no doubt about it. the government is a hulking mass of conniving megalomaniacs. the people in charge have been pitting citizens against each other for decades in an attempt to increase their already enormous power: women against men, men against women, the middle-class against the working class, the working class against communities of color, communities of color against newly immigrated workers, the straight against the queer, the homemaker against the homeless. we are taught to believe that we deserve what we have (refusing to acknowledge circumstances of privilege and inequality) and that we must protect it, guns up, knives out.
but there are still ways to stand up to all of that ugliness, and one way we can do it is by realizing our shared struggles. we all have the right to clean, safe food. we all need to eat. this becomes all the more relevant in the midst of the maddening health care debate: if everyone, regardless of socioeconomic situation, had access to non-genetically modified, pesticide-free, sustainably grown fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains, perhaps we could be more proactive about preventing health problems. the sicker we are, the less energy we have to stand up for ourselves, to point out a problem, to make a ruckus. the more dependent we are on an unstable, endangered food source, the more likely we are to bow our heads and follow the herd to slaughter.
parts of this country are underfed; other parts over overfed and malnourished. it costs more money to purchase whole foods for a family meal than it does to buy a few microwaveable tv dinners, and when millions of people are facing down the barrel of impending bills, mortgages, college loans, job losses, and foreclosures, who could blame the folks who are forced to be thrifty at the grocery store?

the food economy represents everything that is wrong with our nation. and the organics movement is often accused of being exclusive, elitist, and unsustainable. well, there certainly is something wrong with a (otherwise progressive, positive) food movement that is inaccessible to the majority of the population. it doesn't make sense. it is an injustice, and an injustice to one is an injustice to all.
the point being: the big guys at the top are hellbent on dividing in order to conquer, and they do this through the subtle, drawn out dismantling of communities. they shamelessly stoke the fire of distrust, aggression, envy, and capitalist arrogance.
one way to revolt is to take food into the peoples' hands. no more lawns. there are 30 million acres of lawn in the continental united states alone. these lawns require a ridiculous amount of water and an even more ridiculous expenditure of human labor - for nothing but aesthetic value. don't grow anything you can't eat, except maybe flowers, and there are plenty of edible varieties.
instead: urban gardens. community gardens. fruit trees in vacant lots, tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers on parking medians, rooftop farms, backyard permaculture sanctuaries. chard, kale, and lettuce in the pots on your patio. imagine melons, beans, and corn flourishing on hospital rooftops, apple trees and blackberry bushes on elementary school playgrounds.
organic, sustainably grown food from holland might taste good (though it isn't likely after thousands of miles of travel), but it loses its sustainability value in transit. closer is usually better, for you, for the grower, and for the earth.
support local farmers. become one! give your food away. share. bake your own bread, make your own cheese, can, jam, preserve, raise chickens. these are my aspirations, anyway.
support farmworkers' rights. respect the soil. respect the complex ecosystems our eyes cannot detect and our minds cannot fathom. land stewardship, whether 'land' translates into forty acres or four square feet, is one of the most viable, beautiful ways we can break out of the american mold of consumerism, wastefulness, oppression, and inequality.

food politics/economics/history reading list:

the world is not for sale - jose bove

food's frontier - richard manning

the essential agrarian reader

an organizer's tale - cesar chavez

permaculture: principles & pathways beyond sustainability - david holmgren

the urban homestead - coyne & knutzen

the one straw revolution - masanobu fukuoka

farm city - novella carpenter

also: visit thegreenhorns.net (the website for a Hudson River Valley-based organization that recruits, supports and assists young farmers) & watch the trailer for The Greenhorns documentary.