In search of nourishment

I’m sure my forebears would find it amusing that practices carried on for basic survival for thousands of years have become exotic accomplishments slated to allotted leisure time for many of us in the 21st century. When our neighbors told us they were going on vacation for a couple of weeks and for us to help ourselves to their garden, I was more excited than if they’d presented me with a gift card to a spa. Why does eating food you have yourself pulled from the vine, that you have carefully cleaned and prepared, taste so much better than anything you can buy in the supermarket, even from the high priced organic produce aisles? And why should this have become such a bygone activity? To plant and harvest your own food, to nourish your body through the work of your manicured hands, the sweat on your well coiffed brow? Though in my youth I picked apples from the trees in our yard and tomatoes from the fields where I rode my bike and the generosity of the earth was pervasive and apparent, I have lived most of my adult life oblivious to the fact that the food that sustains me has been culled from the earth, the earth buried so far beneath our asphalt streets and steel high rises we can no longer feel it under feet or detect its fecund scent. The food we eat arrives from factories in sterile boxes and plastic wrap, symmetrical, scentless, spotless, from who knows where or what. But always dirt free.

We came from the earth and to the earth we will return. When we fully succumb to a Jetson’s-like existence, disconnected completely from our relationship to the land, to the source of our sustenance, what will have been gained and what will have been lost? Having now left my concrete existence behind, I hope to eventually find out.