Food for Thought: Some Thoughts about Food

On Monday, I overheard on BBC Radio 4's Food Programme a few startling words in relationship to small-holding farming in West Virginia: "more noble," "elegant," and "creation stewardship". (If you want a listen, there's a cordial debate between the farmer, Joel Salatin, and his ideological opposite, Dennis Avery, former agricultural analyst for the US State Department and small-holder himself.) So much of self-proclaimed evangelical Salatin's vocabulary regarding his farming enterprise seemed flavored by Aristotelian ethics, that we couldn't help but check him out further. "No Bar Code" is an article by Michael Pollan (very much in sympathy with Salatin), while "Dining Dilemmas" is a review of Pollan's book on Books and Culture. We're interested in trying to collect more informed points of view from the different sides as well, but we both are really struck by the notion of paying attention to a chicken's "chicken-ness" and crafting an ecosystem as well as an economic system that pays attention to the nature not only of animals and plants, but their human consumers. All very glowingly idealistic -- can it still feed the world? Avery doesn't think so (and for credible reasons), but Salatin is optimistic. Is there any way to balance these two together?

On a related front, here's a healthy reminder by my new favorite journalist Agnieszka Tennant not to get blindingly self-righteous about the relationship between our purchasing and our virtue!

The theme here - thinking about the relationships between what we eat, where it came from, how we purchase it and prepare it, and cultivating virtue and creative stewardship of the earth.