Food Course: Day 5

Our fifth day focussed on the connections between people, food and land. We broke our fast with challah bread and helped prepare the Seder meal.

Our discussions focussed on the gift of the promised land to the Israelites, a restoration of their relationship with God and the land. This was linked with the Passover and jubilee festivals, inaugurated in the Old Testament. We also discussed the implications of the new covenant in the New Testament and the heralding of God's kingdom on earth.

These discussions about people's broken relationships with the land led to a conversation about western farming practices, and how changes in the 1920s and 1930s (particularly in the US) advocated farmers (and farm land) as producers, rather than the established concept of farmers as nurturers of the land. We talked about bioregionalism, and the emergence of the conservation and environmental movements.

Our reading included excerpts from a couple of essays by Wendell Berry, one of Loren's favourite authors and poets. The quote I chose is from Berry's first chapter of "The Unsettling of America", page 12:
"But is work something that we have a right to escape? And can we escape it with impunity? We are probably the first entire people ever to think so. All the ancient wisdom that has come down to us counsels otherwise. It tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis—only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy."