Eating is a gateway drug
I failed to take a picture of
us transplanting but I thought
this picture of the chard harvest
was beautiful.
The clouds were mostly innocent today: huge towering snow white thunderheads against the bright blue sky. I felt like I was in an idyllic painting, or one of those inspirational greeting cards. We were planting our 5,850th transplant, our bodies folded over themselves in some farm tweaked version of a yoga pose, discussing our work as identity. You know, the lighter stuff. I recall taking some psychological “test” where the only question was to complete the sentence “I am…” any number of times as they came to your mind. Ostensibly, it is interesting to see what order you put the things that make up your identity; the first thing being the most important factor of your identity to you, etc. If I took that test today, well, I’d probably cheat since I know how it works, but I imagine that even if I didn’t, the word “farmer” would appear somewhere very near the top. When you’re passionate about something, it sort of takes over your whole identity. Thinking along those lines, I wonder if my second answer would “eater.” Because you just can’t work so closely and extensively with veggies without dreaming of dinner. I spend hours doing it. And then I spend more time scouring our cookbook stash or the internet for new recipes using those veggies. Eating is one of the major reasons we got into farming. Eating…the gateway drug. And now, here we are, planting our 5,850th transplant, our bodies folded over themselves in some farm tweaked version of a yoga pose, admitting our addiction to farming as if it were the first step. Hi, my name is Shiloh, and I love to grow food.
