Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture

7. Reclaiming the Sacred in Food and Farming

81 Reclaiming the Sacred in Food and Farming Farming is fundamentally biological. The essence of agriculture is the living process of photosynthesis—the collection , conversion, and storage of solar energy. All living things are sustained by other living things. If life is sacred, then the food and farms that sustain life must be sacred as well. In fact, throughout nearly all of human history, both food and farming were considered sacred. Farmers prayed for rain, for protection from pestilence, and for bountiful harvests. People gave thanks to God for their “daily bread,” as well as for harvests at annual times of thanksgiving. For some, farming and food are still sacred . But for many others, farming has become just another business and food just something else to buy. Those who still treat food and farming as something sacred tend to be labeled as old-fashioned, strange, radical, or naive. However, the time to reclaim the sacred in food and farming may be at hand. The trends that have desacralized food and farming may have run, even overrun, their course. Today, there is growing skepticism concerning the claim that more stuff, be it larger houses, fancier cars, more clothes, or more food, will make us more happy or more satisfied with life. There is growing evidence that when we took out the sacred we took out the substance and left our lives shallow and empty. The old question “How can I get more stuff?” is being replaced with a new question, “How can I find a better life?” The answer to the new question, at least in part, is that we must reclaim the sacred in our lives. But how can we reclaim the sacred, and how will it change the ways we farm and live? These questions will be addressed, but first we need to under7 82 New Hope stand why we took out the sacred in the first place and why we now need to put it back in. Until some four hundred years ago, nearly everything in life was considered spiritual or sacred. Religious scholars were the primary source of learning and knowledge in the so-called civilized world of that time. Kings, chiefs, clan leaders—the people who others looked to for wisdom—were assumed to have special divine or spiritual powers. It was only during the seventeenth century that the spiritual nature of the world became seriously challenged. Among the most notable challengers was the Frenchman Rene Descartes, who proposed the “spirit versus matter” dualism. “The Cartesian division allowed scientists to treat matter as nonliving, or dead, and completely separate from themselves, to see the material world as a multitude of different nonliving objects assembled into a huge machine.”1 Sir Isaac Newton also held this mechanistic view of the universe and shaped it into the foundation for classical physics. Over time, the mechanistic model was expanded to include the living as well as the nonliving. Plants, animals, and even people were increasingly viewed as complex mechanisms with many interrelated yet separable parts, in spite of the emergence of quantum physics, which challenges the old mechanistic worldview. Reductionism, which attempts to explain all biological processes as purely chemical and mechanical processes, now dominates the applied biological sciences from agriculture to medicine. The spiritual realm, to the extent it is considered at all, is assumed to be in the fundamental nature of things, in the unchanging relationships that scientists seek to discover. There is no active spiritual aspect of life in science, only the passive possibility that spirituality was somehow involved in the initial creation of the universe we are now exploring. The more we understood about the working of the universe, the less we needed to understand about the nature of God. The more we knew, the less we needed to believe. As we expanded the realm Reclaiming the Sacred 83 of the factual, we reduced the realm of the spiritual until it became trivial, at least in matters of science. This shift in scientific thinking has been a shift from a science of understanding to a science of manipulation.2 Over time, the goal of science shifted from increasing wisdom to increasing power. We wanted not only to understand the universe but also to dominate it. The purpose of science became to enhance our ability to influence, direct, and control. Farming was one of the last strongholds for the sacred in...