American Harvest by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Author:Marie Mutsuki Mockett [Mockett, Marie Mutsuki]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-64445-116-8
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2020-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Eric’s son Winston once sent me an email asking if in the city, babies play with cups and bibs emblazoned with taxis and skyscrapers; he had noticed that his soon-to-be-born child had received mostly farm-themed items at the baby shower. No, I wrote back. Even in the city, the early years are partly spent identifying the names and sounds of farm animals, even though most children born in the city aren’t going to go to a farm except, perhaps, on a school trip or yearly pilgrimage to pick a pumpkin.

“Oh, well, that’s good,” he said with genuine surprise. “I’m glad they like farmers.”

When my son was born, in 2009, I and the other mothers in my group sang “Old MacDonald” and mooed and neighed and baahed day after day. Many of my son’s early-childhood books were about animals, and I took him to the Central Park petting zoo to see the sheep and alpacas, even though these animals had nothing to do with our daily city life—or with elevators, subways, and escalators.

In those days I pureed organic peas and paid extra for eggs from grass-fed “happy chickens.” In my mind, purity, childhood, and food were all wrapped up together and set to a soundtrack of songs involving animals. Animals and the barnyard seemed connected with childhood. My son was new to the world, and for a time everything he did would be the first time he had done anything. I wanted each introduction to be gentle. Baby sheep. Soft wool. Chemical-free. Organic and from the farm the way the farm was meant to be, which was something I was sure I knew.

In her book on childhood vaccination, Eula Biss writes: “One of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word natural. This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What natural has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is pure and safe and benign. But the use of natural as a synonym for good is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.” We do not live in shalom.

My own parents grew a lot of our food in our garden in California. I couldn’t do this in New York. What I could do was control what I bought, and so I did.

As Pastor Jeff talks of shalom and the desire we all have to go there, I wonder if he means that we are always trying to go back to the place where we were friends with animals, where everything was new and nothing terrible had yet happened. All of us are trying to do this. I wonder if this is something we are asking food to do—to take us back to shalom, and if GMOs and famers’ use of science strikes us as so unnatural that it disrupts what we want our food to be. Maybe Christians worry about this kind of thing because it is Jesus who will take them to shalom, and not the act of eating.

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