The Way of Gratitude by Galen Guengerich

Author:Galen Guengerich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

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EACH OF US as human beings needs to take personally the sources of our food—to know firsthand what the earth and its creatures give for our survival and our physical health. We begin by acknowledging the often-brutal calculus of life: Living things must consume other living things in order to survive. That’s the way life happens on this particular planet, in this particular cosmos.

Our culture has given us significant latitude in choosing our individual ways of life, especially when it comes to what we eat and drink. Enormous industries have developed—farming, processing, marketing, and advertising, among others—in order to convince us to eat in a particular way. These industries keep us far removed, often intentionally, from our food at its source. If we knew exactly where food comes from and how it gets to us, we may well end up eating differently than we do.

I have an advantage in this respect. Having grown up on a farm, I know where food comes from and how it gets from farm to table. My dad worked in a slaughterhouse for a short period of time when I was a boy, so I’ve seen firsthand what happens there too.

In addition, I used to go fishing in my younger days—for flounder when we were living in Delaware and for catfish and bass when we were living in Arkansas. My fondest memories of time spent with my dad and his father came while flounder fishing on the Chesapeake Bay. We’d rent a small boat on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake and head out for the day. I still remember the thrill of hooking flounder and reeling them in. No matter the size, the flounder always felt like “a tremendous fish,” as Elizabeth Bishop says in one of her poems.

One reason the flounder felt tremendous has to do with simple fluid dynamics. For its weight, a flounder presents a large amount of surface area. When its flat and rounded body—a flounder looks something like a puffy pancake—is turned sideways to resist being pulled through the water, it feels like a much larger fish. The other reason it felt tremendous, at least to me, was that the flounder was instinctively fighting against the pull of the line—fighting for its life. In my case, the flounder would typically lose.

For the most part, the various food-related industries operating today have little interest in consumers knowing exactly where food comes from and how it ends up in the grocery store or on the table. With rare exceptions their goal is to make a profit by selling us more food, often food that’s been highly processed.

In response for all we have been given, we can lighten the load in return. For example, food and beverages that have been processed and packaged exact a much heavier toll on the earth, its creatures, and its people than food and beverages that come to us in more or less their original form.

With water, the toll is already high and continues to climb higher.

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