a sermon preached by David Breeden at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, March 30, 2008
Genesis 3:17: “Cursed is the ground because of you.”
One.
The title of this sermon comes from an old saying, “Don’t mind the mules, just load the wagon.” The saying cuts two ways. The metaphorical meaning is an injunction to have faith—do your part of the job, and other parts will take care of themselves. The saying also reveals an attitude about living things, however, an attitude reflected too often when it comes to living things other than ourselves. I want to consider today how it is we can mind the mules and better respect our connection to the web of life that sustains us.
I grew up on my family farm in the southern part of Illinois. When I walk out the front door of my parents’ house today, I’m looking straight east. When I was a kid looking out that door, there was a farm house southeast of me; a farmhouse southwest; a farmhouse to the west, a farmhouse to the northwest, and a farmhouse to the northeast, all these roughly a half-mile distant. A little before my time, there had been a school, a church, and a small store, all within easy walking distance. Today, only my parents’ house remains. I can see one other farmhouse, about two miles away, due to clearing of woodland for the purpose of farming efficiency. Most days, only the US mail carrier goes down the road in front of my parents’ house.
Going a little further back in time, there’s a spring a few hundred yards from my parents’ house that at one time was the focus of a Shawnee Indian village. They were a semi-nomadic people who spent the winter months encamped at the spring. They were exterminated in the 1830s. My family arrived in the 1840s and bought the land from the US government for $2.40 cents an acre. My great-great great-great grandparents, European immigrants, are buried a mile from the house, on what once was part of the farm.
Those immigrants established a system of farming that continued until I left for college, in the late 1970s. They raised horses, mules, donkeys, cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, chickens, and geese. In terms of crops, they raised corn, and wheat, and sorghum and various grasses for pasture and hay. They raised apples, grapes, and all the other fruits and vegetables they ate. There were walnut and hickory trees in the yard. There were berries in the fence rows and woods. Except for the commodities of cloth and steel, and some manufactured items such as dishes, it was a closed, self-sustaining system.
Now the land produces corn four out of five years and soybeans one out of five. And in a half-mile square that once was a community, now only my parents live. And they won’t be living there much longer. . .
Now, I’m not trying to paint a picture of the good old days. After all, the land was stolen to begin with. The US government wasn’t much concerned with what happened to the land out there in the recently-cleared Indian country, since there was plenty of land left to steal from the native peoples. Furthermore, the southern Midwest looks a lot like northern Europe, so the farmers who settled there stuck to what they knew. The southern Midwest ISN’T northern Europe, however, and thanks to extraordinarily destructive farming practices we have managed to lose over half of the topsoil down the Mississippi River valley due to bad farming practices. Over half of the best soil in the world merely washed down the river.
There was nothing about it that was a golden age. And I’m nostalgic about the good old days.
I don’t like carrying water from the well out back. I don’t like going to an outhouse at 4am in the snow. I don’t like the wasps that always seem to build nests in the outhouse in summer. I don’t like living in close proximity to snakes. I don’t like the suffering of animals. (Those of you who grew up on farms know that it’s the kid’s job to kill the chickens, because it takes some energy to catch ‘em.) I really don’t like killing chickens. Or hogs or cows. I don’t even like hunting. I hate the smell of hot blood. As my grandmother would say, I turned up in the wrong turnip patch.
The fact is, in the 1970s I could see the handwriting on the wall. Either I would have to become an industrial farmer, or I would have to insist on a type of “primitive” farming of the type Wendell Berry pursued that I frankly didn’t have the imagination to pursue. I wanted a job with air conditioning. So, I left the farm. And I broke a chain of agricultural life that goes all the way back to whenever it was human beings began to farm. And in many ways I regret that, because, despite the snakes and the blood, there’s nothing like freeing the hooves of a newborn colt from its mother; there’s nothing like helping a newborn calf struggling to its feet; there’s nothing like watching a newborn lamb struggle to find its voice and bleat for the first time. There is nothing like the wise stare of an old sheep. There is nothing like the power of a good mule. We human beings evolved with the animals we kept, and something is lost when that bond is broken. And there is something extraordinarily sad about a society that for the most part doesn’t know how to feed itself; a society that doesn’t know where its food comes from.
And our society does not know where its food comes from nor the cost of that food.
Mad Cow Disease. E coli. Salmonella. Botulism. No records to tell us where meat comes from or where it goes (who does THAT protect?). Milk and wheat and peanuts and fecal matter in the wrong packages. Sometime when you have nothing better to do, go to “fda.gov” and spend fifteen minutes reading about our food supply. Only major recalls make the news—recalls are constant. And then reflect that 80% of our seafood, 45% of our fruit, and 17% of our fresh vegetables are imported, and that the FDA itself reports that it inspects only one percent of food imports.
(http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2007-03-18-food-safety-usat_N.htm)
We North Americans don’t know where our food comes from; and neither does our government.
Then reflect, if you aren’t too depressed, on our total dependence on fossil fuel to produce our food, to package our food, and to transport our food.
Fact is the way we produce our food has caused irreversible environmental damage; has created an insupportable food chain; and destroyed a way of life. And the fact it, it doesn’t have to be that way. . .
Two.
Let’s look at just once cause of this problem.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the law that provided most US workers with the right to collective bargaining, excluded domestic workers and agricultural workers, and by implication small farmers. This was an instance of real politick for the Roosevelt administration, since it needed to keep southern, plantation-owning Democrats in the coalition. But the compromise had a couple of disastrous consequences.
First, since a sizable number of African Americans were domestic servants, agricultural laborers, or small farmers, the compromise postponed the civil rights movement for another generation. It also insured the suffering of millions of migrant workers to this day, despite the best efforts of people like Caesar Chavez.
Second, it insured that farm workers and small farmers would have no voice in government policy concerning agriculture. The consequences of THAT killed the family farm, damaged the environment, and is now killing the US population with bad food laced with corn derivatives. The farm subsidies that made a real difference in the problem of over-production during the Depression Era turned into guarantees of profitability for factory farming after the Second World War, due to the political power of large farmers and corporations.
Western European farmers, on the other hand, and now all farmers in the European Union, have had the right to collective bargaining. This means that small farms, with free range animals, are the norm rather than the exception in most EU nations, though the World Trade Organization has begun to damage this system, with factory farming of the US type spreading in Poland, the Czech Republic, and some other parts of Eastern Europe. The WTO requires each nation to pass its own agricultural regulations, and it further requires that, within certain limits, nations not ban imports from other nations based on agricultural practices.
This is one of the reasons we see the world’s peasant farmers standing in the streets alongside bomb-throwing anarchists at WTO meetings.
The kind of farming I learned as a child is pretty well gone now, in this country and in much of the world. The fact is, my children don’t have the connection to the land that I feel. For them, the farm is mostly an inconvenience, not a way of life. It is almost inconceivable today to reflect that my grandmother was not only born, gave birth to her own children, and died in the same house, but also in the same room. And the same bed! On the one hand, who wants that kind of stasis? On the other hand there is grandeur to knowing where the sun will rise each day of each season; of living close to the bones of your ancestors.
What does the farm mean to me now? I’m not sure myself. Forget stocks and bonds: I can sell the farm and make more profit simply putting the money in a savings account. There is no dark conspiracy in what happened to the American family farm; it was simply greed coupled with bad government policy coupled with a bubble in national wealth after the Second World War.
And we can’t go back. As I’ve pointed out, there’s no golden age to go back to. Yet we can go forward in a different way. A way of respect.
I vividly remember the last time I saw my grandfather. He was sitting on his front porch, an old scraggly chicken resting between his feet. My grandfather rubbed the chicken’s head with his cane. He respected living things—because they kept him alive. He minded the mules; and he taught me to do that. I learned that when I had to do harm or kill I should do it without hesitation because that is the kindest, quickest way. I learned to see the interdependent web and to live in it as lightly as I could.
Mules aren’t really stubborn, you know. We humans anthropomorphize animals rather than actually seeing them. A horse is a flight animal; horses evolved on the open plains and survived by running away. Mules take after the donkey side of their families. Donkeys evolved in the mountains. They couldn’t run—that would have meant falling down a mountain. Instead they learned to stop and think and react carefully. We do well to mind the mules because, as my grandparents knew, mules are very wise after their fashion. . .
And, going forward, we can be wise as well. Just as donkeys evolved to be careful, we human beings evolved to cooperate with each other; to care for the earth and the animals that take care of us; to think ahead about coming dangers. There are options out there, if we will be wise.
We CAN stop factory faming in this nation. EVERY aspect of farming is controlled by federal law. Help change those laws to favor small, environmentally sustainable, farms. Join FarmSanctuary.org.
We CAN support organic farming. It’s simple: buy organic. Organic food is not necessarily healthier for people, but it is very difficult to follow the factory farming model in organic farming, so organics are better for the environment. Buy organic.
Third, become that weird new
word in our language, a “localvore,” that is, a person who gets most of your
calories from the local farm economy.
Why do that? Less waste of fossil fuels in
transportation. Less waste in terms of packaging. And it supports local farmers
so that perhaps the small, family farm can come back, not as it was, but in a
new way. As a localvore, you can ask questions, and, believe me, a farmer is
not shocked or embarrassed if you ask how the chicken or the hog met its end;
it’s all in a day’s work on a farm. Buying from farmers you know keeps
everybody honest, so that we know who is and who is not minding the mules,
respecting the interdependent web of life, and paying attention to the wisdom
of the earth.
Admittedly, most of our sisters and brothers on this planet and in this nation can’t afford to choose where their lettuce or their eggs come from. They’re lucky to afford food at all. It is up to those with a little more comfort to see the dangers ahead. It’s up to us to educate, legislate, and do what’s right.
Three.
I’m not a scientist, and I don’t play one behind the pulpit. I don’t know if cloning and genetic modification are good or bad things. I DO know that respect for animals and plants is essential to good health and good stewardship of our resources. Cloning and genetic modification, seems to me, just don’t lend themselves to respect for living things.
What I DO know is that when it come to agriculture, no magic occurs: everything we eat is part of the soil and the sun. There is no free lunch. When we eat, we consume life, and the life we consume becomes part of us. We consume plants and animals. . . and the labor of the human beings who raised the plants and animals, processed the plants and animals, hauled the plants and animals, and served the plants and animals to us.
There’s nothing magic about our food, no matter the wonders of the advertising or the packaging. Food is about suffering. And we’re lucky to get what we’ve got. That’s why my family—like so many farmers and hunters through time—has always prayed fervently before meals: farmers know the cost of food.
And that’s why food justice is such a difficult thing to pin down: what we eat next can seem like a small thing; yet it is everything. Though economies of scale and the welter of advertising obscure the reality, eating is a sacrificial act; a holy act: for us to eat, die even when we are vegetarian, things suffer and die.
As an old farmer who has struggled too many hours in the sun; who has looked in the eyes of too many dying animals, I ask you to think about eating as a religious act. Consider praying an old Buddhist prayer that my teacher, the poet Allen Ginsberg, taught me:
We take this food
The labor of many people,
The suffering of many forms of life.
We wish to be worthy.
Steve Ettlinger, in an entertaining book called Twinkie, Deconstructed, goes looking for the sources of those mysterious ingredients in Twinkies, things like wheat. . .well. . .but also chlorine and cellulose gum and yellow dye number five. What Ettlinger discovers is that some of it grows in a field; some of it is mined from the ground, much of it is processed in factories whose processes are top secret. Yet, ultimately, even a Twinkie comes from the earth.
Our food—even Twinkies—comes from an interdependent web that stretches from earth to sun, from next fall’s harvest to the human past, from wherever we live to wherever the ingredients of our next meal come from. Food, whatever our supposed level of civilization, whatever our personal remoteness from its production, wraps our animal selves into the web of life, like it or not. Let’s embrace that tie; lets respect life in it immense variety; let’s be true to our evolutionary potential. It’s up to us to mind the mules, so that we all can get there in the wagon.
So may it be.
Sources:
Michael Pollen, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Steve Ettlinger, Twinkie, Deconstructed. New York: Hudson Street Press, 2007.
Missouri Rural Crisis Center
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