From the Lincoln Journal Star and written by Tim Rinne, Nebraskans for Peace State Coordinator:
After all the fine cooking we just feasted on over the holidays, I’m probably not the only one carrying around some unwanted extra pounds. It’s hard to restrain yourself when the food’s right in front of you, smelling and looking heavenly, just crying to be sampled.
And yet, with all these calories having gone straight to my waistline, there’s something about this annual rite of indulgence that more and more leaves me mystified.
How is it we so utterly relish the food but evince such little regard for the farm? (Because you can’t have the one without the other.)
Yet that’s what we do. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, I oftentimes stuffed myself so much I felt bloated, but couldn’t have told you where a single one of those calories came from.
We never think about the farm being the source of our food. We city dwellers, pulling up at the drive-thru or pushing our carts down the grocery aisle, are so barricaded from the process of food production that the closest most of us ever get to a farm anymore is driving past one on I-80. We prefer not to think about our grains, vegetables, nuts and fruits having grown in dirt or that our meat came from animals that pee, poop and bleed. We like our food attractively packaged, without any of the actual backstory.
The corn and soybean operations we see outside our car window, though, don’t give an accurate picture of where all that food we eat originates.