Diamond-Cut Life

Do you prefer cereal for breakfast, toast, or both? I love whole wheat toast from Portland Bakery, while my husband is crazy for oatmeal from Bob’s Red Mill. (Oatmeal is too gloopy for me. Mornings call for a crunching motion, I feel.)

Our dinners often include pasta with delicious things on or around it, or couscous, both made from wheat. Whatever form of them you prefer, grains are fundamentally great. They’ve been nourishing folks like you and me and entire civilizations ever since agriculture got off the ground on our planet about 50,000 years ago.

There’s a problem, though, with how we grow our grains in the U.S. This article in the New York Times by Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson explains it. We grow our grains as annuals with puny little root systems, plowing their fields up each year right after harvest so that the rain then washes the life-giving topsoil away into rivers. We need deep-rooted perennial grains instead that hold the soil ecosystem firmly in place, and bring moisture deep into the earth. The 50 year farm bill that Mr. Jackson and Mr. Berry are introducing to Congress would do this.

A quote from their article: “And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.”

I had the pleasure of talking with Wes Jackson in person last September when he was the keynote speaker for the Muddy Boot Festival here in Portland, Oregon. He was a warm, self-effacingng Midwestern gentleman who enjoyed hearing that my household has for years been reading his quarterly magazine from the Land Institute of Salinas, Kansas. His speech there in the sanctuary of St. Philip Neri won a standing ovation from the sustainability-oriented crowd.

I am not brave, industrious and hard-working enough to be a farmer myself. I’m just a lowly little gardener who manages to pull off idiot-proof summer projects like tomatoes and zucchini. But I know that soil is more valuable than oil. It’s what keeps me and everyone else on the planet alive. And it’s not renewable. We have to conserve and preserve it in the first place.

Living in a city, it’s easy to think of grocery stores as our food source. But they’re not; grocery stores are just way-stations that would collapse if our soil collapses. Our soil is our food source, and the 50 year farm bill needs to be passed to make sure our food source doesn’t collapse.

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