In the beginning was a garden.

Whether we consult religious myths or natural sciences, we can trace the roots of our species to complex ecosystems of biological life pouring forth in generative relationships within the web of existence.

Humans, like all other life-forms, once participated in these ecosystems according to the constraints of their environments; we found a way to occupy our ecological niche, to survive, and to thrive. Our organisms developed specialized capacities: human consciousness, the capacity for speech and language, complex emotional worlds, an insatiable craving for meaning, opposable thumbs. These (and many other) qualities of our organisms combined to give us unique competitive advantages in our ecosystem.

Sadly, neither our Father who art in Heaven nor the evolutionary processes of this world did much to effectively limit the boundaries of our greed. While we have tremendous capacity for wisdom, compassion, and empathy, it is outmatched by our greed. We have been given great power, but lack the responsibility to use it well.

It seems that power has its own gravitational pull, consolidating more power with the already powerful, granting increased decision-making ability to those most motivated by greed. This power stratification has, over and over throughout history, given rise to dominant systems that expand and exploit and consume until they have destroyed their supporting ecosystems (both natural and cultural) and collapse under their own weight.

Then, and only then, do these systems cease their relentless consumption.

 

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This is the state of our species today.

No longer able or willing to consider ourselves one of the organisms in the web of life, we have made ourselves consumers of the garden’s gifts. In so doing, we are killing the garden and exiling ourselves from the ecosystems in which we were designed (by God or natural selection, it does not matter) to thrive.

The result of this self-imposed exile from Eden is a sense of alienation that pervades our cultural systems and individual identities. We are alienated from the Divine, from the natural world of biological life, from our own sense of purpose and belonging, and from humans who are made “other” in oppressive systems of objectification and exploitation.

 

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Dominant Western economies of capitalism and consumption have taken us far from our hunter/gatherer roots and entrapped us in systems where our relationship with food is heavily mediated by countless layers of commercial and political machinery. No longer embedded in a natural ecosystem, we are citizens of a global economy where resources are distributed around the world according to the logic of cheap energy and endless growth for maximum profit. Human flourishing and the health of our planet are both casualties to our contemporary American relationship with our food.

To see the workings of this pervasive alienation, we need look only at the economic systems that deliver energy to our bodies in the form of food.

When we consider the ecological systems in which human life evolved, we can understand that food is (among other things) the means of capturing, storing, and extracting energy from the sun to fuel the organisms that we are. Unlike our leafy kin, we lack the ability to capture energy directly from the sun. Like our animal kin, we depend on plants to capture energy from the sun for us, which we then can access by ingesting the plants (or by ingesting other animals that have ingested the plants). This is our place in the ecological cycle.

But with so-called “modern” technological advances, the cycle has become infinitely complexified. Most importantly, the sun-energy that infuses our food is now heavily subsidized (perhaps even mostly replaced) by fossil fuel energy taken from deep in the earth, and by human energy extracted from the labor of exploited workers. In Deep Economy, Bill McKibbon writes, “Because of its reliance on cheap energy, the efficiency of our vast farms and the food systems they underwrite is in some sense an illusion, and perhaps a very temporary one.”

Our food comes to us at cost of human suffering and environmental destruction that is carefully hidden from consumers in supermarkets today.

 

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Researchers estimate that the average bite of food travels 1500 miles before it reaches our mouths.

The energy contained in our food is – on average — only 1/10th of the energy used to produce the food. Food is shipped all over the world at the whims of markets and profit margins, wasting literal tons of energy and emitting tons of carbon dioxide. This system does not make sense. It does not provide higher-quality food, nor is it better for the earth. It exists solely because it is profitable to mass-produce and transport food in this way. And that profitability can only exist in a society that has completely severed its relationship with the natural world and forgotten that we were made for a garden.

For untold eons, the sharing of food has been an essential element of cultural, religious, political, and family systems. With the advent of oil-subsidized mass-produced “food”, we have almost completely replaced the shared table with an unholy amalgamation of stores and restaurants and meal ordering apps. This system literally alienates us from our fellow humans, adding layers of pixels, fossil fuels, and corporate profiteering between us and the people who are involved in the production of our food.

Devoid of any relational context, our food items are branded with fictional characters representative of cows, of corn, of tigers, of farmers in straw hats. These cartoon faces have replaced human interaction in the acquisition of food. If I want fruit, I do not need participate in the production or acquisition of it. It is offered to me from a pile of carefully selected Platonicly perfect produce. My body is excessive, an afterthought. No need for my legs to climb or kneel, for my arms to plow or pull or haul, no need for my fingers to get dirty or grasp fruit and bring it to my mouth. I touch a digital picture of bananas and walk out without ever speaking to another human.

Living in a body evolved for the tasks of hunter/gathering, I wander the anonymous aisles of a grocery store and pick out boxes with images of food printed on them, literally a facsimile of food. I have no sense of place or of season – the grocery store ensures that all things are available at all times, forsaking the rhythms of our planets movement arounds the sun and instead stocking its shelves according to the man-made calendar of consumerist holidays / holy days: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines Day, St Pattys, Easter, 4th of July, etc.

This is the default food culture of the society I encounter. To diverge from it requires access to resources of extra time or money or both. Food acquisition that involves bodily participation or face-to-face human interaction is treated as an treat, a field trip, a special event, an elective activity: farmer’s markets, CSA’s, pick-your-own, personal gardens. The dominant narratives of our food culture treat these as hobbies, accepting as normal a perverse system of trucks and conveyor belts and sick dirt and artificial light and so-called “food” that never saw the light of day.

 

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In the essay “Good Oak”, Aldo Leopold writes: “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from a furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.”

This is my strategic proposal for healing our alienated relationship with food: plant a garden. And also: repent from colonial concepts of land ownership and submit to stewardship of a farm, of a forest, of as many ecosystems as you can find not already obliterated by parking lots or restricted by status-quo zoning regulations.

To heal our relationship with our food, we must pursue a holistic vision of wholeness that includes healing the alienation between ourselves, other humans, and the natural world. On a relational level, this means undoing the brainwashing of corporate interests that have normalized disconnected food and working to recover our heritages of food as a locus of communal belonging. We will see cultural change when we reject the stories of food as a commodity and remember an essential element of biological life, an embodied experience of solar energy. These relational/cultural changes will need to be followed by structural change as well – we will need to restructure our communities so that “consumers” can have access to the land and become “creators” instead. We will need to strengthen local food economies and create systems outside the bounds of profit-driven factory-produced food.

Echoing the words of the Prophet Moses, we will face down Egypt and demand that they let our people go so that we may worship our god in the wilderness as we see fit.

And we will worship our god through dirt and tomatoes, through breaking bread with no name, eating fruit with no stickers, sharing real food grown by human effort, imperfect and unbranded and abundant and liberated and liberating.