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Which obviously I'd been meaning to read, since I bought a Kindle copy, but I hadn't been meaning to read it tonight. I'd been meaning to sleep tonight.
So. Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith by Fred Bahnson. I picked it up because it is (self-evidently) in the spiritual memoir genre, in which I am currently trying to write. Bahnson is some flavor of Protestant, though which flavor seems to be variable, and he spends a lot of time in the book's timeframe with Catholics, Jews, Pentecostals, and various other Protestants, discussing those sects' attitudes toward food and the production thereof, particularly with regard to gardening and farming vegetables. (Shockingly, given the genre and the author's divinity degree, there's a Bible quote pretty much every third page.) He also addresses racism and certain of the abuses of the prison industry.
The thing Bahnson wants to be sure his readers understand seems to be the disconnect we are experiencing from the land. When discussing a church-run community garden he led for years, he pointedly says it's not just a means to feed the hungry (though of course it's that too), and for that reason using the garden-funding money to buy food to feed the hungry (as some of the church members were suggesting, notably the ones—all white—who disapproved of having a church operation in a black part of town) wouldn't suffice. He emphasizes that increasing technology in a farm or garden increases that disconnect: not to say that all farming machines are evil (though he may hold that opinion of petrochemical-based farming), simply that there's something more primal about getting one's actual hands in the actual dirt.
Not much of the book is actually memorable to me, though granted that may be a function of having read it between midnight and two am (having gone to bed before ten), but it was worth reading. I got, or noted in passing and expect to properly get on reread, what I wanted out of it, which is a better understanding of how the spiritual memoir genre functions. And I'm kind of regretting that I can't have a proper garden in this apartment. I mean. I don't want a proper garden—too much work for not enough reward, and I hardly manage to keep the potted plants on my patio alive. (I think the mint is done for, honestly.) But enough of the sense of this memoir is resonating with me to make me wish it were otherwise.
So. Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith by Fred Bahnson. I picked it up because it is (self-evidently) in the spiritual memoir genre, in which I am currently trying to write. Bahnson is some flavor of Protestant, though which flavor seems to be variable, and he spends a lot of time in the book's timeframe with Catholics, Jews, Pentecostals, and various other Protestants, discussing those sects' attitudes toward food and the production thereof, particularly with regard to gardening and farming vegetables. (Shockingly, given the genre and the author's divinity degree, there's a Bible quote pretty much every third page.) He also addresses racism and certain of the abuses of the prison industry.
The thing Bahnson wants to be sure his readers understand seems to be the disconnect we are experiencing from the land. When discussing a church-run community garden he led for years, he pointedly says it's not just a means to feed the hungry (though of course it's that too), and for that reason using the garden-funding money to buy food to feed the hungry (as some of the church members were suggesting, notably the ones—all white—who disapproved of having a church operation in a black part of town) wouldn't suffice. He emphasizes that increasing technology in a farm or garden increases that disconnect: not to say that all farming machines are evil (though he may hold that opinion of petrochemical-based farming), simply that there's something more primal about getting one's actual hands in the actual dirt.
Not much of the book is actually memorable to me, though granted that may be a function of having read it between midnight and two am (having gone to bed before ten), but it was worth reading. I got, or noted in passing and expect to properly get on reread, what I wanted out of it, which is a better understanding of how the spiritual memoir genre functions. And I'm kind of regretting that I can't have a proper garden in this apartment. I mean. I don't want a proper garden—too much work for not enough reward, and I hardly manage to keep the potted plants on my patio alive. (I think the mint is done for, honestly.) But enough of the sense of this memoir is resonating with me to make me wish it were otherwise.
