Simpler Living

This is a must read book or at the very least a book to make sure is on your shelf to pull out from time to time.  This is a book that is full of essays from amazing writers and advocates for a different way of living.  They bring up topics that will challenge the way you live, how you view time, how and what you eat and pretty much how our culture is.  It is not easy to read at times because it challenges the very heart of our being.  I will admit that I still haven't finished reading this book for this very reason.  I have needed time to struggle with these topics and decide how I will respond to them.  In a previous post I mentioned how I was startled by a section on time and had to put the book down and stop exhausting myself in my endeavor to get one more class assignment done.

Since I have been focusing on my food choices for this class, I skipped ahead to a section on the social and environmental impact of our every day food choices.  In this section Wendell Berry speaks to readers as victims of the corporate food industry, held captive by our food choices and our unquestioning and uncritical passiveness when it comes to what we buy, eat and put into our bodies.  He makes this claim based on our distance from our food, we no longer know where it comes from, how it's grown, or how it has come to be on our plate.  Berry also asks us to examine what we consider "quality life."  Do we view quality as the amount of things we participate in and what we're able to do?  This constant busyness often causes us to stop and grab whatever "quick" food we can so that we can keep up our pace and our "quality" of life.  Or do we slow down and enjoy all that life has to offer, eating things that will prolong our lives and help to fuel our bodies, not to mention things that we actually enjoy eating as we go about the activities that we love?

Even if you don't agree with Wendell Berry's agrarian perspective and you couldn't fathom participating and learning about  the food system, this article will make you stop, think and assess what it is that's important to you and how you live.