It being Thanksgiving, I'm doing some reading about gratitude. Just read through part of Norman Wirzba's Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhythms of Rest and Delight. Chapter 1 has a section on food - very apropos for Americans this week - and in particular on the production of food.
Wirzba's contention, one that strikes me as probably right, is that the way we produce meat is violent and alienating, and that our willingness to accept food that comes to us this way is symptomatic of a culture that is more motivated by fear than by gratitude.
This could turn into a rant about locavorism, but I don't want to go there right now. My point - and Wirzba's, I think - is not that we need to change our food production, but that we need to ask ourselves why we produce food as we do. And that we ought to ask ourselves if we - and our world - wouldn't be better off if we received what we have with gratitude. I find this very difficult, but I'm going to give it a try.
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