RURAL PROSPERITY
Our weekly gleanings present the latest happenings, research and writing along the tangled banks of culture and agriculture. This week: the new executive order, walnut histories and wild foraging labeling
What Wealth Is – Rebecca Gayle Howell
When you eat the same food as your livestock, your animals, the beasts
you rear from teat to trough—rear up for tender, the cut—
when you chew in your mouth what you dump into theirs
when you know their bodies are not today separate from your body,
the noise-making heat, green flies all around,
when the garden yard is stopped short by its wall of corn, its room of corn,
tall as any useful man, tall as money’s gate,
you know: your hand, rising up and opening, is the devil to which all this prays
and in your dream you walk in past the gate, into the corn,
taller than you, into its room, and it’s dark here, the husk ceiling
its own shallow, unlit, selfish sun, and at your feet the path narrows into a limit
that makes the leaves for a moment look like the ocean folding in on itself or the church
women praising with their palm fans, the church women who knew once
what to do, and so you put your god hand up and open to touch the fronds
thinking they will know what to do, and they are sharp as the stained blade your daddy
carried, sharp as the cut, and your blood hand is bleeding now, your face,
bleeding, and you close your eyes and walk because isn’t this the way out?
This week saw the confirmation of Sonny Perdue as Secretary of Ag and an executive order from the White House on Promoting Agriculture and Rural Prosperity in America. “Food is a noble thing to trade”, Perdue declared at the hearing.
Meanwhile, the US is losing its dominance in agricultural exports. The Iowa senate and house voted on Tuesday to cut funding to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The prairie that Aldo Leopold loved so dearly is breaking. What is wealth?
Elsewhere
The Southern Foodways Alliance has been collecting the oral histories of Helvetia, West Virginia. Population fifty-nine.
A remarkable history of the walnut and its entanglements with the Silk Road. Why have investigations into the origins of agriculture mostly ignored tree crops?
“Fairwild” labeling and schisandra berry harvesting in China
Analytics of indigenous Hawaiian agricultural systems
ICARDA’s seed bank in Syria is still holding on