Rootlessness and Rootedness
A religious holiday stirs reflections on food and human belonging
We recently were part of Congregation Beth Torah's Sukkot holiday--a holiday which reminds Jewish people of the forty years of wandering in the desert and which honors the fall harvest. In learning about the Sukkot holiday, I found resonance with our current relationship to growing and eating the food that keeps us alive. Part of the holiday involves building a "sukkah" a shelter in your yard that you "live" in for seven days to remind Jews of the forty years of temporary shelters and homelessness during the exodus from Egypt. The other part of the holiday is a celebration of the fall harvest, the completion of the growing season. It is a holiday that, from a non-Jewish view, looks to be about the experience of being rootless and about its opposite––being rooted enough to have crops to harvest and honor.
In the last fifty years, human beings have come to live in cities in great numbers. More than half of the world's global population is believed to live in urban areas today. We live in built and highly controlled environments where food is at the grocery store, nature is in parks, and where, as much as possible, we move from one climate controlled space to another. That relocation from the country to the city has had the consequence of separating us from the soil, from the natural environment and from people engaged in food production. This means that we no longer understand food, we don't understand nature, we don't understand our reliance on both of them. We have become rootless; we are living in ways that are counter to thousands of years of human experience. While it is good to no longer be subject to local famines and natural disasters, we’ve lost some important aspects of being human in the world.
I think that many of our health problems––obesity in particular––are a manifestation of our rootlessness and disconnection from nature. In the past, when humans ate food, they understood that the food resulted from a relationship to the natural environment and to the community, and to a spiritual life that helped us understand and mediate our dependency on nature. A potato was not just a potato, it was a full season of weather, of people working together, and of religious practices to support its growth. It provided us with more than calories and nutrition. Today's potato, a staple of the fast and snack food industries, has lost this quality almost completely. When we consume it, in some part of our brain and bodies, we know that something is missing. So we eat more, trying to fill ourselves up.
In promoting urban agriculture, the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture (KCCUA) addresses the human need to be "rooted" and to be connected to the act of feeding ourselves and others. By locating farms and food production in the city where we live and work, we are helping people reconnect to their human reliance on food and nature, we are helping them become rooted. The garden on the corner inserts itself into your consciousness, knowing the farmer who grows the crops helps people to pay attention––when it rains, you are more likely to think of the rain's importance to the crop if you know a farmer who has talked about how the lack of rain has reduced yields. Rain becomes more than an inconvenience, it becomes a life-giving event. You become more aware of our dependence on food, on the person who grows the food, and ultimately, on our specific geographic location and on nature.
What is wonderful about the Sukkot holiday is that it gives us both of these things––the wandering lost and rootless, and an answer to that, which is to ground your life through the fruits and vegetables that feed your body and your soul. Urban agriculture is one way to help with this. It brings our dependency on nature and on food into the communities we live in, where it can become a part of our everyday consciousness and lives, like humans have lived for thousands of years.
(This essay originally appeared in the October 2007 issue of Urban Grown, the KCCUA newsletter)
Katherine Kelly, Executive Director and Farmer, Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture. Kelly operated Full Circle for eight years during which time she developed the farm into one of the city’s best-known sources for organic vegetables. For more than 2 decades, she has worked as a community organizer, non profit manager and organizational development consultant in Kansas City, Boston, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. In Kansas City, she co-founded the Growing Growers Training Program and the Farmers Community Market at Brookside.
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