Your food unites you

with the earth beneath you.

Life’s first-formed – tiny, invisible creatures -

gather from rock, and water, and air,

what the rest of life is built on.

They pass these on, these golden letters,

in conversation with the roots of plants.

Both are ears and tongues, at once – taking,

giving, the necessities of life,

and sugar made from sunlight,

so that tiny life, and plants, can live.

The goodness of the rock is useless

if we do not have the sun.

The brightness of the sun builds nothing

if we do not have the soil,

the dark box of talk.

Soil is where light and darkness meet

and create life.

This is where words have their beginning:

the golden letters of the earth,

the sun’s breath to speak them.

They are in the wheat, that waves,

in summer sunlight, under skies

of rain and wind.

The whole of the world

is in this grain of wheat,

to be ground, mixed with water,

livened by the heat of human hands,

that touches air’s yeast to life.

Your knuckles, palms – all they have known -

are pressing the dough.

The lines on your hands:

threads to join the air and ground.

Here is your food. Bread

made by the words in your blood,

baked to be eaten with others

at a table out of doors,

in a warm evening, with a plain white cloth

on which shadows may be intertwined.

Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved takes a long and wide view of food production, to show how we all suffer the consequences of a food system cooked to a corporate recipe. This is also the story of the fight against the unthinking commerce that brings it to us. In the wrecked paddy fields of India, in the soy deserts of Brazil, in the maize ejidos of Mexico, the supermarket aisles of California, French McDonald's and Italian kitchens, there's a worldwide resistance against unhealthy control of the food system.

In Our Wild Farming Life, Lynn and Sandra recount their experiences as they rebuild their new home and work out what kind of farmers they want to be. They learn how to work with Highland cattle, become part of the crofting community and begin to truly understand how they can farm in harmony with nature to produce wonderful food for themselves and the people around them. Through efforts like these, Lynn and Sandra have been able to combine regenerative farming practices with old crofting traditions to keep their own personal values intact.