September 3rd, 2019

What’s in your share?

• Fennel

• Head Letttuce

• Green Beans

• Turkish Parsley

• Italian and Japanese Eggplant

• Italian Sweet Peppers

• Cherries tomatoes or Slicing tomatoes

• Storage Onions

This Labor Day, we remember and are grateful for the ongoing struggles of working class people - here and around the world - who brave great personal sacrifices for collectively shared goods. Below, we share a potentially norm-bending query by Wendell Berry on the necessity of labor with - of course - a particular attention to the labor of farmers and other rural folk .

From: “What Are People For?” By: Wendell Berry

“The great question that hovers over this issue, one that we have dealt with mainly by indifference, is the question of what people are for. Is their greatest dignity in the unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal? One would conclude so from our attitude toward work, especially the manual work necessary to the long-term preservation of the land, and from our rush toward mechanization, automation, and computerization. In a country that puts an absolute premium on labor-saving measure, short workdays, and retirement, why should there by any surprise at permanence of unemployment and welfare dependency? Those are only different names for our national ambitions.

In the country, meanwhile, there is work to by done. This is the inescapably necessary work of restoring and caring for our farms, forests, and rural towns and communities— work that we have not been able to pay people to do for forty years and that, few people any longer know how to do it.”