Think about this every time you take a bite of food: it started with a farm.
Unless you tended your own vegetables and livestock, foraged your own herbs and mushrooms, or hunted your own game, everything you put in your mouth was produced by someone else’s sweaty, dirty, absurd, reasonable, intelligent, analytical, artistic, “making” labor.
That might mean a small crew on an organic farm planting cucumbers and weeding around the squash. It might mean a single Midwesterner steering massive combines through endless acres of corn or wheat. It might mean a family of migrants stooping over fields of lettuce or berries and painstakingly picking each plant. It might mean factory workers churning out assembly lines of eggs or milk or slaughtered meat. Each meal or midnight snack probably brings together some of each, possibly in a form so highly processed and brightly packaged that the farm work is unrecognizable and easily forgotten.
But don’t forget the farm work that feeds you. Remember it with each trip to the grocery store, and try not to waste what they’ve produced so that you could live another day.