The weight of one grain

What a friend taught me over a bowl of rice in Amsterdam, and what my agriculturally mechanised Essex childhood had taken away.

In the early 2000s I shared a kitchen in Amsterdam with my soul sister Alodia, who had come to the Netherlands from the Philippines, and who changed the way I understood food without even trying. She did it, mostly, by the way she handled rice.

I noticed it first as a small thing. When she cooked, she was careful with the rice in a way I was not careful with anything. She measured it by eye and by hand, tipped it into the water almost tenderly, and at the end of a meal she would not leave a grain on the plate. If a few grains fell on the counter she gathered them up rather than sweeping them into the bin. It was not fussiness and it was not thrift exactly, though she did not have much money. It was something closer to respect, and it took me a while to work out what it was respect for.

What she knew that I did not

When I asked her about it, the answer opened up a whole world that my own upbringing had missed.

Alodia had grown up around rice being planted the way most of the rice in the world has been planted for thousands of years - by hand, one seedling at a time, by people bent double in flooded paddy fields with the sun on their backs and the mud to their shins.

She described it the way you describe something you describe something that is so familiar to you it has become 'part of you' - matter of fact and without drama, but the picture she painted was extraordinary to me. Each young rice plant pressed individually into the soft ground. Whole communities moving down the rows together. The particular ache of a body that has spent a day folded over the water. She had grown up knowing, in her hands and her back and not just in her head, that a single bowl of rice was the outcome of an almost unimaginable quantity of human labour.

There is a teaching that runs through many 'rice cultures', and certainly through hers, that you do not waste a grain because every grain holds the sweat of the person who grew it. I had heard sentiments like that before and dismissed them as the sort of thing adults say to children who will not finish their dinner. Coming from Alodia it was not a platitude. It was simply a description of the facts as she knew them. She was not being sentimental about rice. She was being accurate about it.

She could feel both the cost and the value of the food in a way I had never once felt the cost of anything I ate.

The field I grew up beside, and never knew

I grew up in Essex, surrounded by boulder clay from ancient glaciers; rich, arable farmland, which by rights should have given me exactly the connection to food that Alodia had. It actually gave me the complete opposite.

The Essex of my childhood was already, by the time I arrived in it in 1975, one of the most thoroughly mechanised agricultural landscapes on earth. The grain that grew in the fields around us was planted by machines drilling seed in dead straight lines, sprayed by machines, and harvested by combines that could strip a field in an afternoon while a single person sat in the cab listening to the radio. I watched all of this happen every year and it taught me nothing about food, because the whole genius of the machinery was to remove the human labour, and with it the human meaning, from the process.

I knew, in an abstract way, that bread came from wheat and wheat came from fields. But I had no 'bodily' sense of it whatsoever. Nobody I knew had ever planted a grain by hand or ached from a physical harvest. Food arrived in our house from the supermarket or even the Saturday market in packaging, already several steps removed from anything that had grown, and the fields I passed every day were less a source of food than a kind of green scenery, a backdrop that happened to be there. The machine had done something quietly profound. It had made abundance possible, hunger unlikely, and in the same motion it had made the abundance meaningless. I was surrounded by the growing of food and I was completely disconnected from it.

It took a woman who had grown up on the other side of the world, sitting across a small kitchen table in Amsterdam, to show me what I had been missing my whole life without knowing it was missing.

Alodia was connected to the food chain because she was connected to the labour inside it. I was disconnected from the food chain because the labour had been engineered out of my sight before I was even born. I'll write again shortly on shifting baseline

What the machine gave us and what it took

I want to be careful here not to turn this into a simple story about honest peasant toil against soulless machinery, and Alodia would have been the first to object (as a middle class Filipina with household maids. In fact when we lived together one of our favourite phrases was 'this Fillipina maid is broken' - still a phrase in these woke days in both her household and mine).

The labour she described was genuinely hard. Planting rice by hand is backbreaking, and the people who do it are not doing it as a spiritual exercise. They are doing it because it is the work available to them, and for most of human history that work has come bundled with poverty, precariousness, and physical suffering. The mechanisation that erased the meaning from my Essex childhood also erased an enormous amount of real human misery. It freed millions of people from a kind of toil that broke bodies and swallowed lives. Nobody who has actually done a day of stoop labour in a paddy field romanticises it, and I am not going to romanticise it from the comfort of a keyboard.

So the machine gave us something critical - it gave us food in quantities the world had never known, particularly poignant in the aftermath of WW2 and rationing across Europe, and it gave us freedom from a form of labour that was often brutal. Those are not small gifts.

But the machine took something too, and the thing it took was the thread. It severed the line of feeling that runs from the eater back through all the hands and all the hours to the living plant in the living soil.

Alodia had that thread intact. I had never had it at all. And once I could see it in her, I could not stop seeing its absence in myself, and later in almost everyone around me. We had gained the food and lost the knowledge of what it was. We had gained the time the machine saved us and had no idea what we had done with it.

Why I started growing things, and what growing things actually costs

Years later, when I began to grow a little of my own food, I understood that I was really trying to buy that thread back. And I learned very quickly that there is only one currency it can be bought with, and that currency is time.

This is the thing nobody tells you honestly about growing your own food.

It is enormously time-consuming, and it is often laborious, and there is no version of it that is not. You cannot rush a seed. You cannot batch process a growing season. The tomato takes the whole summer whether you are busy or not. The soil needs tending, the weeds come back, the watering cannot be skipped, and the yield from all of it, measured coldly against the hours you put in, is laughable next to what the same money would buy at the supermarket in ninety seconds. If you judge a vegetable garden purely as a way of producing food, it is an absurd proposition.

And here is the conclusion I have slowly come to, which I think is the real point. The time-consumingness of growing food is not a flaw in the activity that we should try to engineer away. It is the entire source of its value. The connection Alodia had was made out of time and labour. It could not have been made out of anything else. You cannot get the reverence without the hours, because the reverence simply is the felt knowledge of the hours. When I spend a whole evening earthing up potatoes, I am not producing potatoes efficiently. I am doing the one thing that actually re-threads me into the living chain, which is paying attention, slowly, with my body, to where food comes from. The slowness is not the price of the connection. The slowness is the connection.

Which means that the very thing that makes a garden valuable is the very thing that makes it almost impossible to fit into a modern life.

The bind we are actually in

Because here is where it gets harder. The kind of connection I am describing requires time, and time is precisely the thing that has been taken from most households, not by choice but by economic force. For much of the last century a single income could, for many families, support a home, which meant that a household could contain a person with the hours to grow, to cook slowly, to keep some living thread to its food. That arrangement had a great deal wrong with it, and I do not want it back. It usually rested on a woman's unpaid labour and unlived ambitions, and the freedom to earn, to work, to build a life beyond the kitchen was a genuine and hard won liberation that I would defend against anyone.

But that liberation arrived bundled with a trap. As second earners came into the workforce, the economy did not leave household costs where they were and let families grow richer in time and money both. It re-priced life, and housing above all, around the assumption of two incomes, until two incomes became not a route to abundance but the bare minimum required to stand still. So we ended up in the worst of both arrangements. The old world's constraint on who could work is gone, which is right and good. But the new world quietly made the second income compulsory, and then absorbed it, so that most households now need two adults working full time simply to afford a life, and have less genuinely free time between them than a single earner once had alone.

The time that made connection to food possible has not been redistributed or freed. It has been swallowed. We did not decide, as a culture, that we would rather buy our food than grow it and cook it slowly. The decision was made for us by an economy that took our hours and gave us no way to get them back. The disconnection I felt as an Essex child, mechanised out of any relationship with the field, has been generalised and extended to almost everyone, and pushed further, from the field into the kitchen and the garden and the family table. The machine came for the farm labour first. Then the market came for the rest of our time.

What was actually taken

So when I ask what all of this has taken from us, I do not only mean gardens, and I do not only mean home cooking, though it has taken plenty of both. What it has taken is the capacity for the kind of attention Alodia had. The slow, uncounted, unpaid, deeply human work that once connected people to their food, their place, their seasons, and one another has been steadily priced out of ordinary life, not because we stopped valuing it but because we were no longer able to afford the time it runs on. We have been made materially richer and experientially poorer. We have more food than any humans in history and less relationship with it than almost any humans who have ever lived. We have been handed abundance and disconnection in a single package, and told that this is progress, and in many ways it is, and in this particular way it is a quiet and unacknowledged loss.

I do not think the answer is to guilt people into gardening they have no time for, which would simply be one more demand on hours they do not have. And I do not think the answer is a nostalgia for a past that trapped half the population in the kitchen. If anything, the honest conclusion points less at individuals and more at an economy that has made the connective, unpaid, life-giving work of a household into a luxury that only the time-rich can afford.

But I do think there is something worth holding onto at the small scale, even inside the bind, and it is this. When you grow one thing, a pot of herbs on a windowsill, a single row of beans, a tomato plant by a back door, you are not really producing food. The 'hard economics' of it will never make sense. What you are actually doing is buying back a sliver of the very thing the machine and then the market took from us, which is a slow, attentive, felt connection to where your food life comes from.

Alodia gathered her fallen grains of rice because she could feel the labour and the life inside each one. I could not feel it, growing up beside the combines of Essex, and most of us cannot feel it now, moving through our two-income days at the speed the economy demands. But the feeling can be recovered, a little, one slow grown thing at a time. Not because it will feed us. Because it will remind us what growing life to eat actually is.