When Grains are Precious

What a friend taught me over a bowl of rice in Amsterdam, and what my agriculturally mechanised Essex childhood had already 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 really careful with the rice. 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, it was something closer to deep respect.

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' 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' 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 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 dropped 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 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 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.

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 really careful here not to turn this into a story about ''honest peasant toil against soulless machinery'', and Alodia would be 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 Filipina 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 to feed their families. The mechanisation that erased the meaning from my Essex childhood also erased an enormous amount of real human misery around the precariousness of food. 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 post colonial comfort of my 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.

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 grow that thread of connection back. And I learned very quickly that there is only one currency it can be bought with, and that currency is time. 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.

The bond Alodia experienced was forged through time and effort, and nothing else could have created it.

Reverence cannot exist without investing time, as it is the deep understanding gained from those hours. When I dedicate an entire evening to earthing up potatoes, I am not aiming for efficiency in production. Instead, I am engaging in the essential act of reconnecting myself to the living cycle by attentively and slowly acknowledging the origin of food with my body.

The slowness isn't a cost for the connection; the slowness is the connection itself. 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

The kind of commitment 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, as 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). But that liberation arrived bundled with a different trap of time poverty.

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 also ''re-priced'' life, with housing inflating above all else, 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 some ways, 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.

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.

What was actually taken

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, I would argue, 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, and I do not think the answer is a nostalgia for a past that trapped half the population in the fields and 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 growing a luxury that only the 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 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.