Operation Baguette: Harvest Time!

Now to figure out how to thresh it: mortar and pestle? Wrapping it in a tarp and backing over it with my car a couple of times? The trials and tribulations of the urban wheat farmer 😉

I will tell you, though, even cutting my tiny “field” was a decent amount of work. Mad respect for all my forebears who were out there from dawn to dusk with a sickle or stacking sheaves…. Bruno Latour used to say that there’s no such thing as a free ride: what he meant by that was even motion that seems invisible, instantaneous, or effortless costs energy, and someone or something somewhere is always putting in that energy, even if you aren’t. I get why people invented harvesting and threshing machines, so the energy of harvesting wheat wouldn’t be coming from their bodies anymore. But then it came from a horse’s body, or from burning coal or gas. The energy of posting this for you to read is coming from server farms, power plants, and batteries–not to mention YOUR energy (the brain is a total energy hog BTW, using up 1/5 of the calories you consume every day even though it’s only 1/50 of your body mass). Not to mention all the energy of my labor and the sun, rain, and earth that went into the wheat berries themselves, which I’ve written about before.

I have really gotten a lot out of Operation Baguette so far for exactly the reasons above–getting to feel the cost of the things I eat (other than fruit and vegetables, which I know a little more about) and feeling grateful for the humans and nonhumans putting in all that energy on a daily basis.