Mixed Blessings
“When we consume bread, it becomes us. It becomes our eyes and our hands,” Elizabeth DeRuff said, addressing the large circle of people around her. “Agriculture is where the self meets the landscape.” It was August in Sonoma County, California, and the day was already warm, but we—a group of twenty-five—were all wearing long sleeves and pants, to protect our arms and legs against the prickly husks of the wheat we would be harvesting that morning. We needed to start early to finish before the heat of the afternoon set in—record heat, the latest in a string of days to break a hundred degrees. Many of us wore plaid shirts and wide-brimmed straw hats, perhaps in homage to the farmers we were pretending to be for the day.
Elizabeth is the founder of Honoré Farm and Mill, a nonprofit organization that grows, mills, and sells heritage grains, and runs educational programs that involve volunteers—like us—in the agricultural process. For this harvest, we would use hand sickles with curved metal blades and carved wooden handles, which sat in a crate on the ground. It wasn’t functionally necessary that we gather and do this by hand—one of the participants had access to a combine harvester, a tractor-like machine that could do the job in a fraction of the time—but the point was experience, not efficiency, and we wanted to press on. “Think of it as an embodied meditation,” Elizabeth told us.
Elizabeth is an Episcopal minister, but she calls herself an “agricultural chaplain.” She is lean yet sturdy, in her fifties with short blonde hair and a no-nonsense sunniness that I would have associated with Christianity even if I hadn’t known she was a member of the clergy. Elizabeth traces the origin of Honoré to
