Walking down the cobblestoned Rue de la Balme the aural and olfactory assaults commence almost simultaneously. The noise is that of a small farm tractor (a Ford, as it turns out) coming  downhill behind me. The smell is immediate, familiar, and takes me to a long-ago time.  The surprise is the shiny (at least on the outside) new manure spreader the Ford is pulling through town. Many of the pedestrians turn away, covering their faces. I simply stand and gape…

1971: the last year I can recall a farmer actually using his ancient, worn manure spreader to…spread manure.  I can recall wider use as a child, but even then the machines were old, kept in service by great ingenuity and baling wire. By 1972, working for a family farming multiple sections of dryland wheat on the High Plains, my encounters with manure spreaders were at the end of the row of old farm implements literally put out to pasture.

Beynac-et-Cazenac, postcard-perfect, happily situated on the banks of the Dordogne River…

With respect to human habitation, this is an ancient land.  H. sapiens have been in the region for something like 35,000 years, displacing the Neanderthal who were here before.  However, H. erectus predates both, arriving in what is now southern France from Africa approximately 400,000 years ago.  Our earliest ancestors were hunter-gatherers, but the Dordogne River region has been known for much of the last few millennia for its proliferant agriculture.  Apple, peach, pear, plum and fig trees are found here.  So are walnut and sweet chestnut trees.  The majority of strawberries in France are grown here. Feed corn is raised on the bottoms.  Feed corn for?… The geese and ducks raised amidst the walnut and sweet chestnut groves just uphill from the bottoms, évidemment…the world-famous Dordogne Foie Gras. Tobacco and truffles, raspberries and caviar.  The Bergerac wines, the artisanal cheeses.  In this land of small villages and winding roads, small farms are everywhere.  It’s just that…to my Midwestern/Western eye they look like a postcard-perfect part of the landscape…

1971.  Thirty-seven-year old Wendell Berry rocks a certain segment of the world with his essay “Think Little” in the Last Whole Earth Catalog.  It is a call to model agricultural practices on natural systems.  One way of thinking about it is that meadow farms should look like a meadow.  Prairie farms should look like the prairie.  Farms should operate using the same biogeochemical cycling seen in nature. Berry has long argued for deep study, great humility and thoughtful care in our husbandry: “to treat every field, or every part of every field with the same consideration is not farming, but industry” ( “The Unsettling of America, 1977; italics added).

Eating is an agricultural act.  Thus speaks Berry.  Thus speaks Frances Moore Lappé, Barry Commoner, Joan Gussow, Michael Pollin, Wes Jackson and hosts of others who understand that human health is directly tied to soil health, and is in fact just “one subject”.  

I have seen – and known – depleted soils and unhealthy landscapes. Walking the country track south of the Dordogne between Beynac and Vitrac, lost in both my own thoughts and the mists of time, I see something different, something…promising.  Here in an old world, the human footprint is present everywhere, but its impression light. The landscape appears vital, resilient…and importantly, feels restorative… Walking the country lanes across the wooded uplands, native beech and oak interspersed with the small farmsteads, there is a sense of balance, of equilibrium…

The immediacy of the relationship of food to the landscape is obvious:  the confiture de fraise (strawberry jam) and varieties of fromage (cheese) with my breakfast pastries, pommes (apples) and poires (pears) with my baguette midday, the late afternoon vin Bergerac…all the way to the tort aux noix (walnut tort) that provides both benison for the day…and a long-missed intimacy…

Eating.  An agricultural act.  A graceful, grateful act.  A reverential act.  These things have been experienced before…long before… The fact that they can be experienced again is both a blessing and a hope.

The Ford takes a right turn at the base of the hill.  Both the sound and aroma fade. The memories…and commitments…are rekindled…