Richard Ha writes:

Michelle Galimba is a rancher (at her family’s Kuahiwi Ranch, in Na‘alehu) and a member of the Board of Agriculture.

One day, on a plane, I looked across the aisle and saw her reading a newspaper. I did a doubletake when I realized the newspaper was in Chinese.

Michelle is a rancher with a PhD in comparative literature from U.C. Berkeley who knows Chinese. She’s a very interesting, gifted, thinking person. You can click into her blog Ehulepo on the right side of this blog anytime. It’s worth reading.

Here’s an article she wrote at the She Grows Food blog called What Does Truth Taste Like.

What does truth taste like? What does justice taste like?

These might sound like terribly pompous questions to ask. But they are worth asking as we learn, un-learn, re-learn the question: “What is food?”

What is food?

Food – we speak of it as good or bad, as healthy or indulgent, pretty or ugly, tasty or yucky, clever or boring,strange or familiar, pure or tainted.

What is it that we eat? It was there before each of us, like the air we breathe, and yet more complexly given to us by each other – cultural, social, ecological. It is what we have absorbed already before we became conscious; it is what we are formed from. It is what our first thoughts were bent upon, what our bodies cried out for before there were words. Food is a feeling, an interchange with the world, a necessary blessing.

Food can be beautiful and good. It should be so. Because it is the flower of the entirety of our knowledge, because it is the will of the community to nourish and sustain, to embody itself, animate itself. Because it is the form and medium of our conversation with the web of life, in which humans are but one node.

The pathway of food should be known by all – its path from earth to belly and back to earth. What knowledge is more necessary?

Truth might have a taste. Would we know it when we tasted it? …

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