022, Dr. Norman Wirzba: The Conscious Meal

Soul Soil: Where Agriculture and Spirit Intersect with Brooke Kornegay

"Eating is not simply filling some gustatory hole, eating is knitting yourself into the fabric of life that's going on all the time, all around you...and how you knit yourself in can either make that fabric a beautiful thing, or it can make it tattered. Right now, I think a lot of our eating is creating tatters all across the world. What would be great is if the kinds of eating we do, beginning with the growing of food and the harvesting of food and the distribution and the cooking and sharing of food...could create a beautiful tapestry."

Dr. Norman Wirzba is a Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology, Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and the Senior Associate Dean for Institutional & Faculty Advancement at Duke School of Divinity. Dr. Wirzba pursues research and teaching interests at the intersections of theology, philosophy, ecology, and agrarian and environmental studies, and has published several books on food and land. He serves as Series Editor for a group of books called “Culture of the Land”. As an editor, Dr. Wirzba contributed to Wendell Berry’s work in The Art of the Commonplace. He is the director of a project called “Facing the Anthropocene” wherein he works with an international team of scholars to rethink several academic disciplines in light of challenges like climate change, food insecurity, biotechnology and genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, species extinction, and the built environment.

In this episode...

• How connecting with the land fosters empathy and stewardship

• Why the environmental preservation movement has seen so little progress

• How children model Presence and show us how to be in the Now

• Restlessness that is inherent in the social condition

• Examining sacrifice

• How the world economy thrives on ingratitude

• How operating in a world where speed, homogeneity, and mechanization are the production norm, ultimately degrades life at every level

• Our human creaturely condition

• Nurturing the world that nurtures us

• The importance of moving cautiously in a world that we don't fully understand

• The mental health benefits of growing food, cooking, and eating in community

• Food as the ultimate cross-disciplinary subject

Resources

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Wendell Berry

• Mary Oliver

• normanwirzba.com

• https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/norman-wirzba