In many of my conversations with others about food and farming (and just about every other topic), we talk about ‘time’. “I don’t have time” to spend growing food, or “It takes too much time” to plant a seed and wait for it to grow into a mature plant that can be eaten. We talk of time as a commodity that is an entity unto itself rather than our presence in the moment and how we have chosen what to do in that moment.

In this sense ‘time’ is used based on our personal value system. For example: a farmer values growing food, so a farmer has “time’ to grow it because it has priority over other activities during that time. It seems to me, we choose where and how we spend our ‘time’ according to what value we place on the activety.
So if I am not growing or producing food for myself…thank the heavens someone (farmer/hunter) decided they were going to spend their ‘time’ growing/acquiring food so I can eat it. And how do many people in the US reward farmers for their ‘time’ devoted to feeding us? We don’t usually want to pay too much for their food products and we consider a farmers social status to be quite low, even though we literally can’t live without them unles we choose to spend ‘our time’, growing our food, ourselves. Wow! Thinking this through, I just gained alot more appreciation for food farmers, imagining I would have to produce/hunt for food for myself to live.