Monday, April 17, 2023

Agricultural appropriation

 

They’re everywhere. I could be in a bodega in search of a beverage far enough from its eventual expiration date. I could be on the train platform during my routine morning commute. I could be walking on the sidewalk counting pieces of garbage for a graduate dissertation. I could be tagging pigeons, not for science, but for a friendly game of interspecies tag. None of it matters, because around me are people who look like farmers. 


But they aren’t farmers. They aren’t ploughing verdant dreamscapes at the crack of dawn. They wake up to the dissonant sound of email pings, not the cacophonous caw of a roof residing rooster. They drink oat milk, instead of the good stuff taken straight from the tap. They wear overalls to nightclubs despite the bathroom dilemma created every fourth drink. They spell John Deere with two vowels. To them, separating the wheat from the chaff, is a metaphor, not a hard fact of daily life. Use a scythe? They can’t even spell it. They wouldn’t know manure if they leapt headfirst into a pile of the stuff. 


Although, they do farm out much of their day jobs to temp workers in another hemisphere and complain incessantly about daylight savings time. 


Leave the farming to the farmers. 

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