CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN

The following poetic musings by Alison Luterman come from Bread, Body, Spirit: Finding the Sacred in Food (edited with commentary by Alice Peck; quoted here with permission of Alison Luterman):

Strawberries are too delicate to be picked by machine. The perfectly ripe ones even bruise at too heavy a human touch. It hit her then that every strawberry she had ever eaten — every piece of fruit — had been picked by calloused human hands. Every piece of toast with jelly represented someone’s knees, someone’s aching back and hips, someone with a bandanna on her wrist to wipe away the sweat. Why has no one told her about this before?