Back to Morten Korch
When I think back to Denmark as it was in the "good old days", I think of Morten Korch's cornfields in the sunshine, haystacks and storks on the roof, and boys and girls on horse-drawn carts gathering the harvest in the barn, washing carrots at the well in the courtyard, and together securing supplies and prosperity for the whole farm and surrounding area.
Back then, you knew where your food came from - it was local, unsprayed, natural and had passed through human hands several times before landing on our tables. What percentage of the food in your fridge right now lives up to these values? 1%? Probably no more than 10%.
Today, most food is sown, harvested and packaged by machines, transported across borders and sold by clerks who lack any knowledge of the origin, nature and use of each food. This is not a criticism of the clerks - how could a young unskilled man have in-depth knowledge of all the 100,000 items in the shop - but rather a criticism of the system which distances us from food to such an extent that we, as end consumers, are often the first people to touch our food and sometimes do not actually know the answer to whether a vegetable/fruit grows on a bush, a tree or in the ground.
The large grain fields (Or as in the picture our neighbouring field with oilseed rape) with their streamlined, perfectly straight rows without a blade of grass or a mushroom are undoubtedly beautiful - I enjoy the sight myself every day - but they are very far from the Morten Korch scenery of the past, and as a neighbour to such fields, I see how the rape/grain is sown, sprayed (many times) and harvested with gigantic machines and I often wonder how we as humans choose to treat our food in this way.
I know every day wasn't all fun and games of course, with Poul Richard singing "Er du dus med himlens fugle?" in the good old days. Back then, too, harvests could fail, there could be strife, poverty, sickness and misfortune, and there was hard physical labour that put its mark on farm workers and made them old before their time, but ...
I often long for a simpler time when people didn't spend all their time on the internet, settling accounts and reporting to tax, VAT, local councils and the state and when everything didn't have to be so streamlined and standard and rule-based.
I dream of a world where we as people function in our local communities again and come together, and where we work together to create our own local, spray-free, natural and human-produced food. A world where we live healthy, physical lives; where there is room for the old, the young, the foreign, the Danish, the fat, the thin, the quirky, the spiritual and the practical - Everyone has skills and everyone can contribute - A world where the focus is put on the people and where people are not put in boxes, assessed, tested and measured; placed behind a computer screen in an open office landscape with standard art on the white walls. A world where there is TIME.
My own "journey" is far from over, but so far I am happy that I chose to exchange my office job for one under the open sky. I am stronger, braver, happier, freer and much more myself. And although you would think that working on my little farm could get lonely, I have more meaningful relationships every day on the "farm" than I have experienced having in the office and the learning curve is steep... And I get to enjoy the birds singing every day :)
