“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—has 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 way the sweat.

Why had no one told her about this before?”

Alison Luterman, Bread, Body, Spirit, a collection of writing on the role food plays in our lives.