Review: American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

I did not realize it when I started Marie Mutsuki Mockett's American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, that the core of the book is a travel narrative. Somehow I was expecting something different, although I am not sure what I was expecting. Mutsuki Mockett and her crew of Mennonite contract harvesters from Lancaster, Pennsylvania travel to and through Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Idaho cutting wheat fields. They are highly skilled workers operating combines and other sophisticated equipment. This is not the sort of work a dedicated amateur could just figure out with a little elbow grease. (Although Mutsuki Mockett herself is mostly along for the ride as a participant observer who does some of the work while writing ethnographic field notes in the off hours.) 

Mutsuki Mockett was raised in a Buddhist tradition with a Japanese mother and Scottish father with time spent in Nebraska, San Francisco, and New York City. There is much written about the Christian Bible, Protestant churches, and the Anabaptists. There is a lot about the Anabaptists and Mennonites. The term Anabaptist occurs 18 times when I did a search on my kindle. Mutsuki Mockett clearly put a lot of work into reading and thinking about topics as diverse as the Book of Revelation, the history of Oklahoma (did you know it was admitted as the 46th state in only 1907?), geology (with an explanation of the Laramide orogeny), Native America (she attends a Sun Dance), and Native Americans, Mormons, and Protestant Christians, psychological decision making, and farm implements. Although, occasionally, the author underestimates the background knowledge of her readers such as when she spends half a page explaining what an auger is.

A topic that comes up over and over is the gap between multicultural New York City and San Francisco where the author had many Black, Jewish, Latino, and gay friends and small towns where white evangelical straight farmers who claim to have never met a gay person grow wheat. This distinction is often tied to organic and Non-GMO farming as opposed to the methods that are far more common among most farmers. This quote illustrates the idea:

"You think," said my cousin in his summarizing voice, "that the Christians don't mind playing with genetic material, even though they believe God created everything and some of them don't like stem cells, and your atheist friends like the idea of food in which the genetic material hasn't been modified, even though they don't believe in God, and even though all food has been modified."

"Right," I said. "so if we don't believe in God, and we think everything can be explained by evolution and genes, why does it matter if we alter the DNA?"

"Ah."

They were all quiet. It was a good question. It was based on some assumptions, but it was an intriguing question. Finally, my uncle patted me on the shoulder. "You'll spend a long time with this one."

While the book does mention Trump once and describes what it was like to hear about what happened at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia and how it was (or not) talked about in a small protestant church the author attended in between cutting wheat, Mutsuki Mockett wisely steers clear of politics in the book. Despite spending a lot of time raising questions about the topic, the book offers no definitive answers to the questions that come up about the cultural gap between small town America and coastal urban America. 

I thought the book was well written and worth my time.