Fresh Vegetables. Credit: ConstructionDealMkting. (CC BY 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/41608186@N06/4463639314.
‘To be rooted’, wrote French philosopher Simone Weil in The Need for Roots, ‘is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul’ (2002, 40). Writing at the height of the Second World War and shortly before her death, Weil argued that human beings need both material and moral nourishment for life. Food, housing, and heating, for example, may fulfil our physical needs but are not in themselves sufficient conditions for the optimal life of the soul (Weil 2002, 6). Human beings also require the balanced satisfaction of opposing needs: both order and liberty, for example, both security and risk (Weil 2002, 11). When a human being is uprooted, as Weil suggested was both the cause and the consequence of the tragic events of the first half of the twentieth century, she is cut away from a community and thus from the ‘treasures of the past and […] expectations for the future’ (2002, 40). This deracination is particularly prevalent in the brutal actions of war and colonialism, but also more subversively in modern capitalism and the dogmatic pursuit of economic gain (Weil 2002, 41).[1]
