The Weight of the Harvest

To eat is to participate in a slow, quiet violence. We take what the earth has spent months preparing, the sun-warmed fruit, the bitter oil, and we make it part of our own blood. There is a gravity to this. In the north, we understand the hunger that comes with the frost, the way a single preserved thing can anchor a long, dark afternoon. We do not often stop to look at what sits before us. We consume, we move, we forget. But there is a stillness in the object itself, a density that exists before the hunger takes hold. It is a small, dark sphere of history, holding the heat of a summer that has long since retreated into the soil. If we held it long enough, would we taste the season? Or would we only find the silence of the tree that bore it?

Sandra Frimpong has captured this quiet gravity in her photograph titled Olives. It is a study of what remains when the noise of the world falls away. Does the simplicity of the plate tell you anything about the hunger you carry?