Like an Infant Raised at His Mother's Breasts

I love and hate this quote from Avot de Rabbi Natan 31:1, included in Hazon’s Food For Thought curriculum book:

R. Achia ben Yeshaya said: One who purchases grain in the marketplace–to what may such a person be likened? To an infant whose mother died, and they pass him from door to door among wetnurses and [still] the baby is not satisfied. One who buys bread in the marketplace–to what may such a person be likened? It is as if he is dead and buried. But one who eats from his own (what he has grown himself) is like an infant raised at his mother breasts.

I'm not sure why this quote is so equally offensive and true. Don't most of us buy bread in the grocery store, and aren't most of us thus living as if dead and buried? If I may condemn myself with the rest of us poor sinners, I can only answer, Yes, we are all living a lie. We are so ignorant, we need instructions on how to boil rice. How can we even begin to understand our big-agro subsidy system or the implications of Monsanto's monopoly on grain seed? How about millers? Know anything about them?

I love to bake my own bread, but it's just not possible to do every day, or even every week. To extend the idea past bread, though, my husband and I cook our dinners, lunches, and many breakfasts from scratch and have a pretty good idea of where our chicken eggs are laid and what five ingredients make up our store-bought cereals (Cheerios, etc.)

Let's go to Rabbi Achia ben Yeshaya's point, and see how it applies to my life: I have chosen to breastfeed my child, and I value the mother-child connection that this engenders, but I have no idea where my wheat or rye comes from, or how to grow it. So, I'm like an orphan who may as well be dead and buried, but my child is satisfied because I remain a source of satisfaction for him (despite being dead). This convoluted logic is really what drives my distaste for this Rabbi's teaching. But then, the mysterious pull of his metaphor of the orphan: The child just wants to be able to trust the source of his food. Going from wetnurse to wetnurse, the orphan is fed but not loved. He is an afterthought to the nurses and can't possibly know if the numerous sources of his food are nourishing or poisoning him. Of course, neither can I, by looking at a row of bagged flours, tell which ones were grown ethically and which were not. So I may bake my own bread, but who cares? I'm so ignorant, I might as well be dead.