“I’ve come to understand how important stories are,” says Jeff Chu. “Stories help us understand the world and point us to what we value.”
Chu brings that insight to his new book, Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand (Penguin Random House). After years in magazine journalism, he entered seminary, where he took a class at the “Farminary,” Princeton Theological Seminary’s small working farm. Chu’s book details how interacting with people, animals, and plants there deepened his understanding of faith and community.
Certain essays in this collection are delightful: Chu writes about his family recipes for fried rice, meditates on the parable of the sower, and articulates a “theology of compost.” Harder to read is Chu’s essay about his ambivalence and grief over slaughtering a chicken. Chu doesn’t shy away from his own mistakes, however, whether they involve confusion over how to set up a tomato cage or deeper struggles with loved ones.
These reflections—both the engaging and the challenging—suggest a new way of looking at the land, inviting readers to see the Earth less as something to use than as something to love. For Chu, reading the story of our own roots can help us better envision the relationships that connect all creation.
“My time as a farmhand was, on the whole, healing and nourishing,” Chu says, “and that goodness doesn’t just belong to me. I don’t think stories are personal possessions. In Christian theology, when you have good news, you want to share that.”
The book starts with your decision to go to seminary after a career in journalism. Did you know you wanted to explore how place, family, and food affect our faith?
It would be giving me way too much credit to say that I went into seminary with a plan for what I was doing. A lot of folks who feel a sense of spiritual calling know that push doesn’t necessarily come with clarity about your destination. You know you’re being called on a path, but you don’t know exactly where that path goes.
I didn’t have any intention of incorporating any environmental studies or ecotheology into my time at seminary. That was, for lack of a better term, a selfish decision not to spend all of my time in a conventional classroom during my first semester. That’s how I ended up taking a class at the Farminary, which is what Princeton Theological Seminary calls its small working farm.
You write that one of the first things your teachers asked you to do in this class was make a map of your own personal “geography.” Why was this assignment so meaningful, and what sort of “locations” were on your map?
I don’t know if geography is really the right term. I think of geography more as a fixed term, whereas this work was more about helping each person in the class understand where they had come from and what shaped their worldviews. Maybe evolutionary geography is more accurate: How did the shift of your personal, emotional tectonic plates over time lead you to where you are now?
For me, the things that were formative in my upbringing are my Chinese heritage, my conservative Christian values, my parents’ and grandparents’ immigrant story and how they came from Hong Kong to the United States, and the dynamics of growing up in the United States as a relatively insulated Chinese kid in the 1980s and ’90s.
All of these things, as well as both some personal traumas and real opportunities, helped shape who I am, or who I was when I entered seminary. Now, you could add on this experience at the Farminary as being one of the tremendously important formative experiences of my life that would go onto this map of places that made me who I am.
Perhaps the expected place to start in a book about gardening is with sowing seeds or planting. Your book, however, starts almost at the other end of the life cycle, with the death of your grandmother. Was that an intentional choice, to upend what people might be expecting from the opening of the book?
The entire structure of the book is an attempt to tell stories differently. A lot of American novels have tidy beginnings, middles, and ends, but that’s not how our stories as human beings work. That’s not how life works out.
It’s also not how Chinese people tell stories. Traditionally, one way of Chinese storytelling is to circle around a subject and try to perceive it from different angles, slowly putting together a picture of what you believe to be true or what you think happened. So the fact that I tell stories in a way that surprises people says something about what the expectations are of the average American reader.
A lot of nature writing is about the author going into the wilderness, but other people are so present in your experience, such as your grandmother and your friends.
I do think there was something really important to me about naming that a lot of my understanding of nature was handed down to me. I grew up in cities and suburbs. So my contact with nature—with the exception of one really bad school camping trip when I was 5—came through stories, through Chinese legends about the zodiac animals, about nature shows I watched on TV with my grandmother. It wasn’t me discovering the land for myself.
I think that’s true for most people. A lot of us learn to relate to the land because, say, a parent or grandparent took us camping. Or maybe someone dear to us took us fishing, or we went on family hiking trips during our childhood. All of these things are communal gifts; very few of us encounter nature in isolation, in the absence of any other humans.
You also don’t romanticize nature; you write about your mistakes, even in the midst of deep and sometimes painful reflections. Is this part of better connecting nature to the human?
My goal in writing this story about my time at the farm was to be as human as possible. And sometimes that means I did really dumb things: I tell the story in my book about putting a tomato cage in the ground upside down and thinking, “Wow, that’s really pointy on top. What if someone trips on that?” Sometimes that means I spent some time being petty. Other times there were really hard relational moments.
Some of these things felt enormous, some of them were quite small, but that’s how life is. I didn’t want to edit out things that might make me look bad, because I don’t have anything to hide. I think making space for other people to be more fully human is probably the best thing I could do as a writer.
I don’t want the little vignettes in this book to give any reader the impression that at the end of each farm workday, everything was idyllic and beautiful and easy. That’s just not how life works. I write in the book about how we raised chickens from chicks and then slaughtered them and how I cried. It took me a while to sort through my feelings about that first chicken slaughter. And then when we got to the second chicken slaughter, because I’ve done a few now, I still cried.
Why did I cry? It’s been a couple years down the line, and I still haven’t entirely made sense of my emotions. Maybe I never will. Maybe I’ll never be able to put into exact words what I was feeling, and that’s OK. We don’t need to have our lives perfectly packaged for others’ understanding or consumption. That’s not what life is about. And so if I can use the messiness of my own experience to make room for the messiness of others’ experiences, I think that’s good.
Did your experience on the farm change how you understood what it means to be Christian, to be a person of faith?
I had always learned about the Parable of the Sower as an illustration of what a good Christian ultimately should be—good soil in which the sower’s seed flourishes. That was the standard line. And I was really afraid of growing up to be anything other than good soil.
When I got to the Farminary, my professor, Nate Stucky, reframed that. He showed me that good soil is dynamic; it’s constantly changing. Just because soil happens to be good at this moment, that doesn’t mean it is destined to be good forever. Everything is in relationship, such that what is happening on the land at any given moment could change the course of that soil’s health three months from now or even three years from now.
He asked my class to consider whether the Parable of the Sower is not so much a prescription of what ought to be as much as a description of what is. Which is to say that the life of faith will always have seasons where the seed doesn’t take root, where things feel harder and drier and more rugged and less fertile.
And there are seasons when, because of things that have happened—maybe because a previous generation of grass has died and that organic material has contributed to the health of the soil—things will be a little more fruitful. Maybe not super productive but not the desolation that was there before.
And then maybe there will be seasons where things are really spiritually fertile, and everything seems to hit, and you and God feel super close. But just because you feel close to God in that moment, doesn’t mean your spiritual soil will remain that way forever.
When you see the parable this way, there is this gracious invitation to acknowledge what is and what has been and move away from that sense that this parable is all about what ought to be. It was such a liberative thing to hear the parable taught that way.
What about your understanding of the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation?
Before I got to the Farminary, I didn’t understand the reflexiveness with which I viewed almost everything around me as a consumer. I saw everything as existing for humans’ convenience, consumption, and use.
The missing piece there is love. What does it look like to step onto a piece of land and see it as something other than for me, something that centers my needs? Even as hikers, people who like to spend time outside, we do this: My husband and I will go somewhere to hike, and as much as we honor and love that land, we’re also there to consume an experience.
So to be on this land and to have my professor ask me to regard it in a different way actually took a lot of work. That work was about removing myself from the center of the picture. It was about recognizing the other creatures that live there—the groundhog we could never see but knew was there because of the evidence of its nighttime adventures, the deer we could hear rustling in the woods, or the Canada geese.
It was about recognizing all the plants on the land—the sweetgum trees, the different kinds of grasses that signal different kinds of soil health, or the wild roses that are beautiful but not native.
There are so many ways to see and understand the life of the land and to ask questions that don’t center consumption and the human being. That’s what I tried to do, and what I’m still trying to do even after leaving seminary. What does this world look like if we get to be observers and lovers of the world but not the protagonists of every single story?
Simone Weil said that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same as prayer. That attention is rooted in faith and love. When you love something, you want to know more about it. When you pay attention to something, you have faith that it has a story of its own, that there’s something to be learned from and about it.
If I love a piece of land, I want to know about its life, about its heritage, about how it’s been hurt and cared for. Just like how if I love another person, I want to know why they’ve become who they are and what has happened along the way. What gives them delight, what plunges them into sorrow, and what makes their heart beat faster. So, on the farm, I learned new ways to pay attention.
Do you think it’s possible to view the land in this deeper way without spending years—seasons—in one place?
I do think everyone can encounter the world differently, no matter where you are. I’m sitting in a hotel room in Indianapolis; I just got here yesterday. I look out my window, and I see a sky that is mostly cloudy but has streaks of blue. One utilitarian way to see that sky would be to think, “Oh good, it doesn’t look like rain. That will make my day better.” But another way to see the sky would be just to notice the striations and patterns of blue and white the clouds are making without worrying about the effect the sky will have on me.
We all have the opportunity to look around and ask questions that don’t center ourselves. Out my window, I can also see a couple wandering down the street. They seem deep in conversation; I wonder what they’re talking about, and I hope they’re happy. I wish them well and send them off with a blessing. They don’t have to be part of my own story.
We all have the opportunity to do this sort of thing 10,000 times a day: to bless the world around us and to notice something that is just beautiful.
There’s this thread throughout your book of a “theology of compost.” What is a theology of compost?
Death is never the end of God’s story. There’s this cycle of life and death and resurrection that is written into creation itself and into the processes that we can observe.
For instance, many of us have marveled at the beauty of, say, a zinnia during the summertime. But by the time the petals start to turn brown, we might not be so excited about the zinnia, or whatever the flower is. But just because the flower is fading, that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the story. Eventually, the flower produces a seed. It appears at the end of those browned and withered petals.
On a flower like a sunflower, if I grow the flower in the garden, I can see the bees and other pollinators having a feast. And when it goes to seed, then it’s time for the birds and the squirrels to eat their fill. Eventually some of these seeds fall to the ground. And, yes, we have witnessed a death. But then the next season, maybe I don’t have to plant any sunflowers, because from the death of one generation of sunflower came the new life of another.
That’s what I mean by a theology of compost. Metaphors break down at some point, but I do think that the general outline works: We can see that God has written into our world this cycle that never leaves us hopeless.
What might it look like for people to start to integrate this view of creation and God into their own lives?
We all have traditions around food—whether in our own individual households or things we’ve inherited from our parents or grandparents. I think one thing we can all do is ask why. Why do we do this? Why do we love to eat what we eat?
Then we can start asking whose hands helped get our food to our table. Even if the meal is a bag of potato chips from a convenience store or a Happy Meal from McDonald’s. Even the most processed food includes stories of human interaction, stories about how the Earth is used, stories about ecosystems.
All I want is for folks to pay a little more attention. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are, how busy or at leisure you are, what kind of food you are eating: We all have the ability to pay better attention to the world around us.
This article also appears in the September 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 9, pages 26-30). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/Jonathan Kemper
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