If you don’t know Zac Sarian, you don’t know the future.
But that’s because the future is—or should be—about a dramatic return to a green planet, where green, live things will soon reclaim what we razed forests to the ground for, what we flattened hills and mountains for, what we killed bugs and birds and animals for, our cities made of inorganic things like plastic, rubber, asphalt, concrete, glass, and steel.
The future is also about food security. It’s about knowing where our food comes from and knowing our food doesn’t need to travel so far to make it to our tables. There is no other time than now that it’s been made clear to us without any doubt that we are in danger of having put a great distance between where we live and where our food is grown, but Zac Sarian’s career of a lifetime had always been about bridging this gap. His efforts not only as an agri-journalist but also as a farmer had always been about dragging us back to the earth designed naturally to sustain us.
I’d like to think that Zac Sarian had inspired the weekend farmer, a whole generation 30 years his junior who, over the past decade, had begun to see the point of tending farms in their spare time. It will take another Zac Sarian to inspire these weekend farmers to go the whole hog, pun intended.
Or maybe the pandemic has done his work for him and so Zac Sarian has decided it is time to rest. He retired from work in March this year just as the quarantine began and he witnessed, as we have, in the course of the past nine months, how his life’s work has gained fruition with every tomato harvested from pots on condominium building terraces or every mung bean gone from seed to pod in basins kept in kitchen windows. Now we know, in a world fraught with danger, that growing our own food may yet be the only skill we need, especially as the recent turn of events has made it oh so clear that we can, in fact, do our white-collar jobs while harvesting produce in our WiFi-enabled farms or on data-run gadgets in between feeding our farm animals.
I could have been a diplomat, but I chose agri.
Zac Sarian
In Batac, Ilocos Norte, Zac Sarian was born to be a champion of Philippine agriculture. He went to a high school whose curriculum was dominated by agricultural studies and even then he was only learning in theory what he was already practicing as a farmhand raising cows, hogs, and chickens at his cousin’s farm.
In college, while taking up foreign service, he began writing about agriculture for a national daily, the Manila Chronicle, and he had since never stopped, not until his retirement from the Manila Bulletin in March this year. In 1991, he joined the Manila Bulletin, in which he soon took the helm of the agriculture section, which later spun off in a monthly magazine. He also ran the column “Agri-Talk” in the Philippine Panorama, in which week after week he would write success stories celebrating farms and farmers or their particular produce. One wonders if, in all these decades writing about farming, while many, across several generations, dreamed of becoming astronauts or factory owners or nurses abroad or tech wizards, everything else, except farmers, Zac Sarian ever wondered whom he was writing for.
But his life’s pursuits had not been for naught. He was multi-awarded. Early in his career, in 1971, he was honored with a Jefferson Fellowship in Developmental Journalism and, only a few years later, in 1974, with no less than the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts.
But there is no reward better than a name that will always be associated with the future each of us should like for ourselves—a future in which we can grow our own food—because what future is possible without food, what future is there when what we do today does not put it in the center of everything?
Zac Sarian is no more. He died in the morning of Dec. 7, 2020. He was 83.
But he had lived a lifetime planting seeds that, with hope, we could grow into the future he believed we deserved.