the pleasures of eating by wendell berry (edible nation)

8/12/2019 THE PLEASURES OF EATING By Wendell Berry (Edible Nation)

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Many times, after I have nished a lecture on the decline of Americanfarming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, Whatcan city people do?

Eat responsibly, I have usually answered. I have tried to explain what I mean by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt there wasmore to be said. I would like to attempt a better explanation.

I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eat-ing ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins withplanting and bir th. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware thatthis is true. ey think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps,but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture.

ey think of themselves as consumers. If they think beyondthat, they recognize that they are passive consumers. ey buy whatthey wantor what they have been persuaded to wantwithin thelimits of what they can get. ey pay, mostly without protest, what

they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questionabout the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh isit? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? Hofar was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost?How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add tothe cost? When the food product has been manufactured or pro-cessed or precooked, how has that a ff ected its quality or price ornutritional value?

Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farmsBut most do not know what farms, or what k inds of farms, or wherethe farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming

ey apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to pro-duce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them,food is pretty much an abstract ideasomething they do not knowor imagineuntil it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.

THE PLEASURES OF EATINGBy Wendell Berry

EDIBLE NATION

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e specialization of production induces specialization of consump-tion. Patrons of the food industry have tended more and more tobe mere consumerspassive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, thismay be one of the chief goals of industrial production. e food in-dustrialists have persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food thatis already prepared. ey will grow, deliver, and cook your food foryou and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. at they do notyet off er to insert it, pre-chewed, into our mouth is only because theyhave found no protable way to do so. We may rest assured that they

would be glad to nd such a way. e ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food fac-tory directly into his or her stomach.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. e industrial eater no longerknows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, andis therefore passive and uncriticalin short, a victim. When food, inthe minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with theland, the eaters suff er a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleadingand dangerous.

Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor,and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more andmore resemble lling stations, as our homes more and more resem-ble motels. Life is not very interesting , we seem to have decided.Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast . We hurrythrough our meals to go to work and hurry through our work inorder to recreate ourselves in the evenings and on weekends. Andall this i s carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causesand eff ects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the bodyin this world.

One will nd this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in theadvertisements of the food industry, in which food wears as muchmakeup as the actors. If one gained ones whole knowledge of foodfrom these advertisements (as some presumably do), one would notknow that the various edibles were ever living creatures, or thatthey all come from the soil, or that they were produced by work.

e passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-pre-pared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have beenprocessed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained,blended, prettied, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part ofany creature that ever lived. e products of nature and agriculturehave been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Botheater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the resultis a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in whichthe eater may think of eating as, rst, a purely commercial trans-action between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive

transaction between him and his food. And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, again, of obvi-ous benet to the food industry, which has good reasons to obscurethe connection between food and farming. It would not do for theconsumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from asteer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrementin a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf thatyielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which itdid not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for theslaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditateon the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square elds of

cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependenton toxic chemicalsjust as animals in close connements are depen-dent on antibiotics and other drugs.

e consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, inthe food industryas in any other industrythe overriding con-cerns are not quality and health, but volume and price. For decadesthe entire industrial food economy has been obsessed with volume.It has relentlessly increased scale in order (probably) to reduce costs.But as scale increases, diversity declines; so does health; and depen-dence on drugs and chemicals increases. Capital replaces labor bysubstituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers andfor the natural health and fertility of the soil. e food is produced byany means or any shortcuts that will increase prots. And the busi-ness of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumerthat food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee ofmarital delity and long life.

How does one escape this trap? The same way one went by restoring ones consciousness of what is involved in eat

by reclaiming responsibility for ones own part in the food econo

Ph ot o s : C

a r ol eT o p ali a n

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It is possible, then, to be liberated from the husbandry and wifery ofthe old household food economy, but only by entering a trap (unless

one sees ignorance and helplessness as the signs of privilege, as manyapparently do). How does one escape this trap? Only voluntarily, thesame way one went in: by restoring ones consciousness of what isinvolved in eating; by reclaiming responsibility for ones own part inthe food economy. One might begin with the illuminating principleof Sir Albert Howards e Soil and Health, that we should under-stand the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man asone great subject. Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takesplace inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agriculturalact, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the

world is used. is is a simple way of describing a relationship that is

inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact,so far as we can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here isa list, probably not denitive:

Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you1.have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window,grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitch-en scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food foryourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energycycle that revolves from soil to seed to ower to fruit to food tooff al to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for

any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

Prepare your own food. is means reviving in your own mind and2.life the arts of kitchen and household. is should enable you to eamore cheaply, and will give you a measure of quality control.

Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is3.produced closest to your home. e idea that every locality shouldbe, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes severkinds of sense. e locally produced food supply is the most secure, freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know abouand to inuence.

Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, o4.orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion applhere. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole packof merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertise

who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.

Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy an5.technology of industrial food production. What is added to thefood that is not food, and what do you pay for those additions?

Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.6.

Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience 7.possible, of the life histories of the food species.

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e last suggestion seems particularly important to me. Many peopleare now as much estranged from the lives of domestic plants andanimals (except for owers and dogs and cats) as they are from thelives of the wild ones. is is regrettable, for there is such pleasure inknowing them. And farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, andgardening, at their best, are complex and comely arts; there is muchpleasure in knowing them, too.

It follows that there is great displeasure in knowing about a foodeconomy that degrades and abuses those arts and those plants andanimals and the soil from which they come. For anyone who doesknow something of the modern history of food, eating away from

home can be a chore. My own inclination is to eat seafood instead ofred meat or poultry when I am traveling. ough I am by no meansa vegetarian, I dislike the thought that some animal has been mademiserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it tobe from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors,on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.

And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants. I like to eatvegetables and fruits that I know have lived happily and healthily ingood soil, not the products of the huge, bechemicaled factory-eldsthat I have seen, for example, in the Central Valley of California. eindustrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory produc-tion line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp.

e pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of themere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegeta-bles have grown and know that the garden is healthy and rememberthe beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy rst light ofmorning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory is one of thepleasures of eating. e knowledge of the good health of the gardenrelieves and frees and comforts the eater. e same goes for eatingmeat. e thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly

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The locally produced food supply is the mostsecure, freshest, and the easiest for localconsumers to know about and to inuence.

grazing avors the steak. Some, I know, will think of it as blood-thirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life.On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understandingand with gratitude. A signicant part of the pleasure of eating is inones accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from whichfood comes. e pleasure of eating, then, may be the best availablestandard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fullyavailable to the urban consumer who will make the necessary eff ort.

Wendell Berry, born 1934, is a Kentucky-based writer and farmer whbelieves the good life includes sustainable agriculture, healthy rural comunities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, gwork, local economics, the miracle of life, delity, frugality, and the iterconnectedness of life.

e Pleasures of Eating fromWhat Are People For? by Wendell Ber-ry. Copyright (c) 1990 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission ofNorth Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

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the pleasures of eating by wendell berry (edible nation)

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