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Wendell Berry 395 Wendell Berry “The Pleasures of Eating” A perceptive comment by the critic Jack Hicks of the University of California at Davis is a good way to introduce Kentucky’s preeminent writer about the human relationship to the land and, indeed, all of nature. Berry’s own life and work, he says, “has nourished and been nourished by an extraordinarily rich metaphor: man as husband, in the oldest senses of the word, having committed himself in multiple marriage to wife, family, farm, community, and finally, to the great cycle of nature itself.” It is, he says, “the central stream of Wendell Berry’s writing.” Berry’s novels and short stories, his essays and poems, and his fiction and nonfiction center on the fragile but strong human bond to nature and humanity’s good stewardship of the natural world—leitmotifs running like a river of life through them all. Although Berry probably wishes that he had been born at home in Port Royal in Henry County on the Kentucky River—a setting more in keeping with his agrarian vocation—he was born in a Louisville hospital on August 5, 1934. In his writing and in his life, he has more than made up for that missed symbolism. In 1965 he moved his family to a small farm near his ancestral home at Port Royal. Despite setbacks and false starts, it has been an awe-inspiring achievement in agrarian living. His works include Nathan Coulter (1960), a novel about farming the old way, The Hidden Wound (1970), a book of essays about the permanent wounds left by slavery on both the owners and the owned, and another collection of essays, The Art of the Commonplace (2002), from which the first selection is taken. h Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, “What can city people do?” “Eat responsibly,” I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I meant by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt that there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation. I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as “consum395 396 The Kentucky Anthology ers.” If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers . They buy what they want—or what they have been persuaded to want— within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been manufactured or “processed” or “precooked,” how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value? Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea—something they do not know or imagine—until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table. The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers—passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and...

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