[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Pleasures of Eating

[Bill Totten]

by Wendell Berry


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 mean by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt 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 "consumers". 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 of 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 (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do
not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because
they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest assured that
they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food
consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food
factory directly into his or her stomach.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. The industrial eater is, in fact,
one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer
knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who
is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical - in short, a victim.
When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming
and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural
amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The current version of the
"dream home" of the future involves "effortless" shopping from a list of
available goods on a television monitor and heating precooked food by
remote control. Of course, this implies and depends on, a perfect
ignorance of the history of the food that is consumed. It requires that
the citizenry should give up their hereditary and sensible aversion to
buying a pig in a poke. It wishes to make the selling of pigs in pokes
an honorable and glamorous activity. The dreams in this dream home will
perforce know nothing about the kind or quality of this food, or where
it came from, or how it was produced and prepared, or what ingredients,
additives, and residues it contains - unless, that is, the dreamer
undertakes a close and constant study of the food industry, in which
case he or she might as well wake up and play an active an responsible
part in the economy of food.

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our
freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our
minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected
to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are
controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of
food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to
live free.

But if there is a food politics, there are also a food esthetics and a
food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics. Like
industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and
paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more
resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels.
"Life is not very interesting", we seem to have decided. "Let its
satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast". We hurry through our
meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to "recreate"
ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we
hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through
our recreation - for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some
fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the "quality" of our life? And
all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and
effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in
this world.

One will find this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the
advertisements of the food industry, in which food wears as much makeup
as the actors. If one gained one's whole knowledge of food from these
advertisements (as some presumably do), one would not know that the
various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all come from
the soil, or that they were produced by work. The passive American
consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts
a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been
processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained,
blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any
creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have
been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and
eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a
kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater
may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction 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
obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reasons to obscure
the connection between food and farming. It would not do for the
consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who
spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot,
helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the
veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not
have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be
less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic
and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for
vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals -
just as animals in close confinements are dependent on antibiotics and
other drugs.

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the
food industry - as in any other industry - the overriding concerns are
not quality and health, but volume and price. For decades now the entire
industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains
of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants has been obsessed with volume.
It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order
(probably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines;
as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the
dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital
replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and
chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of
the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcuts that will
increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is
to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty,
healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.

It is possible, then, to be liberated from the husbandry and wifery of
the old household food economy. But one can be thus liberated only by
entering a trap (unless one sees ignorance and helplessness as the signs
of privilege, as many people apparently do). The trap is the ideal of
industrialism: a walled city surrounded by valves that let merchandise
in but no consciousness out. How does one escape this trap? Only
voluntarily, the same way that one went in: by restoring one's
consciousness of what is involved in eating; by reclaiming
responsibility for one's own part in the food economy. One might begin
with the illuminating principle of Sir Albert Howard's The Soil and
Health (1945), that we should understand "the whole problem of health in
soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject". Eaters, that is,
must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that
it is inescapably an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a
considerable extent, how the world is used. This 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 is a list, probably not definitive:

1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you
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 kitchen scraps and
use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you
become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from
soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal 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.

2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life
the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more
cheaply, and it will give you a measure of "quality control": you will
have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.

3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is
produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be,
as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of
sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, freshest,
and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.

4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or
orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply
here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of
merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who
thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.

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

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

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

The last suggestion seems particularly important to me. Many people are
now as much estranged from the lives of domestic plants and animals
(except for flowers and dogs and cats) as they are from the lives of the
wild ones. This is regrettable, for these domestic creatures are in
diverse ways attractive; there is such pleasure in knowing them. And
farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, and gardening, at their best,
are complex and comely arts; there is much pleasure in knowing them, too.

It follows that there is great displeasure in knowing about a food
economy that degrades and abuses those arts and those plants and animals
and the soil from which they come. For anyone who does know something of
the modern history of food, eating away from home can be a chore. My own
inclination is to eat seafood instead of red meat or poultry when I am
traveling. Though I am by no means a vegetarian, I dislike the thought
that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am
going to eat meat, I want it to be 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 eat vegetables and fruits that I know have lived
happily and healthily in good soil, not the products of the huge,
bechemicaled factory-fields that I have seen, for example, in the
Central Valley of California. The industrial farm is said to have been
patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more
like a concentration camp.

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the
mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have
grown and know that the garden is healthy and remember the beauty of the
growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens
are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is
one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the
garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for
eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly
grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think of it as
bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its
life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding
and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in
one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food
comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard
of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to
the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.

I mentioned earlier the politics, esthetics, and ethics of food. But to
speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating
with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on
ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with
the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence
and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did
not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of
food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams,
which seem to me merely honest:

There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.

The blessed plants and the sea,
yield it to the imagination intact.
_____

Wendell Berry is a farmer and author of more than thirty books of
poetry, essays, and novels.

"The Pleasures of Eating" from What Are People For? (1990) by Wendell
Berry.

Copyright (c) 1990 by Wendell Berry.

http://www.stjoan.com/ecosp/docs/pleasures_of_eating_by_wendell_b.htm


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