Wendell Berry for That
By Michael Pollan
The Nation Posted on September
10, 2009, Printed on September 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142502/
This article is adapted from Michael Pollan's introduction to Bringing It
to the Table, a collection of Wendell Berry's writings out this fall from
Counterpoint.
A few days after Michelle Obama broke ground on an organic vegetable
garden on the South Lawn of the White House in March, the business
section of the Sunday New York Times published a cover story bearing the
headline Is a Food Revolution Now in Season? The article, written by the
paper's agriculture reporter, said that "after being largely ignored for
years by Washington, advocates of organic and locally grown food have
found a receptive ear in the White House."
Certainly these are heady days for people who have been working to reform
the way Americans grow food and feed themselves -- the "food movement,"
as it is now often called. Markets for alternative kinds of food -- local
and organic and pastured -- are thriving, farmers' markets are popping up
like mushrooms and for the first time in many years the number of farms
tallied in the Department of Agriculture's census has gone up rather than
down. The new secretary of agriculture has dedicated his department to
"sustainability" and holds meetings with the sorts of farmers and
activists who not many years ago stood outside the limestone walls of the
USDA holding signs of protest and snarling traffic with their tractors.
Cheap words, you might say; and it is true that, so far at least, there
have been more words than deeds -- but some of those words are
astonishing. Like these: shortly before his election, Barack Obama told a
reporter for Time that "our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil"; he went on
to connect the dots between the sprawling monocultures of industrial
agriculture and, on the one side, the energy crisis and, on the other,
the healthcare crisis.
Americans today are having a national conversation about food and
agriculture that would have been impossible to imagine even a few short
years ago. To many Americans it must sound like a brand-new conversation,
with its bracing talk about the high price of cheap food, or the links
between soil and health, or the impossibility of a society eating well
and being in good health unless it also farms well.
But the national conversation unfolding around the subject of food and
farming really began in the 1970s, with the work of writers like Wendell
Berry, Frances Moore Lapp, Barry Commoner and Joan Gussow. All four of
these writers are supreme dot-connectors, deeply skeptical of reductive
science and far ahead not only in their grasp of the science of ecology
but in their ability to think ecologically: to draw lines of connection
between a hamburger and the price of oil, or between the vibrancy of life
in the soil and the health of the plants, animals and people eating from
that soil.
I would argue that the conversation got under way in earnest in 1971,
when Berry published an article in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue
introducing Americans to the work of Sir Albert Howard, the British
agronomist whose thinking had deeply influenced Berry's own since he
first came upon it in 1964. Indeed, much of Berry's thinking about
agriculture can be read as an extended elaboration of Howard's master
idea that farming should model itself on natural systems like forests and
prairies, and that scientists, farmers and medical researchers need to
reconceive "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as
one great subject." No single quotation appears more often in Berry's
writing than that one, and with good reason: it is manifestly true (as
even the most reductive scientists are coming to recognize) and, as a
guide to thinking through so many of our problems, it is inexhaustible.
That same year, 1971, Lapp published Diet for a Small Planet, which
linked modern meat production (and in particular the feeding of grain to
cattle) to the problems of world hunger and the environment. Later in the
decade, Commoner implicated industrial agriculture in the energy crisis,
showing us just how much oil we were eating when we ate from the
industrial food chain; and Gussow explained to her nutritionist
colleagues that the problem of dietary health could not be understood
without reference to the problem of agriculture.
Looking back on this remarkably fertile body of work, which told us all
we needed to know about the true cost of cheap food and the value of good
farming, is to register two pangs of regret, one personal, the other more
political: first, that as a young writer coming to these subjects a
couple of decades later, I was rather less original than I had thought;
and second, that as a society we failed to heed a warning that might have
averted or at least mitigated the terrible predicament in which we now
find ourselves.
For what would we give today to have back the "environmental crisis" that
Berry wrote about so prophetically in the 1970s, a time still innocent of
the problem of climate change? Or to have back the comparatively
manageable public health problems of that period, before obesity and type
2 diabetes became "epidemic"? (Most experts date the obesity epidemic to
the early 1980s.)
But history will show that we failed to take up the invitation to begin
thinking ecologically. As soon as oil prices subsided and Jimmy Carter
was rusticated to Plains, Georgia (along with his cardigan, thermostat
and solar panels), we went back to business -- and agribusiness -- as
usual. In the mid-1980s Ronald Reagan removed Carter's solar panels from
the roof of the White House, and the issues that the early wave of
ecologically conscious food writers had raised were pushed to the margins
of national politics and culture.
When I began writing about agriculture in the late '80s and '90s, I
quickly figured out that no editor in Manhattan thought the subject
timely or worthy of his or her attention, and that I would be better off
avoiding the word entirely and talking instead about food, something
people then still had some use for and cared about, yet oddly never
thought to connect to the soil or the work of farmers.
It was during this period that I began reading Berry's work closely --
avidly, in fact, because I found in it practical answers to questions I
was struggling with in my garden. I had begun growing a little of my own
food, not on a farm but in the backyard of a second home in the exurbs of
New York, and had found myself completely ill prepared, especially when
it came to the challenges posed by critters and weeds. An obedient child
of Thoreau and Emerson (both of whom mistakenly regarded weeds as emblems
of wildness and gardens as declensions from nature), I honored the wild
and didn't fence off my vegetables from the encroaching forest. I don't
have to tell you how well that turned out. Thoreau did plant a bean field
at Walden, but he couldn't square his love of nature with the need to
defend his crop from weeds and birds, and eventually he gave up on
agriculture. Thoreau went on to declare that "if it were proposed to me
to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human
art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for
the swamp." With that slightly obnoxious declaration, American writing
about nature all but turned its back on the domestic landscape. It's not
at all surprising that we got better at conserving wilderness than at
farming and gardening.
It was Wendell Berry who helped me solve my Thoreau problem, providing a
sturdy bridge over the deep American divide between nature and culture.
Using the farm rather than the wilderness as his text, Berry taught me I
had a legitimate quarrel with nature -- a lover's quarrel -- and showed
me how to conduct it without reaching for the heavy artillery. He
relocated wildness from the woods "out there" (beyond the fence) to a
handful of garden soil or the green shoot of a germinating pea, a
necessary quality that could be not just conserved but cultivated. He
marked out a path that led us back into nature, no longer as spectators
but as full-fledged participants.
Obviously much more is at stake here than a garden fence. My Thoreau
problem is another name for the problem of American environmentalism,
which historically has had much more to say about leaving nature alone
than about how we might use it well. To the extent that we're finally
beginning to hear a new, more neighborly conversation between American
environmentalists and American farmers, not to mention between urban
eaters and rural food producers, Berry deserves much of the credit for
getting it started with sentences like these:
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in...farming? There are lots of
reasons - but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. To be interested in
food but not in food production is clearly absurd. Urban conservationists
may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they
are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all
farming by proxy. They can eat only if land is farmed on their behalf by
somebody somewhere in some fashion. If conservationists will attempt to
resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly
directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature. - -
"Conservationist and Agrarian," 2002
That we are all implicated in farming -- that, in Berry's now- famous
formulation, "eating is an agricultural act" -- is perhaps his signal
contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today. All
those taking part in that conversation, whether in the White House or at
the farmers' market, are deep in his debt.
2009 The Nation All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142502/
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