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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Michael Pollan: People Are Finally Talking About Food, and You Can Thank Wendell Berry for That
  • Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:09:16 -0600


"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.""

"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."


Michael Pollan: People Are Finally Talking About Food, and You Can Thank
Wendell Berry for That
http://www.alternet.org/environment/142502/michael_pollan%3A_people_are_finally_talking_about_food%2C_and_you_can_thank_wendell_berry_for_that/?page=entire
By Michael Pollan, The Nation. Posted September 10, 2009.

Wendell 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.

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 Lappé, 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, Lappé 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.





  • [Livingontheland] Michael Pollan: People Are Finally Talking About Food, and You Can Thank Wendell Berry for That, Tradingpost, 09/12/2009

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