Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

What city people can do.
by wendell Berry

winter 2008 edible brooklyn

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. I have tried to explain what I mean by that, but afterwards
I have invariably felt there was more to be said. 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 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, 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 food industry have tended more and more
to be mere consumers—passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed,
this may be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The
food industrialists have 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 no
longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the
land, and is therefore passive and uncritical—in short, a victim.
When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with
farming and with the land, the eaters suffer a kind of cultural amnesia
that is misleading and dangerous.

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 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 food, confronts 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 the 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 dependence on drugs and chemicals increases. Capital
replaces labor 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 only by entering a trap
(unless one sees ignorance and helplessness as the signs of privilege,
as many apparently do). How does one escape this trap? Only voluntarily
the same way 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, 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 will give you a measure of
“quality control.”

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 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
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.

Wendell Berry, born 1954, is a Kentucky-based writer and farmer who
believes the good life includes sustainable agriculture, healthy rural
communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry,
good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality,
and the interconnectedness of life.