Eating Is an Agricultural Act: A Tribute to the Late Wendell Berry

Remembering the farmer-poet who taught a generation that every meal is a choice about the land.

Wendell Berry died last Monday at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. He was a poet, a novelist, and an essayist who farmed land his family had worked for five generations, plowed behind a team of draft horses, and wrote in pencil by daylight because he wouldn't run his writing off strip-mined electricity. If you think for a moment about where food comes from, you owe him something, whether you've read a word of his or not.

Many people pick up The Unsettling of America expecting a book about agriculture. What they get is a book about everything. How a country treats its soil turns out to be how it treats its people, its towns, its idea of a good life. He wrote that the way farmland was being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands couldn't be pulled apart from what was happening to the culture around it. He published that in 1977, and it read like it was written this morning.

Then there’s his essay called The Pleasures of Eating, which has a line in it that doesn’t let go once you’ve read it. "Eating is an agricultural act," he wrote. The argument behind it is simple, and true. Every time you eat, you take part in the life of a farm somewhere, whether you know that farm or not, whether it's a place you'd want to stand in or not. Most people have been quietly trained to forget this, to treat food as something that begins on a shelf. Berry wanted us to wake up and rejoin the economy of it.

That's more or less why we chose to work in food. Not food as a lifestyle or a trend. Food as the daily, ordinary thread that ties a person to a piece of land, the people who tend it, and the friends you share it with.

It's also a fair description of what we're trying to do at Rootstock. In that same essay, Berry gave a short list of things an eater could actually do about all this. One was to learn the origins of your food and buy what's grown closest to home. Another was to deal directly with a local farmer whenever possible, and so cut out "the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers." When we harvest to order, and when the name on your clamshell of produce is Live Earth Farm or Fifth Crow Farm or Twin Peaks Orchards and not just a price, we're working out a very small version of what he spent his life arguing for. He never owned a computer, so he'd surely eye our online store with some suspicion, but we think he'd recognize what we're reaching for.

He got a whole generation reaching for it. You can draw a line from Berry to the farmers market on your corner, to the CSA box, to the chef who lists the farm on the menu, to the growers and organizers and soil scientists who decided a different food system was worth building. A lot of people in this industry have a Berry book with a broken spine on the shelf. Ron Kroese, the co-founder of the Land Stewardship Project, once called him the “contemporary conscience of American agriculture,” and that's about right.

He was also clear that none of this is drudgery or denial. The point, for him, was pleasure. Not the thin pleasure of convenience, but the deeper kind that comes from knowing where a thing came from and what it cost to bring it to you. Eating that way, he wrote, is "perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world," a way of celebrating our dependence and our gratitude.

So this week we're grateful. For the writing, for the argument, for the permission to take food more seriously. The best tribute we can think of is the one he'd have wanted anyway. Cook something grown by someone you could name. Sit down and eat it with attention. Then get up tomorrow and tend the small piece of the world in front of you.

Thank you, Wendell