Wendell Berry, part one

About fifteen years ago, wanting tools for thinking about alternatives to contemporary consumption-crazy capitalism, I read E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973). In certain circles, it has the status of a classic, but I found it an almost complete disappointment. Schumacher is thoroughly anti-modern, suspicious of technology and capitalism, and throughout the book he rails against the excesses of industrial production. But his argument is almost entirely a negative one: he wants to destroy our current economy and the way of life it creates and enables, but he offers no compelling alternative vision. Small Is Beautiful left me with the impression that Schumacher simply liked the (mostly imaginary) old days—maybe even medieval times—better than today, but that, whatever our doubts about contemporary life, there was no reason for the rest of us to follow him.

Years later, I discovered Wendell Berry, who, while sharing a lot of Schumacher’s suspicions of modernity, unlike Schumacher succeeds in presenting a positive alternative vision. For nearly forty years, in stories, novels, poems, and essays, he has both detailed the problems with industrial life and demonstrated the many benefits—and even the necessity of—alternatives. He is, to use Isaiah Berlin’s formulation, a hedgehog, having one big idea: that a local economy, tied to a healthy stewardship of the land and a sense of responsibility towards it and one’s family and neighbors, is the only economy that is sustainable over the long term. The land, in Berry’s mind, is given to us in trust, handed from one generation to the next, and it is the job of every generation to tend it well, repair damage that has been done, and pass it on healthier than it was when we received it. If we do that, argues Berry, we will have healthy land, strong communities, and successful families.

Berry’s essays are an always interesting combination of agrarian thought and personal reflection, making use of personal experience to illustrate larger points about community and land use and drawing the essential links between environmentalism and politics. They’ve taught me a lot about my own small-town background, explaining how the rapid post-World War II industrialization and the subsequent widespread adoption of automobiles and industrial farming techniques led to the current state of rural population loss and environmental degradation. They’re also a great starting point for anyone questioning, in particular, the way we currently raise and distribute our food in the West, and in fact they were a major source for Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (which I wrote about here).

The ideas Berry lays out in his essays also underlie his fiction, where they are explored through the lives of the interlocking families of the small Kentucky hill town of Port William. Since 1960 Berry has written seven novels and two dozen stories about what he calls the Port William Membership, from Reconstruction to the present day. Much of the large cast and many of the major events in the life of the town are presented in A Place on Earth (1967), which takes place in 1943 and 1944, as World War II begins to make its effects shown, though no one in the town yet realizes how extensive and long-lasting those effects will be, or that the result will be the loss of a long-sustained agrarian way of life. In subsequent novels and stories, Berry draws attention to different groups of characters and different periods, showing us alternative views of the same stories, earlier or later incidents in the lives of people we have already come to know well through A Place on Earth.

Berry's books are full of manual labor and the constant conversation that accompanies it, of families and marriages and deaths, of surprises and violence, of tired old jokes and sudden seriousness. They’re vastly entertaining, as captivating as a soap opera, and, as novel adds to novel, each fleshing out a different portion of the overall story whose contours Berry limned in A Place on Earth, the breadth and sweep of the narrative becomes breathtaking.

More tomorrow.

Food

I have Sandy and Sarah to thank for pointing me to the best book I read during my baseball-induced blog hiatus. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, through the sometimes strained conceit of tracing four specific meals back to their source materials, is a fascinating exploration of the current state of our production of—and relationship to—food. Coming from a farm background, and being both a vegetarian and a subscriber to the produce of a nearby community-supported farm, I knew a little bit about the subject going into the book. I know that our contemporary food system is built on a willful blindness about the materials and methods that bring us our meals. I know that most American eat in ways that are bad for them and their planet, out of a combination of ignorance, busy-ness, complacency, and lack of opportunity. I know that, like many other aspects of our resource use as a culture, our current approach to food is likely to be unsustainable. And I know that I haven’t always had this knowledge, despite my background and the amount of cooking I’ve done since I became an adult; I distinctly remember being stopped cold by Wendell Berry’s reminder that we can never be any healthier than the land from which we draw our sustenance.

But despite that knowledge, Pollan’s relentless questioning, his dogged working backwards through link after link in the food supply chain, taught me a lot about aspects of our food culture that I knew little about. Take the huge fields of corn that blanket the Midwest. Pollan’s opening chapter clearly and carefully explains how, in part because of various subsidies and government programs, American agriculture after World War II began growing a tremendous surplus of corn every year. That corn has ended up in every part of our food system, with often terrible, unanticipated results. Corn syrup replaces sugar in soft drinks; because corn syrup is so cheap, the soft drinks get larger (rather than getting cheaper); people drink more calories of soft drinks; people get diabetes. That’s a simplified version, of course, leaving out many mitigating and complicating factors (which Pollan does not neglect), but when you see similarly malignant patterns in the realms of livestock, chemical fertilizers and herbicides, crop rotations, and more, the overall effect is powerful.

That chapter, and subsequent ones on large-scale organic farming (which has its own grave problems) are both fantastic. But the highlight of the book is when Pollan visits a small-scale farm in Virginia, where grasslands, chickens, hogs, and cattle interact in layers and loops of dizzying complexity to create an ecological system in careful balance, one requiring very, very few external inputs beyond sunlight, rainfall, and manual labor. The farmer, evangelical about his type of farming to the point where I think he’d probably be annoying as a relative or friend, is adamant that this is the way forward: producing and selling locally, keeping a close connection to the land and therefore (as Wendell Berry would certainly agree) fully understanding of the responsibility the farmer has to the land. At first, Pollan is confused that the farmer won’t fedex him a steak; by the end of his visit, he feels like a fool for having asked.

The closing section, on hunting (pigs) and gathering (fungi), isn’t t anywhere near as interesting. And while I love the process of cooking, I’m not actually that interested in reading about food itself, so the descriptions of meals that crop up here and there in The Omnivore’s Dilemma were mostly skippable. But it’s still a great book, and the one I’m most likely to buy as a Christmas gift for more than one person this year. It’s also the gift most likely to spark lively discussion. Pollan, after all, raises far more questions than he answers—he ‘s too smart not to acknowledge that every possible solution to our current situation has its own limitations and problems. But I’ll be very surprised if you can read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and keep it out of your thoughts the next time you sit down to a meal with the person you gave the book to, or the next time you go to the grocery store.

After all, asparagus in January? Apple cider in March? Twinkies, ever? Clearly there’s something wrong here, but how wrong, and how can we make it right? That’s a Thanksgiving dinner conversation if I’ve ever heard one!