The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 522

Wendell Berry's Agrarian Ideal
A writer of rare genius, Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is not just a representative of the alter-
native food movement; he is also one of its founders. For more than forty years, Berry's
ideas and have informed, influenced, and inspired this movement. In the introduction
to Bringing It to the Table , a collection of Berry's essays, the author Michael Pollan, him-
self one of the stars of the alternative food movement, states,
Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture
that it would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago. To many
Americans it must sound like a brand-new conversation . . . But to read the essays in
this anthology, many of them dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, is to realize just
how little of what we are saying and hearing today Wendell Berry hasn't already said,
bracingly, before.
And in that “we” I most definitely, and somewhat abashedly, include myself. I chal-
lenge you to find an idea or insight in my own recent writings on food and farming
that isn't prefigured (to put it charitably) in Berry's essays on agriculture.
(Pollan 2009, x)
Even many of those who have never read Wendell Berry, or even heard of him, have
directly or indirectly, intentionally or unknowingly, adopted some of his ideas. Referring
to the White House organic kitchen garden and some of President Barack Obama's pro-
nouncements, Michael Pollan comments, “I have no idea if Barack Obama has ever read
Wendell Berry, but Berry's thinking had found its way to his lips” (Pollan 2009, x). An
exploration of Wendell Berry's thinking thus provides useful insights into the underly-
ing ideology and logic of the alternative food movement.
In moving poetry and eloquent prose, imbued with gentleness and grace,
Wendell Berry has written about the goodness of a vanishing way of life in rural
north-central Kentucky. His writing vividly celebrates the traditional way of farm-
ing as practiced around the time of his childhood. Berry writes of the balance that
existed in the small self-sufficient rural community. He portrays that commu-
nity as being in harmony with nature and with itself. He describes the hard work
involved in farming, and lauds the joys and contentment that come from work-
ing the land. Sadly, says Berry, this near-perfect old world order is disappearing,
replaced by mechanization, industrialization and urbanization. A profound sense
of loss pervades Berry's writing, the “loss of local memory, local history, and local
names” (Berry 2001, 138).
The agrarian order that Berry so lovingly and so eloquently eulogizes is not, however,
without its dark sides. Consider, for instance, the fact that the farms that Berry so exalts
are tobacco farms. Tobacco was a major—perhaps the major—crop on most of the farms
that Berry writes about. As an integral part of the larger tobacco economy, these farmers
were responsible—even if unintentionally—for millions of deaths. In so romanticizing
tobacco farming, Berry romanticizes not only farming, but also tobacco. In spite of the