The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 524

is part of a fascinating story of how the pre-World War II South of poverty and share-
croppers became the modern, urbanized South of the 1990s.
(Holley 2000, xiv)
Wendell Berry's Basic Principles
Wendell Berry's work may be seen as dedicated to espousing certain basic principles,
which have remained remarkably consistent over his more than forty years as a public
intellectual. According to Berry, we must adopt these principles in order to reverse our
present-day deviation from what he calls the “standard of nature” and return to the path
of righteousness.
Local Is Best
A prominent theme in Berry's ideas is the goodness of the local: local food, local econ-
omy, local conventions, local loyalty, local community, local adaptations, and so on. We
must think in terms of the local, says Berry, because only the local can be directly experi-
enced and understood in its concrete particulars, while knowledge of the nonlocal must
necessarily be abstract. Unfortunately, says Berry, people today are all too eager to dis-
parage the local. Too many have been infected with a “characteristic disease of the twen-
tieth century: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace
else” (Berry 2004a, 49).
According to Kimberly Smith, the author of Wendell Berry and the Agrarain
Tradition: A Common Grace , Berry's novels are centrally concerned with “how a place
and a person can come to belong to one another—or, rather, how a person can come to
belong to a place.” According to Smith, Berry typically describes a place as represent-
ing a ritualistic union, a marriage , between people and nature (Smith 2004, 142). One's
identification with a place, according to Berry, must be absolute and must submerge
all nonlocal identities: “So long as we try to think of ourselves as African Americans
or European Americans or Asian Americans, we will never settle anywhere. For an
authentic community is made less in reference to who we are than to where we are
(Berry 2002b, 180).
Berry also emphasizes community over individual identity: For Berry, “a part of
[an individual's] properly realizable potential [lies] in its community, not in itself ”
(Berry2002c, 138). With individual identity suppressed, and with other identities
superseded by a common place identity, Berry's vision leaves little room for diversity
within local communities (though it does allow for diversity across communities).
Berry's notion of a sense of place and community has much in common with the
German concept of Heimat , a word for which there is no real counterpart in the English