The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 525

language, but which may be taken to mean a native place to which one belongs by birth,
by community, by culture, by work, and by other deep and enduring ties. For Berry,
rural north-central Kentucky is his Heimat . During the Nazi era in Germany, this idea
of Heimat , this sense of place, became the foundation of the the Blut und Boden (blood
and soil) ideology, which celebrated the sense of place and glorified the local agrarian
community. Jews were vilified in part because they were seen as a threat to the Heimat ,
defined more by their Jewishness than by any Heimat identity. This Nazi appropria-
tion of the concept of Heimat shows the risks associated with an excessively acute sense
of place. Glorification of the local necessarily carries with it a distrust of what is not
local: food from afar, ideas from outside, and even outsiders themselves. If taken too far,
the logic of Berry's sense of place, his glorification of the local, could, like the German
notion of Heimat , lead to xenophobic tendencies.
We Need Cultural Solutions: Technological Fixes Won't Do
In Berry's view, we can never solve our social or environmental problems by means
of scientific-technological solutions. Instead, workable solutions must take the
form of local “culture-borne instructions” (Peters 2007a, 260). Trying to find
scientific-technological solutions, is, according to Berry, like trying to “cure a disease by
another disease.” He addresses this search for a scientific-technological fix in reference
to birth-control technology:
What is horrifying is not only that we are relying so exclusively on a technology of
birth control that is still experimental, but that we are using it casually, in utter cul-
tural nakedness, unceremoniously without serious understanding, and as a substi-
tute for cultural solutions—exactly as we now employ the technology of land use.
And to promote these means without cultural and ecological insight, as merely a way
to divorce sexuality from fertility, pleasure from responsibility—and to sell them
that way for ulterior “moral” motives—is to try to cure a disease by another dis-
ease. . . . The technologists of fertility exercise the power of gods and the social func-
tion of priests without community ties or cultural responsibilities.
(Berry 2002a, 130)
In Berry's view scientific knowledge and the technologies that depend on it are bound to
cause more harm than good. This is partly because they are nonlocal (there is no north-
central Kentucky science, for example, just as there is no German science or Jewish sci-
ence). More importantly, it is because they rely on the human faculty of reason, which,
according to Berry, is far too fallible for us to depend on. In the introduction to We n d e l l
Berry: Life and Work , Jason Peters writes, “[Berry] makes bold to say that we will certainly
use clean energy poorly, could we ever adopt it, because we are not good enough to know
how to use energy well and not smart enough to know what it is for” (Peters 2007b, 8).
Berry is not inherently against complex techniques or methods or knowledge—just
so long these are not based on reason. Once some technique or some knowledge has