Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

In this book, Wendell Berry forcefully and convincingly communicates the dangers of the agribusiness in this country. His prose is exact, yet beautiful. I could not put the book down.

"Wendell Berry is one of today's most popular essayists and Bringing It to the Table which includes his stories about food and farm life is the perfect book about understanding where our food comes from. The introduction by Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma is the icing on the cake."

Before organic produce was available at any supermarket author Wendell Berry was farming and writing about food issues - and BRINGING IT TO THE TABLE: ON FARMING AND FOOD offers his insights on mindful eating and farming practices. Literary food essays draw important links between consumption choices and the environment and provide a fine survey recommended for any library strong in cuisine and food or farming issues.

Another book to be treasured from Wendell Berry. The book is composed of essays Berry has written over many years and is in three sections. The first lays out what a real farm should look like and how it should be run thinking in terms of its viability over time. That involves studying and coming to know the actual land the farm is on, animals and crops and ways of farming need to be adapted to that particular piece of land. In other words, farming involves having eyes wide open and thinking. Berry states that those in government would benefit from this model. "If the people in our state and national governments undertook to evaluate economic enterprises by the standards of long-term economics, they would have to employ their minds in actual thinking. For many of them, this would be a shattering experience, something altogether new, but it would also cause them to learn things and do things that would improve the lives of their constituents." In the second section, Berry profiles farmers whom he admires - and that is high praise indeed. "A Good Farmer of the Old School" is a wonderful explanation of farming that makes sense. Lancie Clippinger "is taking his own advice, and his advice comes from his experience and the experience of farmers like him, not from experts who are not farmers. For those reasons, Lancie Clippinger is doing all right. He is farming well and earning a living by it in a time when many farmers are farming poorly and making money for everybody but themselves. 'I don't know what they mean,'he says. 'You'd think some in the bunch would use their heads a LITTLE bit.'" The third section of the book is titled "The Pleasures of Eating" and consists of excerpts from Berry's fiction centered on cooking and eating and the communal joys of eating real food around a table. Reading this section brings back fond memories of Wendell Berry's fiction I have loved through the years and adds to my motivation to keep on cooking up the vegetable dishes I create from my community supported agriculture share.

Bringing It to the Table is a treasure-house of Wendell Berry's work, an important collection of essays and excerpts gathered from his essays and fiction. A cantankerous, argumentative, eloquent writer who knows farming and food from field to table, Berry has been writing for more than forty years about the sadly declining state of American agriculture, the dangers of industrialized food farming, and the importance to the human community--and to the human body, mind, and soul--of good husbandry. If you've been reading Berry over the years (my husband and I chose an excerpt from The Unsettling of America for our wedding ceremony in 1986), you'll find some jewels here, all the richer for their association with other pieces in the collection. If you're new to Berry's work, you'll be astonished at his prescience: as Michael Pollan writes in his introduction, Berry is among the very first to point out the dangers of our American industrial agriculture and our disastrous separation of food production from food preparation and consumption. Bringing It to the Table is divided into three sections. In "Farming," the essays (1971-2004) provide a compelling review of the central argument of all Berry's work: that we must "adopt nature as measure" and create farming practices that deeply connected to the "nature of the particular place." Industrial agriculture arming ignores and attempts to overcome the natural limits of place, seasons, soils, and resources. It is, Berry warns, "a failure on its way to being a catastrophe." This place-focus continues in the second section, "Farmers." It includes seven elegiac essays that describe true farmers, not dependent on fossil fuels or large farm debt, in touch with their soils, their climates, their animals--people who understand and work within the limits of responsible husbandry. These farmers range from the traditional Amish to the Land Institute, where a radical new science adopts the natural ecosystem as "the first standard of agricultural performance." The third section, "Food," brings farm husbandry and farm housewifery together, with excerpts from Berry's fiction: people sitting down to eat the food they have planted, raised, harvested, cooked, and served. It is beautifully illustrated by the cover image: Grant Wood's Dinner for Threshers. The painting frames Berry's argument that "eating is an agricultural act," that we must eat what is grown locally and prepared in our own kitchens, not prepackaged, precooked, premasticated. It also demonstrates what, in Berry's view, is the central stablizing force and foundation of the agricultural partnership: that women and men work together to unite household and farm, and that "traditional farm housewifery"--helping with the work of the farm, preserving the harvest, and preparing the family's food--is the essential contribution of women to the farm household economy. Within this context, it is an honored contribution, not to be "belittled" as "women's work." As we