3.5
Bringing It to the Table
ByPublisher Description
Drawing from his agricultural background and written in his signature candid style, Wendell Berry delivers a deeply thoughtful and illuminating collection of essays for anyone who cares about what they eat
Only a farmer could delve so deeply into the origins of food, and only a writer of Wendell Berry’s caliber could convey it with such conviction and eloquence. A progenitor of the slow food movement, Wendell Berry reminds us all to take the time to understand the basics of what we ingest. “Eating is an agriculture act,” he writes. Indeed, we are all players in the food economy. For the last five decades, Berry has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing. In recognition of that influence, Michael Pollan here offers an introduction to this wonderful collection that is essential reading for anyone who cares about what they eat.
Drawn from over thirty years of work, this collection joins bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Pollan, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, as essential reading for anyone who cares about what they eat. The essays address such concerns as: How does organic measure up against locally grown? What are the differences between small and large farms, and how does that affect what you put on your dinner table? What can you do to support sustainable agriculture?
Only a farmer could delve so deeply into the origins of food, and only a writer of Wendell Berry’s caliber could convey it with such conviction and eloquence. A progenitor of the slow food movement, Wendell Berry reminds us all to take the time to understand the basics of what we ingest. “Eating is an agriculture act,” he writes. Indeed, we are all players in the food economy. For the last five decades, Berry has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing. In recognition of that influence, Michael Pollan here offers an introduction to this wonderful collection that is essential reading for anyone who cares about what they eat.
Drawn from over thirty years of work, this collection joins bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Pollan, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, as essential reading for anyone who cares about what they eat. The essays address such concerns as: How does organic measure up against locally grown? What are the differences between small and large farms, and how does that affect what you put on your dinner table? What can you do to support sustainable agriculture?
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesBringing It to the Table Reviews
3.5
“The book is a curious anthology: half farming essays, a third visits with farmers who are still maintaining traditional farming and husbandry despite the pressure to get big or get out, as the cretinous corpocrats in DC and K Street urged in the 1970s, and a dash of excerpts from Berry’s fiction in which food culture appears. The core message of Berry’s farming essays is that industrial agribusiness as reduced the integrated elements of agriculture into objects to be manipulated and used to exhaustion: the land and livestock are mere objects subject to the will and desire to maximize profits, and farmers themselves are reduced to clients. I saw this first when watching Food, Inc ten years ago and learning how chicken farmers are held in continual bondage to the big distributors like Tyson, who constantly demand equipment upgrades and perpetuate debt cycles. Here and in The Unsettling of America, Berry expands his criticism of the shift from farming to agribiz to the nation itself, pointing out that the system is becoming increasingly more fragile as it becomes more centralized, and the efficiencies of economies of scale are eaten up by the inferior quality created by mass production and the loss of attentive care. The same arguments are being made — and practiced today, with small-scale but intensive farming (like that practiced by Mark and Kristin) undermining the theory that agriculture must consist of county-sized monocultures tended to by dirt-compacting machines, or vast factories in which thousands of animals stand in their own offal, the horrors of their environment compounded by the drugs they’re continually injected with to counter those horrors.”
“This was an interest little collection of essays. I was already really familiar with WB’s perspective, so it wasn’t anything new. He does make some great points about our relationship to agriculture and how pivotal it is for a noble society to have ties to the earth and to our food. Definitely lots to apply, even for the house-wife hobby gardener.”
About Wendell Berry
WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among other distinctions. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.
Other books by Wendell Berry
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