Kicking your ass gently: An introduction to Wendell Berry

Wisconsin Book Festival keynote speaker Wendell Berry (appearing Sunday, Oct. 11 at the Overture Center) is an ecologist, poet, novelist, and essayist in the truest “man of letters” description, and he prefigures the current onslaught of Michael Pollan-induced food fervor by many years. Many of the essays he's published over the years have been newly collected in Berry's latest book, Bringing It To The Table. Many of them read prophetic in today's big-agriculture food world; he was often able to predict the ruthlessness of wide-scale industrial farming left unchecked. To ready you for his mild and subdued form of ass-kicking on Sunday, The A.V. Club offers a primer for some of his thoughts on farming, farmers, and food.

On farming

Berry laid out the fundamental conflict between profit-driven industrialized farming and traditional farming in a 1978 essay "Agricultural Solutions For Agricultural Problems." Berry sees the practice and language of industrialized agriculture—which reduces farmers to components in a production unit—as a conceptual failure central to the problem. "We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist,” writes Berry. And in his 1986 essay, "A Defense Of The Family Farm," he lays out all the ways sustainable agriculture naturally aligns with practical considerations on the family farm, and posits the corporate intrusion as an alien occupation of a system that had previously worked pretty damn well.

On farmers
In the 1979 essay "Elmer Lapp's Place," Berry describes a type of family farm that is now nearly extinct: "The farm is thriving because what I would call its structural problems have been satisfactorily solved. The patterns necessary to its life have been satisfactorily worked out." Wild swans swim in the lake while Lapp and his children feed and wash their 30 or so Guernsey, Holstein, and Jersey cows. Cats lounge around waiting for cow's milk to be poured from the test cup, and life has a holistic interdependence. The family of humans takes care of the families of animals, which in turn take care of the humans. Lapp and his family drink only their own farm's milk, and draw from ". . . an orchard of apple, peach, and plum trees for fruit, and for blossoms for his bees. Lapp slaughters his own beef, and produces his own poultry, eggs, and honey." It's a compelling vision of a functional, practical, and sustainable food production system in which the farm is not a specialized factory.

On food
In 1989 Berry wrote "The Pleasures Of Eating," an essay that's very proto-Pollan—a kind of Buzzcocks to Pollan's Green Day (in fact, Pollan hails Berry as forerunner in the foreword to Bringing It To The Table). In response to the question "What can city people do?" Berry answers: "Eat responsibly.... Eating is an agricultural act." He goes on to claim that there is a politics of food, and that we aren't really free if we don't question those political aims. In other words: Vote with your money when you buy food. In 2009, it seems those votes are shifting: Domestic sales of organic foods have grown twenty-fold since 1990. This change in consumer awareness is a ray of light through an oftentimes stormy sky, and we can probably thank Berry at least in part for getting this message out.