Berry’s Bringing It to the Table: A Call to Honor Farming and Food

Abstract

First paragraph:

Forty years of Wendell Berry’s essays and excerpts from his fiction are gathered in Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, providing some interesting historical, critical and thoughtful insights into what has shaped farming and food over these past decades. As a testament to the breadth of ideas that Berry expresses on American agriculture and food, you find chapters with names as varied as “A Defense of the Family Farm,” “The Soil and Health,” “Renewing Husbandry,” and “The Pleasures of Eating.” For those previously unfamiliar with Berry and his writing, this compilation is a perfect introduction to his ongoing conversation with the public on the perils of a agricultural system that is not in balance with its ecosystem and communities. Michael Pollan sums it up well in his introduction: “[Berry’s] now-famous formulation, ‘eating is an agricultural act’ is perhaps Berry’s… signal contribution to the rethinking of food and farming under way today” (p. xiv).