The Pleasures Of Eating Wendell Berry Analysis

Throughout his life Wendell Berry has made it a mission of his to educate people about what really happens to our food in the food industry, he has written multiple books about the subject including the essay “The Pleasures of Eating” written in 1989. He wishes to expose people to the idea that how they eat, affects more than just themselves. One point that Berry really tries to get through to the readers in this piece is that eating is what he refers to as, “An agricultural act” (227). What he is trying to say is that eating is a part of the whole process of growing and processing the that everyone eventually eats, most people don’t view eating as an agricultural act but more of just a necessity that they don’t think too much about. People
The food industry is dramatically decreasing the diversity of our food, there are hundreds of types of apples, corn and rice and thousands of other plants, but people only see a very limited variety because for the industries, it is easier and more profitable to produce quantity and monocultures over quality and diversity. Berry states one of his main points as, “Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used” (231). He then goes on to explain a few ways that city folk can, as consumers, ‘eat responsibly’, to eat responsibly one must: participate in food production, prepare their own food, learn where their food is grown, try to buy from local farmers, learn about the food industry and learn about food history. Berry wants the reader to realise that no matter how they are eating, they are shaping the world around them; therefore, if they decide to eat more mindfully and less ignorant, the food industry would be forced treat the food more mindfully because they would realise that the people actually cared and were paying attention to what they were eating. People need to understand that eating connects us to the world, it connects us to the animals, the plants, and the soil that surround us. How people eat has consequences, it shapes the food industry along with the world around them. Berry ends with a few lines of a poem by William Carlos Williams that exemplify Berry’s ideas that everything we eat is the earth and everything we eat is divine and should be treated as such. He wishes us to take everything in as it is and to be enriched and have gratitude about