We Are Not Free By Wendell Berry Summary

Berry tried to tell us that the food we eat is neither healthy nor natural anymore. He gave his public these hints by saying the following; “There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else” (Berry 7) and “Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kind of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge of skills is involved in farming.”(Berry 4) I believe everyone has different opinions and arguments but mine happens to disagree with Wendell Berry’s argument.
Wendell Berry argues that the farms are not even farms anymore and the foods we eat are GMOs. Yes, this might be true but I disagree with Berry in the “we are not free because the food we eat is being controlled by someone else.” first of all I think
that’s just ridiculous because it’s like he’s saying that we should grow our own fruits and vegetables and kill our own type of meat we eat so we can know where it actually comes from. Our food being controlled and processed by someone else has nothing to do with our freedom; it’s just a company making business and doing its job.
“They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found a profitable way to do so” (Berry 5) making commercials that will persuade you into buying their food is not a way of begging you to eat it, it’s kind of dull how berry tries to make us believe his opinion is actually a fact but its full of misleading information. People have bought all these types of foods for generations, I have eaten these food for years and I haven’t died and if anything I rather eat something good and cheap than to pay 5 dollars for a head of broccoli that is healthy and 100 percent naturally made.
I might sound ignorant for not agreeing with Berry but then again I prefer to look like an ignorant than a hypocrite because I can say I agree with Berry’s opinion but not even a day later go out and buy McDonalds or any type of food they sell at the store because according to him everything is GMOs that is also part of the reasons I do not agree with this article.
Berry also said how we don’t know where the farms are from or what they do to the animals we eat or how badly they get treated but have we died? That’s the question. There hasn’t been a big amount of deaths per month but they add them up by year. And not every food company is like that, also as the years go by the population grows bigger and it gets harder to make a huge amount of food in just days so the easy way out is to feed them corn. Call me cruel but those animals will die eventually, we will die eventually so why are we worrying about the type of food we eat or feed to
someone?
“One will find this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the advertisements of the food industry, in which food wears as much makeup as the actors.(Berry 9) Yes, actors wear a lot of makeup and the food industries figuratively do the same thing to cover the imperfections. But he says it like if we didn’t know they did that, I think everyone knows how a chicken is killed and how a cow gets pushed around. It’s all over the internet and it doesn’t change anything, only about 20% of the people that watch it will do something about it but the biggest they have done is to stop eating meat.
The thing about that “heroic act” is that I find it super unhelpful because even if they stop eating any type of meat the food industries will continue to kill the animals, only 7.3 million Americans are vegetarians they will not stop getting profit for those 7.3 million of people that probably saw a video and do that trying to “make a change” but doesn’t make one at all.
My conclusion comes to be that Berry didn’t have a point at all but pointed out obvious things that everyone knows already, we all know it we just don’t care anymore until something happens to us, its typical. Then again what else can we eat? Let me go to Mexico and buy a rancho so berry could have his point proven. We really can’t do anything about it because that’s a method finally he only said the bad things about the food politics he never mentioned how good it was to have more and cheaper and how annoying watermelons with seeds are, or anything with seeds. Humans make things easier as time goes by.