Rate this book

Bringing It To The Table: Writings On Farming And Food (2009)

by Wendell Berry(Favorite Author)

4.19 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

158243543X (ISBN13: 9781582435435)

languge

English

genre

Food & Cookbooks

publisher

Counterpoint

review 1: Some of these essays are little too science-y and industrial for me to appreciate, but overall... Wendell Berry never disappoints. He always seems to strike the perfect balance between artful, practical, optimistic and grounded. This is a great intro to Wendell Berry book... a collection of essays that cover the gamut of food industry, farming, family, art and eating. Plus, I love a book that you can pick up and put down at leisure. This is that book.
review 2: "Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the s... morecale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed, to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.And so the first thing farmers as conservationists must try to conserve is their love of farming and their love of independence...But farmers obviously are responsible for conserving much more than agrarian skills and attitudes. I have already told why farmers should be, as much as any conservationists, conservers of the wildness of the world – and that is their inescapable dependence on nature. Good farmers, I believe, recognize a difference that is fundamental between what is natural and what is man-made. They know that if you treat a farm as a factory and living creatures as machines, or if you tolerate the idea of 'engineering' organisms, then you are on your way to something destructive and, sooner or later, too expensive. To treat creatures as machines is an error with large practical implications.Good farmers know too that nature can be an economic ally. Natural fertility is cheaper, often in the short run, always in the long run, than purchased fertility. Natural health, inbred and nurtured, is cheaper than pharmaceuticals and chemicals. Solar energy – if you know how to capture it and use it: in grass, say, and the bodies of animals – is cheaper than petroleum. The highly industrialized factory farm is entirely dependent on 'purchased inputs.' The agrarian farm, well integrated into the natural systems that support it, runs to an economically significant extent on resources and supplies that are free.It is now commonly assumed that when humans took to agriculture they gave up hunting and gathering. But hunting and gathering remained until recently an integral and lively part of my own region's traditional farming life. People hunted for wild game; they fished the ponds and streams; they gathered wild greens in the spring, hickory nuts and walnuts in the fall; they picked wild berries and other fruits; they prospected for wild honey... As the countryside has depopulated and the remaining farmers have come under greater stress, these wilderness pleasures have fallen away. But they have not yet been altogether abandoned; they represent something probably essential to the character of the best farming, and the should be remembered and revived.Those, then, are some reasons why good farmers are conservationists and why all farmers ought to be."– from a 2002 essay, "Conservationist and Agrarian""The form of the farm must answer to the farmer's feeling for the place, its creatures, and its work. It is a never-ending effort of fitting together many diverse things. It must incorporate the life cycle and the fertility cycles of animals. It must bring crops and livestock into balance and mutual support. It must be a pattern on the ground and in the mind. It must be at once ecological, agricultural, economic, familial, and neighborly. It must be inclusive enough, complex enough, coherent, intelligible, and durable. It must have within its limits the completeness of an organism, or of any other good work of art.The making of a form begins in the recognition and acceptance of limits. The farm is limited by its topography, its climate, its ecosystem, its human neighborhood and local economy, and of course by the larger economies, and by the preferences and abilities of the farmer. The true husbandman shapes the farm within an assured sense of what it cannot be and should not be. And thus the problem of form returns to that of local adaptation."– from a 2004 essay, "Renewing Husbandry""Elmer Lapp is eminently a traditional farmer in the sense that his farm is his home, his life, and his way of life – not just his "work place" or his "job." For that reason, though his farm produces a cash income, that is not all it produces, and some of what it produces cannot be valued in cash. In obedience to the traditional principle, the Lapps take their subsistence from the farm, and they are as attentive to the production of what they eat as to the production of what they sell. The farm is expected to make a profit, but it must make sense too, and a part of that sense is that it must feed the farmers. And so a pattern of subsistence joins, and at certain points overlaps, the commercial pattern. ...For a man giftedly practical, Mr. Lapp justifies what he has and does remarkably often by his 'likes.' One finally realize that on the Lapp farm one is surrounded by an abounding variety of lives that are there, and are thriving there, because Elmer Lapp 'likes' them. And from that it is only a step to the realization that the commercial enterprises of the farm are likewise there, and thriving, because he likes them too. The Belgians and Guernseys are profitable, in large part, because they were liked 'before' they were profitable. Mr. Lapp is as fine a farmer as he is because liking has joined his intelligence intricately to his place. And that is why the place makes sense. All the patterns of the farm are finally gathered into an ecological pattern; it is one 'household,' its various parts joined to each other and the whole joined to nature, to the world, by liking, by delighted and affectionate understanding. The ecological pattern is a pattern of pleasure."- from the 1979 essay, "Elmer Lapp's Place""Harmony between our human economy and the natural world—local adaptation—is a perfection we will never finally achieve but must continually try for. There is never a finality to it because it involves living creatures who change. … The work of adaptation must go on because the world changes; our places change and we change; we change our places and our places change us. The science of adaptation, then, is unending."– from a 2004 essay, "Agriculture from the Roots Up" "She was being extravagant with the sugar for my sake, as I was more or less aware, and I took it for granted. But knowledge grows with age, and gratitude with knowledge. Now I am as grateful to her as I should have been then, and I am troubled with love for her, knowing how she was wrung all her life between her cherished resentments and her fierce affections. A peculiar sorrow hovered over her, and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years; it also came from her settled conviction of the tendency of things to be unsatisfactory, to fail to live up to expectations, to fall short. She was haunted, I think, by the suspicion of a comedown always lurking behind the best appearances. I wonder now if she had ever read 'Paradise Lost.' That poem, with its cosmos of Heaven and Hell and Paradise and the Fallen World, was a presence felt by most of her generation, if only by way of preachers who had read it. Whether or not she had read it for herself, the lostness of Paradise was the prime fact of her world, and she felt it keenly."— excerpt from the novel 'Andy Catlett' "There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and our 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. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free."– from a 1989 essay, "The Pleasures of Eating" less

Download links for: Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

Advertising