Fire and Knowledge

…the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.

–Daniel Webster

In the current regulatory environment, the rules make small-scale traditional food production and distribution almost impossible. Selling home-baked bread, or any food prepared in a home kitchen, is prohibited by most, if not all, health codes in the United States. Livestock for sale (with the exception of poultry, in most places) may not be slaughtered by the farmers who raise them; instead they must be trucked to anonymous factory-like commercial slaughterhouses. Milk and other dairy products may not be sold without pasteurization, which diminishes nutritional quality, digestibility, and flavor. Cider, too, is nearly always required to be pasteurized or irradiated. In other words, real food, increasingly illegal, is being replaced by processed food products. Laws dictating food standards are driven by the model of mass production, where sterility and uniformity are everything, rendering much of the trade in local food technically illegal. Eating well has become an act of civil disobedience.

–Sandor Ellix Katz, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements [source].

Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds. As long, therefore, as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or anything else.

–Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Jay (Aug. 23, 1785)

Christianity Today has an article about Wendell Berry entitled “Imagining a Different Way to Live” by Ragan Sutterfield. It’s an excellent introduction to Wendell Berry and his thinking. I hope it will get many CT readers interested in Berry and conservation.

If we do not live where we work, and when we work, we are wasting our lives, and our work too.

–Wendell Berry, “Living in the Future: The ‘Modern’ Agricultural Ideal” in The Unsettling of America (1972), pp. 79

If a culture is to hope for any considerable longevity, then the relationships within it must, in recognition of their interdependence, be predominately cooperative rather than competitive. A people cannot live long at each other’s expense or at the expense of their cultural birthright—just as an agriculture cannot live long at the expense of its soil or its work force, and just as in a natural system the competitions among species must be limited if all are to survive.

–Wendell Berry, “The Agricultural Crisis as a Crisis of Culture” in The Unsettling of America (1972), p. 47

The household that prepares its own meals in its own kitchen with some intelligent regard for nutritional value, and thus depends on the grocer only for selected raw materials, exercises an influence on the food industry that reaches from the store all the way back to the seedsman. The household that produces some or all of its own food will have a proportionally greater influence. The household that can provide some of its own pleasures will not be helplessly dependent on the entertainment industry, will influence it by not being helplessly dependent on it, and will not support it thoughtlessly out of boredom.

–Wendell Berry, “The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Character” in The Unsettling of America (1972), p. 24-25

A person dependent on somebody else for everything from potatoes to opinions may declare that he is a free man, and his government may issue a certificate granting him his freedom, but he will not be free. He is that variety of specialist known as a consumer, which means that he is the abject dependent of producers. How can he be free if he can do nothing for himself? What is the First Amendment to him whose mouth is stuck to the tit of the “affluent society”? Men are free precisely to the extent that they are equal to their own needs. The most able are the most free.

–Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 124