Fire and Knowledge

In the loss of [Jefferson’s agrarian vision], or of such a vision, and in the abandonment of that possibility, we have created a society characterized by degrading urban poverty and an equally degrading affluence—a society of undisciplined abundance, which is to say a society of waste.

–Wendell Berry, “Discipline and Hope” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 101

Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed.

–Wendell Berry, “The Regional Motive” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 67

I walk often through places unknown by any name or fact or event to people who live almost within calling distance of them, yet more worthy of their interest, I think, than the distant places to which they devote so much of their attention.

–Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 48

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

–Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return” in A Continuous Harmony (1972), p. 41

The defining achievement of the Industrial Revolution [was] the creation of a society in which people are reduced to a choice between wage labor and starvation.

–Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future (1995), p. 47

It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals—just as animals in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry—as in any other industry—the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price…. As scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcut that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food is so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.

—Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 324

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, stained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

—Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 323

We still (sometimes) 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. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.

—Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 323