Fire and Knowledge

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)

In the kitchen cabinet is a bag of oranges for morning juice. Each orange is stamped “Color Added.” The dyeing of an orange, to make it orange, is man’s most impudent gesture to date. It is really an appalling piece of effrontery, carrying the clear implication that Nature doesn’t know what she is up to. I think an orange, dyed orange, is as repulsive as a pine cone painted green. I think it is about as ugly a thing as I have ever seen, and it seems hard to believe that here, within ten miles, probably, of the trees that bore the fruit, I can’t buy an orange that somebody hasn’t smeared with paint. But I doubt that there are many who feel that way about it, because fraudulence has become a national virtue and is well thought of in many circles.

–E. B. White, “On a Florida Key” (1941) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), p. 139

Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

–Michael Pollan, “Unhappy Meals” in The New York Times, January 28, 2007.

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.

Both the stratification and the mobility are based upon notions of prestige, which are in turn based upon these reliquary social fashions. Thus doctors are given higher status than farmers, not because they are more necessary, more useful, more able, more talented, or more virtuous, but because they are thought to be “better”—one assumes because they talk a learned jargon, wear good clothes all the time, and make a lot of money. And this is true generally of “office people” as opposed to those who work with their hands. Thus an industrial worker does not aspire to become a master craftsman, but rather a foreman or manager. Thus a farmer’s son does not usually think to “better” himself by becoming a better farmer than his father, but by becoming, professionally, a better kind of man than his father.

–Wendell Berry, “Jefferson, Morrill, and the Upper Crust” in The Unsettling of America (1972), p. 159

It is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without making machines also of people.

–Wendell Berry, “Living in the Future: The ‘Modern’ Agricultural Ideal” in The Unsettling of America (1972), pp. 75