Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food

by Wendell Berry

  Thus she has forced us to recognize that the context of American agriculture is not merely fields and farms or the free market or the economy, but it is also the polluted Mississippi River, the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico, all the small towns whose drinking water contains pesticides and nitrates, the pumped-down aquifers and the no-longer-flowing rivers, and all the lands that we have scalped, gouged, poisoned, or destroyed utterly for “cheap” fuels and raw materials.

  Thus she is forcing us to believe what the great teachers and prophets have always told us and what the ecologists are telling us again: All things are connected; the context of everything is everything else. By now, many of us know, and more are learning, that if you want to evaluate the agriculture of a region, you must begin not with a balance sheet, but with the local water. How continuously do the small streams flow? How clear is the water? How much sediment and how many pollutants are carried in the runoff? Are the ponds and creeks and rivers fit for swimming? Can you eat the fish?

  We know, or we are learning, that from the questions about water we go naturally to questions about the soil. Is it staying in place? What is its water-holding capacity? Does it drain well? How much humus is in it? What of its biological health? How often and for how long is it exposed to the weather? How deep in it do the roots go?

  SUCH ARE THE questions that trouble and urge and inspire the scientists at The Land Institute, for everything depends upon the answers. The answers, as these scientists know, will reveal not only the state of the health of the landscape, but also the state of the culture of the people who inhabit and use the landscape. Is it a culture of respect, thrift, and seemly skills, or a culture of indifference and mechanical force? A culture of life, or a culture of death?

  And beyond those questions are questions insistently practical and economic, questions of accounting. What is the worth, to us humans with our now insupportable health care industry, of ecological health? Is our health in any way separable from the health of our economic landscapes? Must not the health of water and soil be accounted an economic asset? Will not this greater health support, sustain, and in the long run cheapen the productivity of our farms?

  If our war against nature destroys the health of water and soil, and thus inevitably the health of agriculture and our own health, and can only lead to our economic ruin, then we need to try another possibility. And there is only one: If we cannot establish an enduring or even a humanly bearable economy by our attempt to defeat nature, then we will have to try living in harmony and cooperation with her.

  By its adoption of the healthy ecosystem as the appropriate standard of agricultural performance, The Land Institute has rejected competition as the fundamental principle of economics, and therefore of the applied sciences, and has replaced it with the principle of harmony. In doing so, it has placed its work within a lineage and tradition that predate both industrialism and modern science. The theme of a human and even an economic harmony with nature goes back many hundreds of years in the literary record. Its age in the prehistoric cultures can only be conjectured, but we may confidently assume that it is ancient, probably as old as the human race. In the early twentieth century this theme was applied explicitly to agriculture by writers such as F. H. King, Liberty Hyde Bailey, J. Russell Smith, Sir Albert Howard, and Aldo Leopold, Howard being the one who gave it the soundest and most elaborate scientific underpinning. This modern lineage was interrupted by the juggernaut of industrial agriculture following World War II. But, in the 1970s, when Wes Jackson began thinking about the Kansas prairie as a standard and model for Kansas farming, he took up the old theme at about where Howard had left it, doing so remarkably without previous knowledge of Howard.

  And so, in espousing the principle and the goal of harmony, The Land Institute acquired an old and honorable ancestry. It acquired at the same time, in the same way, a working principle also old and honorable: that of art as imitation of nature. The initiating question was this: If, so to speak, you place a Kansas wheatfield beside a surviving patch of the native Kansas prairie, what is the difference?

  Well, the primary difference, obvious to any observer, is that, whereas the wheatfield is a monoculture of annuals, the plant community of the prairie is highly diverse and perennial. There are many implications in that difference, not all of which are agricultural, but five of which are of immediate and urgent agricultural interest: The prairie’s loss of soil to erosion is minimal; it is highly efficient in its ability to absorb, store, and use water; it makes the maximum use of every year’s sunlight; it builds and preserves its own fertility; and it protects itself against pests and diseases.

  The next question, the practical one, follows logically and naturally from the first: How might we contrive, let us say, a Kansas farm in imitation of a Kansas prairie, acquiring for agriculture the several ecological services of the prairie along with the economic benefit of a sufficient harvest of edible seeds? And so we come to the great project of The Land Institute.

  I lack the technical proficiency to comment at much length on this work. I would like to end simply by saying how I believe the science now in practice at The Land Institute differs from the science of industrial agriculture.

  WE ARE LIVING in an age of technological innovation. Our preoccupation with invention and novelty has begun, by this late day, to look rather absurd, especially in our strict avoidance of cost accounting. What invention, after all, has done more net good or given more net pleasure than soap? And who invented soap? It is all too easy, under the circumstances, to imagine a media publicist snatching at The Land Institute’s project as “innovation on an epic scale” or “the next revolution in agriculture” or “the new scientific frontier.”

  But these scientists are contemplating no such thing. Their vision and their work do not arise from or lead to any mechanical or chemical breakthrough; they do not depend on any newly discovered fuel. The innovation they have in mind is something old under the sun: a better adaptation of the human organism to its natural habitat. They are not seeking to implement a technological revolution or a revolution of any kind. They are interested merely in improving our fundamental relationship to the earth, changing the kind of roots we put down and deepening the depth we put them down to. This is not revolutionary, because it is merely a part of a long job that we have not finished, that we have tried for a little while to finish in the wrong way, but one that we will never finish if we do it the right way. Harmony between our human economy and the natural world—local adaptation—is a perfection we will never finally achieve but must continuously try for. There is never a finality to it because it involves living creatures who change. The soil has living creatures in it. It has live roots in it, perennial roots if it is lucky. If it is the soil of the right kind of farm, it has a farm family growing out of it. 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. Anybody who undertakes to adapt agriculture to a place—or, in J. Russell Smith’s words, to fit the farming to the farm—will never run out of problems or want for intellectual stimulation.

  The science of The Land Institute promptly exposes the weakness of the annual thought of agricultural industrialism because it measures its work by the standard of the natural ecosystem, which gives pride of place to perennials. It exposes also the weakness of the top-down thought of technological innovation by proceeding from the roots up, and by aiming not at universality and uniformity, but at local adaptation. It would deepen the formal limits of agricultural practice many feet below the roots of the annual grain crops, but it would draw in the limits of concern to the local watershed, ecosystem, farm, and field. This is by definition a science of place, operating within a world of acknowledged limits—of space, time, energy, soil, water, and human intelligence. It is a science facing, in the most local and intimate terms, a world of daunting formal complexity and of an ultimately impenetrable mystery—exactly the
world that the reductive sciences of industrial agriculture have sought to oversimplify and thus ignore. This new science, in its ancient quest, demands the acceptance of human ignorance as the ever-present starting point of human work, and it requires the use of all the intelligence we have.

  PART III

  FOOD

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART III CALLS for a few words of explanation. The publisher’s idea was to show in this gathering of writings the connections that make one subject of farming, farms, farmers, and food. I agreed, thinking the idea was a good one. But if we limited the contents of our book to essays, as at first we thought we would do, we were going to come up short on food. Though I have written many essays on farming, farms, and farmers, I have written only one specifically on food. I am by no means a chef, and as a cook I am limited to frying and scorching.

  And so we decided to include in Part III, in addition to the lone essay, “The Pleasures of Eating,” a selection from my fiction of passages in which people eat. This is a good idea also, I think, because it unspecializes the idea of food. All the episodes from my stories and novels are not about food only, but about meals. You can eat food by yourself. A meal, according to my understanding anyhow, is a communal event, bringing together family members, neighbors, even strangers. At its most ordinary, it involves hospitality, giving, receiving, and gratitude. It pleases me that in these fictional passages food is placed in its circumstances of history, work, and companionship.

  I have provided notes to accompany these episodes, to say when they took place, and to give some sense of the stories they belong to.

  But I need to say, furthermore, something about the part of the women in these episodes. The effort of justice to women, in addition to the substantial good it has done and is doing, has attached a sense of belittlement to “women’s work.” I know that there are reasons for this. But understandable as it may be, it is unjust when it extends to traditional farm housewifery.

  People and their domestic arrangements are imperfect, of course. Abuses no doubt can be found in the customs and usages of any time, no matter how enlightened or liberated. But the women in the episodes that follow, as I think is obvious, are not the “little women” of the liberationist stereotype, and are related distantly if at all to the housewives of the modern suburbs. They are not consumers. They are not openers of cans or heaters of frozen dinners or stirrers of “mixes.”

  On the contrary, they are, with their menfolk, managers of domestic economies that are complex, practically and culturally. These economies unite household and farm. They are as dependent on old knowledge and immediate intelligence as on the land. In accordance with tradition, these women do the cooking, but this is a cooking that is only a part of an intricate seasonal procedure that includes the cultivation of plants and the nurturing of animals, harvesting and bringing in, slaughtering and butchering, preserving and canning and storing for the winter. How all this work was (and sometimes still is) divided between the sexes would vary, according to preferences and abilities, from one household and marriage to another. But both men and women participated and were associated in the work.

  Justice to these women requires recognition of the entirely admirable knowledge, intelligence, and skill that they applied to their “women’s work.” Moreover, many of these women were perfectly capable also of “men’s work.” The reader will notice, in the passage from The Memory of Old Jack, that Mary Penn is helping to prepare a harvest dinner, but also that she is wearing work clothes. After the women have eaten (with the men fed and gone, this will be a leisurely, quietly sociable meal that the women have) and after they have washed the dishes and set the kitchen to rights, Mary will go to the field to work with the men. Hannah would be going too if she were not pregnant.

  FROM That Distant Land

  Here is a glimpse of an old way of family life and hospitality before the twentieth century, and its invariable resort to war and industrial destruction, changed everything. These paragraphs are from the short story “Turn Back the Bed.”

  OLD ANT’NY WAS a provider, and he did provide. He saw to it that twelve hogs were slaughtered for his own use every fall—and twenty-four hams and twenty-four shoulders and twenty-four middlings were hung in his smokehouse. And his wife, Maw Proudfoot, kept a flock of turkeys and a flock of geese and a flock of guineas, and her henhouse was as populous as a county seat. And long after he was “too old to farm,” Old Ant’ny grew a garden as big as some people’s crop. He picked and dug and fetched, and Maw Proudfoot canned and preserved and pickled and cured as if they had an army to feed—which they more or less did, for there were not only the announced family gatherings but always somebody or some few happening by, and always somebody to give something to.

  The Proudfoot family gatherings were famous. As feasts, as collections and concentrations of good things, they were unequaled. Especially in summer there was nothing like them, for then there would be old ham and fried chicken and gravy, and two or three kinds of fish, and hot biscuits and three kinds of cornbread, and potatoes and beans and roasting ears and carrots and beets and onions, and corn pudding and corn creamed and fried, and cabbage boiled and scalloped, and tomatoes stewed and sliced, and fresh cucumbers soaked in vinegar, and three or four kinds of pickles, and if it was late enough in the summer there would be watermelons and muskmelons, and there would be pies and cakes and cobblers and dumplings, and milk and coffee by the gallon. And there would be, too, half a dozen or so gallon or half-gallon stone jugs making their way from one adult male to another as surreptitious as moles. For in those days the Proudfoot homeplace, with its broad cornfields in the creek bottom, was famous also for the excellence of its whiskey.

  So of course these affairs were numerously attended. When the word went out to family and in-laws it was bound to be overheard, and people came in whose veins Proudfoot blood ran extremely thin, if at all. And there would be babble and uproar all day, for every door stood open, and the old house was not ceiled; the upstairs floorboards were simply nailed to the naked joists, leaving cracks that you could not only hear through but in places see through. Whatever happened anywhere could be heard everywhere.

  The storm of feet and voices would continue unabated from not long after sunup until after sundown when the voice of Old Ant’ny would rise abruptly over the multitude: “Well, Maw, turn back the bed. These folks want to be gettin’ on home.” And then, as if at the bidding of some Heavenly sign, the family sorted itself into its branches. Children and shoes and hats were found, identified, and claimed; horses were hitched; and the tribes of the children of Old Ant’ny Proudfoot set out in their various directions in the twilight.

  The following passage also is from a short story, “The Solemn Boy.” Going home at noon with a load of corn on a bitter cold day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 1934, Tol Proudfoot gives a ride to a man and his young son. These are people clearly displaced by the Depression. Because he understands this, and has seen how poorly dressed they are for the weather and how cold, and because kindness is anyhow his rule, Tol insists that the two strangers come to his house for dinner—the big meal, that is to say, that the country people ate at noon. He sends them to the house while he drives on to the barn to care for his horses.

  TOL SPOKE TO his team and drove on into the barn lot. He positioned the wagon in front of the corncrib, so he could scoop the load off after dinner, and then he unhitched the horses. He watered them, led them to their stalls, and fed them.

  “Eat, boys, eat,” he said.

  And then he started to the house. As he walked along he opened his hand, and the old dog put his head under it.

  THE MAN AND boy evidently had done as he had told them, for they were not in sight. Tol already knew how Miss Minnie would have greeted them.

  “Well, come on in!” she would have said, opening the door and seeing the little boy. “Looks like we’re having company for dinner! Come in here, honey, and get warm!”

  He knew how the
sight of that little shivering boy would have called the heart right out of her. Tol and Miss Minnie had married late, and time had gone by, and no child of their own had come. Now they were stricken in age, and it had long ceased to be with Miss Minnie after the manner of women.

  He told the old dog to lie down on the porch, opened the kitchen door, and stepped inside. The room was warm, well lit from the two big windows in the opposite wall, and filled with the smells of things cooking. They had killed hogs only a week or so before, and the kitchen was full of the smell of frying sausage. Tol could hear it sizzling in the skillet. He stood just inside the door, unbuttoning his coat and looking around. The boy was sitting close to the stove, a little sleepy looking now in the warmth, some color coming into his face. The man was standing near the boy, looking out the window—feeling himself a stranger, poor fellow, and trying to pretend he was somewhere else.

  Tol took off his outdoor clothes and hung them up. He nodded to Miss Minnie, who gave him a smile. She was rolling out the dough for an extra pan of biscuits. Aside from that, the preparations looked about as usual. Miss Minnie ordinarily cooked enough at dinner so that there would be leftovers to warm up or eat cold for supper. There would be plenty. The presence of the two strangers made Tol newly aware of the abundance, fragrance, and warmth of that kitchen.