Wendell Berry Quotes About Eating

Quotes about: Eating

• Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.

  Wendell Berry

  Independent, Garden, Thinking

• A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

  Wendell Berry

  Food, World, Consciousness

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.326, Counterpoint

• Eating is an agricultural act.

  Wendell Berry

  Agriculture, Environment, Eating

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.282, ReadHowYouWant.com

• 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.

  Wendell Berry

  Animal, Rooms, Hamburgers

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.148, Counterpoint

• Eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as 'consumers.'

  Wendell Berry

  Drama, Thinking, Agriculture

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.145, Counterpoint Press

• Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health -- and create profitable diseases and dependencies -- by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving.

  Wendell Berry

  Broken, Ordinary, Connections

  "The Art of the Commonplace". Book by Wendell Berry, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2002.

• The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. (pg. 326, The Pleasures of Eating)

  Wendell Berry

  Morning, Memories, Garden

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.151, Counterpoint Press

• ... it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world.

  Wendell Berry

  Drinking, Community, Environmental

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

• Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

  Wendell Berry

  Gratitude, Food, Ignorance

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.152, Counterpoint

• 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. (pg. 323, The Pleasures of Eating)

  Wendell Berry

  Voice, Mind, Remember

  Wendell Berry (2010). “Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Large Print 16pt)”, p.12, ReadHowYouWant.com

• An agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking & good eating

  Wendell Berry

  Cooking, Mind, Fields

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.241, Counterpoint

• Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

  Wendell Berry

  World, Eating, Used

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.149, Counterpoint Press

• The sense of it may come with watching a flock of cedar waxwings eating wild grapes in the top of the woods on a November afternoon. Everything they do is leisurely. They pick the grapes with a curious deliberation, comb their feathers, converse in high windy whistles. Now and then one will fly out and back in a sort of dancing flight full of whimsical flutters and turns. They are like farmers loafing in their own fields on Sunday. Though they have no Sundays, their days are full of sabbaths.

  Wendell Berry

  Sunday, Dancing, Cedars

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