| | The
Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture,
by Wendell Berry.
In The Unsettling of America I argue
that industrial agriculture and the assumptions on which
it rests are wrong, root and branch; I argue that this kind
of agriculture grows out of the worst of human history and
the worst of human nature.
By the time one reaches this sentence
in the author's 1996 afterword (to the 1977 book), this
argument is very clear and very convincing. Beginning the
book with a brief, Zinn-like history
of America, Berry tackles many aspects of American and Western
culture (money & consumerism, religion, technology,
even the publisher) but always in relation to agriculture.
For him, food is culture (hence agriculture) as
well as a religion, because it is our most direct connection
to the earth, the generator of an ongoing cycle of birth,
death, and rebirth. By separating ourselves from the production
and processing of food -- mainly through the replacement
of agriculture with agriscience and agribusiness
-- we are suffering, and not just in terms of our health
but, more importantly, morally, culturally, as communities
of people. While 95% of the population may not need to work
the land, the purchasing of pre-packaged, frozen, chemically-treated
foods is not a substitute for this suffering, in the author's
opinion. But to return or move towards a true agriculture
(like the Amish, the Americans closest to Berry's ideals),
it requires an almost complete overhaul of the American way,
changing not only the way we grow food but the way we live
and work in the broadest sense. It's a hard-to-fathom proposition
-- more now than when the book was written -- but one that
could slowly happen one reader at a time.
. . or . . 
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