Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food [Paperback]

Bringing It to the Table is a treasure-house of Wendell Berry's work, an important collection of essays and excerpts gathered from his essays and fiction. A cantankerous, argumentative, eloquent writer who knows farming and food from field to table, Berry has been writing for more than forty years about the sadly declining state of American agriculture, the dangers of industrialized food farming, and the importance to the human community--and to the human body, mind, and soul--of good husbandry. If you've been reading Berry over the years (my husband and I chose an excerpt from The Unsettling of America for our wedding ceremony in 1986), you'll find some jewels here, all the richer for their association with other pieces in the collection. If you're new to Berry's work, you'll be astonished at his prescience: as Michael Pollan writes in his introduction, Berry is among the very first to point out the dangers of our American industrial agriculture and our disastrous separation of food production from food preparation and consumption.

Bringing It to the Table is divided into three sections. In "Farming," the essays (1971-2004) provide a compelling review of the central argument of all Berry's work: that we must "adopt nature as measure" and create farming practices that deeply connected to the "nature of the particular place." Industrial agriculture arming ignores and attempts to overcome the natural limits of place, seasons, soils, and resources. It is, Berry warns, "a failure on its way to being a catastrophe."

This place-focus continues in the second section, "Farmers." It includes seven elegiac essays that describe true farmers, not dependent on fossil fuels or large farm debt, in touch with their soils, their climates, their animals--people who understand and work within the limits of responsible husbandry. These farmers range from the traditional Amish to the Land Institute, where a radical new science adopts the natural ecosystem as "the first standard of agricultural performance."

The third section, "Food," brings farm husbandry and farm housewifery together, with excerpts from Berry's fiction: people sitting down to eat the food they have planted, raised, harvested, cooked, and served. It is beautifully illustrated by the cover image: Grant Wood's Dinner for Threshers. The painting frames Berry's argument that "eating is an agricultural act," that we must eat what is grown locally and prepared in our own kitchens, not prepackaged, precooked, premasticated. It also demonstrates what, in Berry's view, is the central stablizing force and foundation of the agricultural partnership: that women and men work together to unite household and farm, and that "traditional farm housewifery"--helping with the work of the farm, preserving the harvest, and preparing the family's food--is the essential contribution of women to the farm household economy. Within this context, it is an honored contribution, not to be "belittled" as "women's work."

As we face climate change, resource depletion, financial insecurity, and health issues created by poor food choices, the sustainable production and consumption of our food will undoubtedly be one of the most challenging issues of the twenty-first century. Wendell Berry has been trying to tell us this for many decades. It's high time we began to listen.

I rated the (first) one-star review helpful, but I'd also rate it unfair. As the list below will show, long-time fans probably have all the works in this volume on their bookshelves. The value in this collection lies in the way that it draws together works on the topic at hand. If you're new to Berry, this is a reasonable place to start. If the points made by the favorable reviews appeal to you, check it out. Not everybody is going to buy every book or CD by a writer/singer, so sometimes a compilation based on a theme is a good choice. With one exception for the list below, I have all of the non-fiction in this book, so I am going to pass

Essay title ---- Appears in
Nature as Measure ---- What Are People For?
Stupidity in Concentration ---- Citizenship Papers
Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems ---- The Gift of Good Land
A Defense of the Family Farm ---- Home Economics
Let the Farm Judge ---- Citizenship Papers
Energy in Agriculture ---- The Gift of Good Land
Conservationist and Agrarian ---- Citizenship Papers
Sanitation and the Small Farm ---- The Gift of Good Land
Renewing Husbandry ---- The Way of Ignorance
Seven Amish Farms ---- The Gift of Good Land
A Good Farmer of the Old School ---- Home Economics
Charlie Fisher ---- The Way of Ignorance
A Talent for Necessity ---- The Gift of Good Land
Elmer Lapp's Place ---- The Gift of Good Land
On the Soil and Health ---- Intro to The University Press of Kentucky 2007 ed of Howard's On the Soil & Health
Agriculture from the Roots Up ---- The Way of Ignorance
The Pleasures of Eating ---- What Are People For?

This book is an excellent introduction to Wendell Berry's thought on farming and food. My main interest in reading Berry stemmed from reading Michael Pollan, who quotes Berry repeatedly in Omnivore's Dilemma. I had known about Berry and his poetry for many years, of course, but this collection seemed to be a good way in, rather than through his novels or poetry. I was initially concerned that the essays might seem dated or be too repetitive of the same points, and so I was delighted to discover that each essay, written between 1971 and 2006, seemed as fresh and relevant to me today as when they were written. Berry's essays on the Amish and a farmer by the name of Lancie Clippinger are absolute gems. All of the pages in this book are infused with a deep appreciation of the natural world and its astonishing interconnectedness. They approach the transcendent but never overreach.

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