Here is our short Wendell Berry reading preceding our Thanksgiving Dinner...
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"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 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. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing, flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think it bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is one's accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.
I mentioned earlier the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. 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 and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest:
There is nothing to eat
seek it where you will
but of the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.
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That was written in 1989. This idea of growing, raising, and knowing your food (or at least your farm[s]) is at the idealistic heart of "Occupy Wall Street". It is not about buying expensive organic products at Whole Foods or Wal-Mart - it is about the direct relationship to the seed, the soil, and the seasonal life cycle.
Furthermore, It is about eye contact between poverty and wealth. An economics of people instead of money.
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Berry speaks to this in an essay from 2006...
"The fashion now is to think of universities as industries or businesses. University presidents, evidently thinking of themselves as CEOs, talk of "business plans" and "return on investment", as if the industrial economy could provide an aim and a critical standard appropriate either to education or research.
But this is not possible. No economy, industrial or otherwise, can supply an appropriate aim or standard. Any economy must be either true or false to the world and to our life in it. If it is to be true, then it must be made true, according to a standard that is not economic.
To regard the economy as an end or as the measure of success is merely to reduce students, teachers, researchers, and all they know or learn to merchandise. It reduces knowledge to "property" and education to training for the "job market".
Health is at once quantitative and qualitative; it requires both sufficiency and goodness. It is comprehensive (it is synonymous with "wholeness"), for it must leave nothing out. And it is uncompromisingly local and particular; it has to do with the sustenance of particular places, creatures, human bodies, and human minds."
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As much as I understand the "Occupy Wall Street" movement/revolution to be necessary and historically inevitable, it can only be political or economic, leading to either apathy or violence as extremes, if it cannot be "quantitative and qualitative" and "uncompromisingly local and particular".
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