Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky

Blog Watch: "Eating as as Spiritual Act (Part 1)

These are the first of my notes from a wonderful presentation I attended yesterday, entitled “The Spirituality of Stewardship, Sustainability, and Food”. It was held at the holy Rothko Chapel and featured Dr. Norman Wirzba of Duke (author of Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating) as well as some Texan farmers and one pastor who are advocates for sustainability. But it was Wirzba’s talk which garnered the bulk of my note-taking, since he & I are simpatico.

via foodievangelist.wordpress.com

The article reflects on a presentation in Houston on March 10 by Norman Wirzba.

Marion Nestle on the Prince's food book

Americans in general love royalty. Whether food movement participants care about royalty is a different matter. I can't imagine anyone in America having more weight than Michael Pollan and Alice Waters but it's great to have Michelle Obama and now the Prince on our side.

via www.theatlantic.com

Prince Charles Calls for a Greener Food System

Last May, just a day after his son William's eagerly anticipated marriage to Kate Middleton, Prince Charles flew to Washington D.C. to give a speech at the Future of Food Conference, in which he outlined the social and environmental problems associated with industrial food systems and some pragmatic solutions to them. Author and environmentalist Laurie David was in the audience that day and like many others (including Ecocentric bloggers Chris Hunt and Kai Olson-Sawyer), was deeply impressed. Laurie immediately set out to convince the Prince -- and Rodale Press -- that an essay adaptation of the speech would make a great small book.

Today, that little book is out in print and called The Prince's Speech: On the Future of Food, with a foreword by poet and farmer Wendell Berry, and an afterword co-written by urban farmer/MacArthur genius Will Allen and longtime food journalist Eric Schlosser.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Of Interest: Wendell Berry noted in "The Soul of Slow Food"

When my fiancée, Juliana, and I were farming, we grew the most beautiful produce I have ever seen. I do not mean to brag. It is sort of like being a parent, or a pet owner. Anyone who has grown food with love probably feels that way about the product of his or her labor. We grew 300 varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers, many heirloom varieties, and ingredients for cooking food from so many traditions. We sold them at a farmers' market in a well-heeled neighborhood, and we charged a lot of money. We did not think twice about charging $16 per pound for salad greens. We knew what work went into it, we knew how good it was, and we knew it was worth it. We sold out. And we made $12,000 a year between the two of us. We thought we were doing pretty well.

When low-income people came to our stand with food stamps, we gave them two or three for the price of one. But something was broken. At $12,000, we had low incomes ourselves, and the only people we could feed had high incomes. I wanted to change the world, and I saw farming as a piece of that work. Fairness for the farmer seemed to mean injustice for the eater. Fairness for the eater seemed to mean injustice for the farmer. How could we simply choose to fight for one, with the knowledge that it undercut the other?

via www.theatlantic.com

Wendell Berry considered in "Environmental Imagination: The Food Movement and Climate Change"

In big ways, the modern food movement goes back to an eccentric, powerful, and often beautiful book by Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America. Writing in 1977, as the first popular wave of environmental awareness and activism crested, Berry tied ecological destruction to the American food economy. In the move from diversified, small-scale agricultural to industrial production, he saw a larger decline in miniature: from integrated organic fertility to systems that import artificial fertilizer to the farm and discard rich manure as a pollutant, breaking (in Berry's phrase) one solution into two problems; from intimate knowledge of a piece of land and its species to the tunnel-vision ignorance of the industrially enabled, public subsidized ignorance of someone who produces of one thing, whether corn, wheat, or pork, in a radically simplified system; from respect for the hard but sometimes good work of farming to dislike, even contempt, of labor, which came with a willingness to make agricultural labor, in industrial poultry plants and slaughterhouses, as degrading as it has ever been.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

Of Interest: Food Art Manifesto - A Contest for Artists and Writers!

As a follow-up to the Manifesto for a New Food Art (Click link to read), The Englewood Review is sponsoring FOOD ART MANIFESTO, an art and writing contest to encourage reflections by artists related to current conversations on food, place and the new agrarianism.

ABOUT:

Read the Manifesto for a New Food Art.

While this document by no means calls for specific aesthetics or media, it does ask for artists to consider some basic ideals that have been associated recently with food, and particularly the new agrarianism (fresh, local, sustainable, etc.), as normative also for art-making.

via erb.kingdomnow.org

Find more information at ERB ... HERE

Wendell Berry cited in "A Feast Fit for the King"

One of the early voices to sound the alarm was social critic and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry, who has written voluminously about returning integrity to the act of eating. In his essay "The Pleasures of Eating," he describes a typical processed meal, either fast food or cooked at home from packages, so altered from its original form as to be unrecognizable on the plate. "What nature has produced, man has turned into the products of industry," Berry concluded. Two sentences from his famous essay have become rallying cries for the new food revolution: "Eating is an agricultural act"; and "… how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used."

via www.christianitytoday.com

Novel trivia: Old Overhold?

Just this past week, I learned of a probable allusion in Mr. Berry's novel Jayber Crow to what has been a popular, historical brand of rye whiskey, Old Overholt. Not being much of a drinker myself, I had never heard of such a brand. But one of my reading group companions pointed out Mr. Berry's wry wink in naming Roy and Cecilia Overhold ... Roy being the drinker of the family.

Blog Watch: "A Chicken, A Red Rudge and A Pair of Shoes"

My old bike, at its time, was a very good one. It was a ten-speed manufactured in the early 1960s with a hand built thin walled, lugged, steal frame. I asked Ed, my local bike shop owner, if it made sense to rebuild my old ten-speed into an urban commuter. Absolutely he said. He put Nick, a college aged young man, in charge of the project.

My old red Rudge was reborn with upright bars, a classy and comfortable leather saddle, new rims and rubber, new chain and bearings and a slick 8-speed internal hub. Here is a sensible example of the proper economies of scale. It wedded my household economy, the stuff at hand, with economy of my local bicycle shop. The $400 give or take that I could afford on a bike (mostly give in this case, but in that range) were dollars spent in my community and largely remained in my community.

via www.soupcrafter.blogspot.com

Reading about food

I will never forget the day my young daughter inspected the neat wedge of meat on her dinner plate and asked, incredulously, “Do we call this chicken because it’s from a chicken?” The majority of us are far removed from our food sources. Our meat and vegetables — often shipped from another state or country — come shrink-wrapped from the supermarket, not fresh from the family farm, and our snacks come in packages printed with lists of unpronounceable ingredients. Change is definitely afoot, however, with a growing number of books, films and events aiming to educate us about the sources of our food, its effects on our health and the environmental, economic and even moral implications of what we consume.

via www.columbiatribune.com