Reflecting on Wendell Berry and Cory Booker's Veganism
17 February 2019
Wendell Berry, the poet, essayist, environmental activist, and farmer, once wrote that “eating is an agricultural act.” This is a statement that should both liberate us and implicate us — we are actors in the food economy, and every decision we make about what we eat and where we buy our food from is a vote for a direction that the food economy will continue upon, or newly take, to meet consumer demand. Unfortunately, most of us are extremely disconnected from our food’s lineage, and we’re unaware of our active role in the series of relationships that is global in scope. Our role, however, isn’t merely as passive consumers, although the industrial food economy prefers the relationship between the citizenry and the food on their plates from grocery stores to be an entirely transactional one.
Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) has somewhat called attention to the environmental impact that our eating decisions make in comments he made to VegNews. Booker says that the planet can’t sustain people eating the quantities of meat they eat today, and that Americans need to be encouraged to switch to eating fake cheese in order to mitigate the “environmental impact” that the “standard American diet” is making. Booker became a vegan after initially becoming a vegetarian in 1992. He also noted that his friends who are lovers of cheese have tried the fake stuff and loved it — and that the pizza at the New Jersey VegFest was phenomenal.
Read all of "A Wendell Berry Solution to Cory Booker's Problem" by Marlo Safi at National Review.