4 Degrees

Wendell Berry is a big proponent of supporting the local and knowing the land. He also seems to be against capitalism as it is destroying everything in order to have the best production methods while ignoring the environment. In “The Pleasures of Eating”, Berry introduces the idea that eating is an “agricultural act”. He goes into details about how food is produced and the toll it takes on the land. The quality of our food, and everything that goes into the making of our food (animals, what the animals eat, plants, soil) has gone downhill and so has the health of the animals and the healthiness of our produce. He also states that food is an abstract idea; that people know vaguely where it comes from but nothing about the process of how it is made or what goes into the land. He advocates, in a way like Thoreau, for self-sufficiency, saying we can not be free if we are controlled by the government and some of that control is held through commercially sold foods. He states that we should grow our own produce and raise our own meat, prepare our own food, and care about the quality of what goes on our plate. He also brings up the suffering of industrially farmed animals and how it was originally thought that they had a soul. A lot of his philosophies in this week’s readings remind me of the song “4 Degrees” by Anohni (one of the songs I’d like to do a presentation on). She laments the future deaths of animals and such due to our pollution of the Earth raising the temperature 4 degrees. Part of that pollution comes from our current production methods from food, including the degradation of the soil and how it washes away into our watersheds, the methane gases that industrial farmed animals produce, the pollution that goes into the air through transport of foods across large distances, and the landfills we fill with the packaging our food comes in. Anohni’s song uses sarcasm much in the way that the beginning of Berry’s poem “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” uses sarcasm.