The Pleasure of Eating By Wendell Berry

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Responding Essay “The Pleasure of Eating” By Wendell Berry
Renowned author and poet Wendell Berry describes responsible eating as an agricultural act focusing on the process of agriculture and not the agricultural product being consumed. He encourages the attention to the origin of the food product and its contents. Berry emphasises that the consumer should understand the relationship between eating and land in order to be conversant with the biological reality of their food product. This knowledge would help the consumer to distinguish between genuinely healthy food and food that is just a product of industry meant to generate profits in the food industry (Berry, 65).
Berry argues that there is a difference between participants of the agricultural process and consumers. Most people buy food based on their need to consume and the fact that they can afford the food type that they have access to at a certain time. Critical issues involving the food or the food product and the process used to get it to the shelf are mostly ignored by passive consumers. Wendell describes passive consumers as people who eat what they want, when they want without giving much regard to the process of manufacture, purity cost and the effect of the processed food to their bodies (Berry, 67).
The food industry thrives on the idea of volume and price. Food processing firms have mastered agriculture as an act. Since most ignorant consumers don’t ask questions about the origin of their food, the industry has turned agriculture into a business which values profits over the general health of the public. Food industrialists plant, grow, harvest and sell food and its products to a public that is ignorant about the history and origin of what it consumes (Berry, 64). Wendell terms such consumers as industrial eaters. As a result of this ignorance of the food history these consumers eat products of industry instead of products of agriculture and nature. Food has nowadays become part of a financial transaction between the consumer and the producer. The consumer judges the food s/he consumes based on whether it tastes as good as it looks or to confirm what is said about the product in the adverts. The producer on the other hand works to generate as much profit as possible by passing the food through so many manufacturing processes in order to sell an image that looks appealing to the consumer (Berry, 66).
Even if both the supplier and the consumer lose their grip on logical reality, the consumer is always on the receivi...