‘Eating Is an Agricultural Act’

The Wendell Berry quote that frames Michael Pollan’s environmental writing

Photo: Eddie Kopp via Unsplash

Eating is an agricultural act.
— Wendell Berry

I’m not a farmer. Or a gardener. And I wouldn’t even call myself a decent potted-planter. I like the idea of becoming a gardener, though. The same way I liked the idea of becoming a baker: because fresh bread is delicious.

Flashback

When I was a high school exchange student in France years ago, I recall a few late nights after skateboarding, drinking at outdoor cafés, and muddling through drunken French discussions. Discussions about the weekly student grèves (strikes), French hip-hop, or Bush’s America (this was the early aughts).

When the evening wound down, mes amis and I were pulled through the streets of my small town in Ardèche like moths to a light.

The light, in this case, was a small bakery, selling off its first bread of the day at what seemed to be a ridiculous hour for someone unfamiliar with the baking business: 3 a.m.

The smell of baking dough wafted through the air, and once we got our bread, we all fell into a state of altered consciousness while we drunkenly munched our bread.

What an amazing job to have, I remember thinking. Baking bread like this for the people!

But being on the receiving end of a bakery’s fresh-baked bread is not the same as putting in the work to make it. The sweat and toil that produced that bread were mostly hidden from my view. Instead, whatever I romanticized running a bakery to be like after eating that delicious dough was surely different from the reality of the situation.

Writing, surfing, gardening: There are plenty of other activities where a similar “logic of absence” holds; reading a great piece of writing, watching an expert surfer, or eating the delicious veggies from someone’s farm. In the moment, the endless hours of work that went into that essay, that performance, or that food gets erased.

All we are left with is a finished product whose originating dots we tend to only trace back in time through our imagination.