Welcome to Litsy!

“The food jndustrialists have...persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have not yet found a profitable way to do so.”

I have the impression from reading a few of Mr. Berry's works that he must be a very peaceful man to encounter. His words leave me longing for a much simpler life; one dependent on the land and other people. A life that is much more fulfilling because it is centered around dignified work and love. What more could we ask for?

According to the new norm, the child's destiny is not to succeed the parents, but to outmode them; succession had given way to supersession. And this norm is institutionalized not in great communal stories, but in the education system. The schools are no longer oriented to a cultural inheritance that it is their duty to pass on unimpaired, but to a career, which is to say the future, of the child.

To have everything but money is to have much.

There used to be a sort of institution known as 'sitting till bedtime.' After supper, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, ate apples and talked. They told each other stories.... Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories and thus keeping their memories alive.... My friend talked and thought about this, then said, 'They had everything but money.'

It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams.... And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of the mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on

To act, in short, is to live. Living 'is a total act. Thinking is a partial act.' and one does not live alone. Living is a communal act, whether or not is communality is acknowledged. And so Emerson writes: 'I grasp the hands of those next to me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that do shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech.'

From Berry's essay, A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey:

"His work abounds in anti-intellectual jokes, but no one can read him attentively without realizing that he has read well and widely.... His outrage often vents itself in outrageousness, and yet it is the outrage of a cultivated man -- that is why it is valuable to us, and why it is interesting."