Wendell Berry's The Pleasures Of Eating By Wendell Berry

In “The Pleasures of Eating,” Wendell Berry addresses the disconnection between food and its consumers, and argues how food industries distance consumers from knowing where and how their food is produced, which is making the consumers ignorant. Throughout the essay, Berry wants people to have a better understanding of their food, and how it has been affected by the food culture. Consumers would buy food without any question and believe that they are not participants of agriculture, which is making the ignorant of where their food came from. Food Industrialists have been a cause of creating this disconnection by persuading consumers to buy food that have been already prepared, which leads these consumers to become less aware of how eating affects

By educating those who are ignorant about the gap, Berry’s goal was to try to close the gap by bringing an understanding to consumers. Michael Pollan’s article, “Unhappy Meals,” touched on the ways food has changed over time to attract more consumers. “Food industry set about re-engineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and less of the bad,” (Pollan 4). From this I believe that even though we might know where our food comes from, we might not know what has happened and if it has been modified. This is able to connect to Berry’s idea that the food industries would keep us in the dark and control what is in our food that we consume. In both essays they want consumers, in a sense, to eat healthy. Pollan states, “pay more, eat less” as one of his key points on how to stay healthy in a food culture that is unhealthy (15). Similar to Pollan’s point, Berry brings up his own point saying, “deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist” to avoid the problem of getting processed foods (234); although, both said to follow their guidelines whenever it is possible, they gave reasons that only fortunate people were able to perform. Since most low class families are not able to obtain healthy foods because they are more expensive than genetically modified foods, which is a reason I think why people “ignore certain critical questions about the quality and cost of what they are sold” because they just need to eat for survival (Berry