The February issue of Gourmet magazine has a great article on Wendell Berry. (Here's a man who pays attention to details.) I've just recently gone back to reading this magazine regularly and I've noticed that the editors are really wonderfully adept at profiling real people who are making a difference in how we eat, shop and think about food.
Berry is described as a man who "was preaching the gospel of small farms and local foods when Michael Pollan was still in knee pants." Pollan's 2006 book,
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, is currently on our '08 book group list (though we, too, are still in caucuses) and I really hope we vote for this one. I will read it regardless but I know it will be a great book to discuss in the group. Both Pollan and Berry approach the subject of food as naturalists, not scientists, and I think this makes them both much more accessible and enjoyable.
"Eating with the fullest pleasure-pleasure that is, that does not depend on ignorance-is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world." See what I mean? I'm hungry for more (to quote my pretend celebrity best friend, Anthony Bourdain.) If you are, too, hungry for more...Berry that is (okay, okay, I'm done.), here's where you start: The Art of the Commonplace (farm-focused non-fiction), Farming (poetry, a hard-to-find chapbook in which he dubs soil "a divine drug"), and That Distant Land (a collection of stories).
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I'll have to check out Berry's work, and that issue of Gourmet. The Art of the Commonplace sounds awesome. On the local food topic, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver blew me away this past summer. It's written with more of a literary and family-focused voice than Pollan's book, but it was extraordinarily motivating. Burpee's got a lot of business from me after I read that book.
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