Friday Food for Thought: Wendell Berry Musings

If you're craving mental inspiration the way your stomach is craving summer produce this season, Wendell Berry's "The Pleasures of Eating" is an essay to savor. In the past few weeks, a couple of posts popped up reflecting on his words, so I wanted to pass them along to you.

First, a quote from Bery's essay:

"Eaters … must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used."

And here are the thoughtful responses from two food bloggers.

Hannah from Inherit the Spoon wrote:

"Preparing meals from our Farmer’s Market bounty is one of the best ways to remind ourselves that we are in fact committing an agricultural act. Shaking soil from basil, slicing into sticky tree-ripe figs, swirling frisée to remove the dirt … with each swoosh of leaves through the cool water we are reminded that our food was grown in the ground."

Sweet Amandine wrote:

"When we set our tables and pull up chairs, when we drop dough onto parchment, words onto the page, whenever we make something according to our talents and tastes and launch it into the world, we get a bite of that pleasure, I think.  To be free is to generate and to build, to make something delicious, and gobble it up.  'Eating with the fullest pleasure … is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world,”'Berry says."