09/01/2026
Wendell Berry passed away yesterday, and I’ve always thought about his words, “Eating is an agricultural act.”
I raise food for a living, so maybe that sentence hits a little differently from where I stand. I see everything that comes before the package of meat. The pasture, the weather, the grass, the animals, the work, the good years and the hard ones, and all the ordinary days in between.
There is an incredible amount of life between the land and the food that eventually ends up on someone’s table.
Most people will never see all of that, and they shouldn’t have to raise their own food to understand it. But I do think there is value in remembering that food comes from somewhere. It comes from land. It takes water and weather and time. And behind it are people whose lives are tied pretty closely to all three.
That is something Berry understood and wrote about better than most.
“Eating is an agricultural act.” I think those words are worth remembering, along with so many others he left behind.
I’m grateful we had Wendell Berry putting words to things so many of us who live close to the land have felt but haven’t always known how to say. There is a lifetime of wisdom in what he left behind, and I know I’ll keep coming back to it.
