웬델 베리의 음식의 경제학과 섭생의 윤리

Wendell Berry's Economy of Food and Ethics of Eating

This paper investigates how Wendell Berry's ideas about food and eating are closely related with his life-long struggle to keep a traditional and sustainable way of life within a local community. The importance of farming to Berry cannot be overemphasized because it is, above all, one of the most direct and fundamental expressions of our relationship with nature. His criticism of current industrial farming is unforgiving and relentless because it devastates the land, the very source of farming and thereby our food. His alternative to this self-annihilating economy of greed is traditional farming, based on the husbandry and stewardship of farmers who take nature as measure. Berry's idea of eating is best summarized in his words, "eating is an agricultural act," which means eating is not just an act of filling our stomachs but a whole process of farming from the production of food to its distribution and consumption. He insists that we should eat responsibly and that our eating should be an act of pleasure. Only when we first understand how and what we eat largely determines the fate of the earth and secondly, become ecologically conscientious eaters instead of ignorant and passive victims of the industrial farming and food industry, can our eating be an act of pleasure and responsibility. By practicing the economy of husbandry and responsible eating, Berry claims that we can save our ecologically devastated world and our own endangered health.