Landon Hatfield Hatfield 1. The Pleasures of Eating. Wendell Berry, author of "The Pleasures of Eating" published in 1990 from The Center

Transcription

1 Landon Hatfield Hatfield 1 Ms. Szetela English April 2014 The Pleasures of Eating Wendell Berry, author of "The Pleasures of Eating" published in 1990 from The Center for Ecoliteracy lectures on the decline of American farming and rural life. Berry wants to teach and convince his audience of urban food shoppers how to eat responsibly, shop locally, be aware of additional costs added to foreign foods, and know the benefits of growing your own vegetables and raising your own meat. He does this by using three rhetorical appeals, ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos to affirm his credibility, pathos to reach the audience emotionally, and logos to explain his reasoning logically. He makes a point that most people ignore a lot of crucial questions that would change where and how they buy their food. He claims urban people do not know the connection between eating and the land. His first point is that in order to eat responsibly we must live free; free to not let our food sources be controlled by someone else. Berry says we are oblivious to where our meats come from, such as steer that spent most of their life standing in their own excrement in a feedlot. He wants us to buy locally to be sure we are buying meat from animals that were treated well. He finished with giving multiple tips on how to eat responsibly. Berry gives many examples of ethos, pathos, and logos, all of which help make his points stronger. He begins with ethos, showing his character and ethics talking about our freedom: "we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone

2 Hatfield 2 else One reason to eat responsibly is to live free" (para. 7). Wanting to be free in the sense of eating responsibly shows Barry's character because many people do not care enough to put in the extra effort to learn about their food source. He is very sincere and knowledgeable in everything he talks about and wants everyone around him to know what he knows. He is showing ethos when he talks about the production of our meats. "And they mostly ignore certain questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been manufactured of "processed" or "precooked", how has that affected its quality or price of nutritional value?" (para. 2). This shows ethos because it shows he will not sit back and let food companies dictate what meats and vegetables he buys and how much he pays for it. In further showing his character, he talks about how he would prefer to eat seafood instead of other meats while traveling. Berry makes it clear that he is not a vegetarian, but he does not like the thought that an innocent animal was miserable to feed him. He says that if he is going to eat meat, he wants to be sure that it lived a good life. Berry clearly shows his feeling of ethos by describing situations in which animals are not taken care of; he does not want to be part of the majority that eat meat when they are traveling, not knowing where their food has come from or if the animals have lived a good life. Berry addresses pathos in his article by touching on a lot of descriptive and graphic incidences where these innocent creatures are mistreated for the sole benefit of the average

3 Hatfield 3 American to enjoy a hamburger or a crispy chicken sandwich. Berry talks about why most people do not want to know how their food came to be at their kitchen table. He says they do not want to know that their juicy hamburger came from a steer who spent most of his life standing in his own feces in a box too small to turn around in, who also contributed to polluting the local streams. Berry shows his deep emotions and how he is thoroughly upset with these big corporations and the lengths they will go to just to make an extra buck. He says "There is a great displeasure in knowing about the food economy that degrades and abuses the arts and those plants and animals and the soil in which they come" (para. 21). Berry talks about logos and the logic behind why knowing where your food comes from is better for you, you also have more satisfaction knowing you are not harming animals and knowing that your vegetables are coming from your garden and do not have any pesticides in them. Berry says, "People who know the garden in which the vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy and remember the beauty of growing plants" (para. 22). Growing your own garden is logical because it is much cheaper then to buy vegetables at the store. It is also logical because you know there were not any pesticides sprayed on the food you will be eating. Who would want it any other way? Berry tries to explain logically to his audience that having the ability to raise animals to be slaughtered is not something abnormal, but is something that most people have never been exposed to in their life. He explains, "Some, I know, will think of it as blood thirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it beans you eat with understanding and gratitude" (para. 2). He talks about the American people and how we expect that most of our food that we eat at fast food restaurants we consider

4 Hatfield 4 to be food. Even though when you actually look at how processed it actually is, somehow our minds tell us it is food and is ok to eat. Berry goes into a little more detail, "The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal that has been pre prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inherent anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, grieved, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any creature that has ever lived" (para. 9). Berry Talks about the way in which we can grow our food even in neighbor hoods, even when there does not seem to be room for plants to be grown, "participates in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window grow something to eat in it. Make a compost with kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer" (para. 13). The author was very effective especially when he used the graphic explanations of how some farmers treat their animals. Berry also made a lot of easy was to change the way you get your food, he broke it down and made it simple. His logic was seemingly flawless to the reader, unless the reader was the farmer treating their animals poorly. Berry was trying to tel his audience, urban food shoppers, to buy meats and vegetables locally, to learn how to eat responsibly. He wants us to realize the torture some animals go through and he wants us to be able to control the food we put into our bodies. By using ethos, logos, and pathos, the author tried to convince urban food shoppers to eat responsibly.

5 Hatfield 5 Works Cited Berry, Wendell. "The Pleasures of Eating." The Pleasures of Eating (1990): 1-5. Web. 6 Feb