Wendell Berry Saw the Screen Coming

Wendell Berry did much of his writing in a small cabin raised above the woods beside the Kentucky River. It had no electricity or plumbing. There was a woodstove, a table, paper, a line of sharpened pencils and a window looking out towards the trees. From this almost entirely disconnected room, Berry saw our connected food culture coming with greater clarity than most of the people building it.

In his 1989 essay The Pleasures of Eating, Berry pauses to consider the “dream home” being imagined for the future. It would offer “effortless” shopping from a list of goods displayed on a television monitor, followed by the heating of precooked food by remote control. Read now, just after his death, the passage no longer resembles a quaint piece of twentieth-century speculation. It reads like an early product brief for the digital food economy.

The television monitor became the smartphone. The remote control became the app. The precooked food became the restaurant meal, meal kit, virtual brand and rapid-grocery order moving towards us across a map. What Berry understood, however, was that the important change would not be the device. It would be the distance the device placed between the eater and everything involved in feeding them.

Berry died on 31 August at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. His daughter Mary confirmed his death, bringing to an end a life spent writing about land, farming, work, community and the increasingly strained relationship between them. He was a poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, farmer and activist, although none of those descriptions quite contains him. Berry was interested in the whole arrangement: how the way we produce food shapes the way we live, and how the way we live eventually remakes the land beneath us.

Born into a Kentucky farming family in 1934, Berry left home to study and write. He attended Stanford alongside writers including Ernest Gaines, Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry, spent time in Europe and taught at New York University. In 1964, when the expected direction of travel was away from rural America and towards the city, Berry returned to Kentucky. He and his wife, Tanya, bought a house and twelve acres near his family’s home place. He taught at the University of Kentucky, farmed with horses and began the work that would occupy the rest of his life.

This was not a retreat from the world. It was his way of seeing it properly.

The power of Berry’s most famous sentence comes from everything we ordinarily leave out. Eating does not begin when a plate arrives at the table. It begins with soil, weather, seed, birth, husbandry, labour and time. A meal is the conclusion of a chain of relationships involving plants, animals, farmers, processors, drivers, cooks and landscapes. Whether we acknowledge those relationships or not, we participate in them every time we eat.

Modern food culture encourages us to forget this. We call ourselves consumers, as if our only role begins at the point of purchase. Food simply appears on a shelf, a menu or a doorstep, separated from the conditions in which it was grown and the people whose work brought it there. Berry called this a form of cultural amnesia. The less we understand about the origin of food, the easier it becomes for the system producing it to escape our attention.

That was the argument running through The Unsettling of America, published in 1977. Berry’s objection to industrial agriculture was not simply that farms had acquired machines. It was that an industrial idea had taken command of agriculture. Land became a production unit. Animals became inputs. Farmers became operators or costs. Diversity gave way to volume, and knowledge rooted in a particular place was displaced by systems designed elsewhere.

As farms became larger and fewer, the distance between cause and consequence grew. The person making the decision no longer had to live beside the damaged soil, drink from the polluted stream or watch a community lose the farms that had sustained it. Efficiency was counted centrally; damage accumulated locally.

Six days before Berry died, Counterpoint published a fiftieth-anniversary edition of The Unsettling of America, carrying a new foreword by him. It is a strange final punctuation mark. Nearly half a century after he warned that industrial agriculture was separating culture from land, the book returned not as a historical document but as an account of a crisis still unfolding.

This is where Berry moves decisively into the world of Eat Your Screen.

In The Pleasures of Eating, he writes that consumers buy what they want — or what they have been “persuaded to want”. In 1989, that persuasion largely meant packaging, television advertising and supermarket display. Today it is continuous, personalised and increasingly difficult to distinguish from appetite itself.

The screen is now our grocer, cookbook, restaurant guide, dining companion, delivery dispatcher and television channel. It notices what we pause over, what we save, who we follow, when we order and what resembles the thing we ordered last time. It does not merely satisfy appetite. It participates in forming it.

Berry’s passive consumer has been given the appearance of extraordinary activity. We tap, swipe, search, save, rate, share and order. But activity is not necessarily agency. The field has already been narrowed, the results ranked and the next desire placed in front of us. The industrial food system concealed where food came from. The platform food system adds another obscurity: it conceals why this particular food appeared before us at all.

The next step is from the screen to the agent — when the system stops showing options and starts acting.

Berry observed that food had become an abstract idea until it materialised on the supermarket shelf or dining table. Now it is abstracted one stage earlier. Food first arrives as an image, a video, a recommendation or a piece of entertainment. It can succeed culturally before anyone has tasted it. Its value is established through circulation, visibility and response, sometimes long before the practical business of cooking and eating begins.

That is how you get queues that form on the feed first.

This does not make the screen inherently hostile to good food. It can teach someone to cook, introduce a small producer, preserve a disappearing technique or create a market for a restaurant that would otherwise remain unknown. Berry was too often reduced to the role of technological scold, particularly after explaining why he would not buy a computer. But even his own life resisted that simple caricature. He used a truck and a chainsaw, and solar panels stood beside his house. He was not really asking whether a tool was modern. He was asking what it displaced, what dependencies it created and whether it left people and places more capable of caring for themselves.

Those remain better questions than whether an innovation is exciting.

Berry’s influence on contemporary food culture is difficult to overstate. Michael Pollan credited those five words about eating and agriculture with changing his life. Alice Waters wrote that The Pleasures of Eating electrified her and articulated the relationships between Chez Panisse, its farmers and the local economy surrounding the restaurant. Much of the language now used around seasonality, provenance, regenerative farming and farm-to-table food travelled through Berry’s work.

But culture has a way of turning criticism into styling. Farm-to-table became a restaurant category. Seasonality became menu language. The farmer became an image circulated between pictures of the dining room and the chef. The appearance of connection could be reproduced without necessarily changing the underlying economics.

An origin story can become another garnish.

Berry’s question was more demanding: can farmers afford to farm well? That question still guides the work of the Berry Center, founded by his daughter Mary to support farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional economies. A beautifully photographed carrot does not repair an agricultural system if the person growing it is still being squeezed out of existence.

Nor should Berry now be polished into a faultless prophet of an innocent rural past. His family’s history included tobacco farming and slaveholding, subjects he confronted in The Hidden Wound and, decades later, The Need to Be Whole. The communities he defended could nurture people, but communities can also exclude, constrain and preserve injustice. Critics accused him of romanticising agrarian life and underestimating the freedoms people sometimes gain by leaving it.

Those tensions matter. They stop us from turning Berry into another soothing rural image: the old farmer, the wooden desk, the horse-drawn plough. His best work does not ask us to reconstruct Kentucky in the 1930s. It asks a harder question about progress. What deserves to be called progress if it leaves the soil poorer, the farmer less secure, the eater less knowledgeable and the community less able to sustain itself?

Late in his career, Berry increasingly used the word affection. His 2012 Jefferson Lecture was titled It All Turns on Affection. He argued that places are protected by people who know them particularly: their weather, history, failures, possibilities and limits. Affection, in his use of the word, was not sentimentality. It was knowledge accumulated through attention and made durable through responsibility.

This idea also animated his fiction. Across novels including Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, Berry created the imaginary Kentucky town of Port William. Its families formed what he called the Membership: people connected not by a formal organisation but by memory, dependence, work and care. The stories allowed him to show what his essays sometimes stated too sternly — that belonging is built through innumerable ordinary acts, and its disappearance is experienced one person, one farm and one empty house at a time.

There is something in that idea that contemporary food culture urgently needs. We have more information about food than any previous generation and perhaps less direct knowledge of it. We can watch bread being made in another country, summon dinner without speaking to anyone and ask artificial intelligence to create a weekly meal plan from the contents of a refrigerator. Yet information is not the same as participation, and visibility is not the same as understanding.

The danger Berry identified was not simply that we would eat badly. It was that we would forget what eating is.

Berry never insisted that everyone abandon the city and become a farmer. His challenge to the urban eater was more practical: pay attention, learn where food comes from, recover some of the skills surrendered to industry and refuse the idea that convenience is the same thing as freedom. The point was not purity. It was to move from passive consumption towards conscious participation.

That challenge now extends beyond agriculture. If Berry taught us that eating is an agricultural act, we must also recognise that appetite has become a computational act. What we want is increasingly observed, interpreted and returned to us by systems designed to hold attention and produce transactions.

But the computational act does not replace the agricultural one. At the other end of every frictionless interface there is still land, water, weather, energy, labour and a body that must be fed. Somewhere, something was planted, picked, slaughtered, packed, cooked or carried. The screen can make that chain disappear from view. It cannot make the chain disappear.

Wendell Berry saw the screen coming. What he asked us not to lose was the world beyond it.