Trashdumping

I feel a deep connection with much of Wendell Berry’s articulate and pointed writing. Though born in vastly different times and regions, he and I are both the descendents of farmers, and we both have been stirred by a vague but deeply personal sense of debt to the past and to the earth. Because of these allegiances, I have felt the same frustration and sadness over people’s wastefulness and neglect—what Berry calls the tragic manifestations of our “national character.” In general, Berry uses language to flesh out concepts that I have pondered for much of my life without attempting to articulate. Following is one example.

My first job was washing dishes at the Cracker Barrel restaurant when I was seventeen. Each night when we closed, my Hispanic co-workers and I poured pounds of “extra” food into garbage cans, which we then hauled to a dumpster and laboriously lifted and dumped. The senselessness of it sickened me. I remember the drab shades of the dish room and what it felt like to dump gallons of hot gravy over steaming mashed potatoes plopped into the bottom of an industrial sized trash can. Following the gravy and potatoes were biscuits, green beans, and any other hot sides that could not be kept overnight. The logic behind this sickly ritual was simple: the food was unable to be sold and therefore had no value. So we were ordered, by other “corporate underlings (69)” and upon condition of receiving our paychecks, to send it in bags to a landfill.

In Racism and the Economy, Berry points out the similarities between industrial society and the institution of slavery. In short, he asserts that modern consumer culture exploits power and misuses people just as slaveholders did. There is hard, physical work to be done, and the wealthy don’t want to do it. So they purchase human labor to build a personal enterprise. Though this system does not violate human rights as blatantly as its predecessor, it makes a mockery of the dignity of human labor by assigning workers to degrading tasks like throwing away perfectly good food. Such tasks have no value aside from the need to clean up the muck left behind by profit-driven businesses.

As a high school junior trying to make some summer money, I lacked the intellectual and spiritual capacity to understand societal sin, but I felt the guilt of participating in it. Complacently, but not without unease, I sold my body and my labor to an irreverent and destructive force controlled by greed. It sobers me to think that the nightly taking-out of trash at the Cracker Barrel is a case study of similar misdeeds committed a million times over each day across the world.

(quote taken from The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)