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by Marion Nestle
Sep
2
2026
RIP Wendell Berry, 1934 – 2026
Alas, we must now mourn the death of one of the great heroes of food politics, the honorable and immensely inspiring Wendell Berry.
His very existence was enough for hope that a decent food system might some day be possible in the United States.
When I think of his writings—his many books, essays, and poems—the words “decency” and “values” leap to mind.
He believed so deeply in the inherent worth of agrarian life—the idea that small-scale, sustainable, organic, regenerative agriculture, plant and animal, is the bedrock of a healthy, moral, and ethical life. He lived that life.
He also believed that agrarian values are fundamental to healthy, moral, and ethical societies.
Ethics. Imagine that.
I was honored to meet him for the first time at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky in 2007. I have had this photo on the wall of my NYU office ever since.
He was a constant source of inspiration.
What a loss.
I’ve collected a few memorial items recently posted.
- The obituary in the New York Times
- Berry’s 1981 Schumacher lecture: “People, Land, and Community.”
- His Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. It ends:
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
- The Peace of Wild Things (from Instagram, his reading, illustrated)
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The fragment of the earth
that is now me is only on its way
through me. It is on its way
from having been a tree,
a school of fish, a terrapin,
a flock of birds. It will pass
through all those forms again.
