The pleasures of eating by wendell berry

Revision Assignment And Reflective Memo

The Assignment: You will substantially revise one of your major assignments: your Inquiry essay, Rhetorical Analysis, or Digital Forum—the choice is yours! You will also compose a 2-page single-spaced reflective memo detailing the revisions you made and explaining the rationale behind the changes.

Purpose: As we’ve discussed throughout the semester, revision and reflection are key components to growing as a writer and thinker. This final assignment for the course is an opportunity to enact the revision strategies you’ve been learning all semester in a sustained way by revising an essay of your choosing. In addition to this revision, you will also compose a reflective memo that details the changes you’ve made in the revision and the reasoning behind these changes. In the memo, you want to explain not just what you revised but why you revised in the way you did.

Audience: I am the audience for the reflective memo, so you should direct your comments to me.

Writing the Revision and Reflection

To guide your revision, you will consider the rhetorical concepts and strategies you’ve learned throughout the semester, review the comments I have made on your documents, reconsider the suggestions students have made on your drafts, and reflect on your own ideas and concerns that you articulated in your reflective writing assignments.
You will devise a revision plan based on these observations you’ve made about your writing and carry out your revision. Your revision will demonstrate your assessments of your writing and your mastery over the skills you’ve identified as critical to the revision. The idea here is that you show how you’ve developed and fine-tuned your rhetorical skills over the course of the semester and that you can now use these new understandings to revise your work. Your revised essay should reflect your end-of-the-semester knowledge and rhetorical expertise.
The revisions you make to the project of your choice must be substantive and effective. While you will be expected to bring our style and grammar work to bear on this revision, these are not the only changes you should be making. This means you are not only editing your essay. Rather, your work in this revision is to rethink major parts or aspects of the essay such as appeals, arrangement, introductions and conclusions, integration of research and so on. The goal of course is to create a stronger essay by tackling a major rhetorical concern in your revision.
After you have completed your revision, you will compose the reflective memo. The expectation here is that you (1) discuss what you’ve learned about academic writing and yourself as an academic writer over the course of the semester and (2) details the changes you’ve made in the revision project and the reasoning behind these changes. For example, you may find that your arrangement in your Rhetorical Analysis lacked cohesiveness and purpose, and after working on arrangement during the Position Paper unit, you can now devise a better arrangement strategy. In your reflective memo, you would discuss how you thought through issues related to cohesiveness and purpose, how and why you identified arrangement as a possible solution to these problems, and how you created a new organizational strategy that allowed for greater sense of purpose and cohesion. *See more info below on what should be included in the reflective memo.
Detailed discussions in your memo are vital because they highlight for me the thinking and decision-making that directed your revisions. Here is where I gain a sense that you are making conscious, careful, and rhetorically effective decisions. Furthermore, the idea behind the reflective memo is that you offer me a guide to reading your revision. In essence you’re saying, “Here’s what I did and here’s why I did it.” There are a variety of ways you can incorporate detail into your memo: You can offer evidence of the changes you’ve made by quoting your earlier and revised drafts. You can bring in the specific advice I have offered or suggestions you received from peers or tutors at the Writing Center. Or you may include identification of specific rhetorical strategies discussed in class or through readings. The idea is that you want to show me the specific reasons why you made the revisions you did.
This is the article I analyzed:

https://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/wendell-berry-pleasures-eating#

Eating is indispensable for every human being. While most people who live in the city go to the restaurant or shop at supermarkets, they don’t know much about farming or the essence of food they have every day. They just eat as a part of the agriculture act and lose the pleasure of eating. When people buy food, they barely consider the correlation between food and the land and themselves. The ignorance of the public is observed by Wendell Berry and brings him food for thought.

In Berry’s article “the Pleasures of Eating”, the author, who wrote books relating to lands and farms, mainly argues that people get dumbed and unconscious of everyday eating action. They eat much and think little. During this process people lose much pleasure of eating nowadays under the structure of mature food industry mechanism.

Berry establishes his authority by utilizing logos. He first starts with his personal experience as a professor. While showing that he held a lecture concerning American farming and rural life, he demonstrates his academic ability in the field relating to eating. Then, he claims, “They buy what they want — or what they have been persuaded to want — within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged.” (Berry, 1989) The author points out the undisputable fact that people think they have much more freedom in eating than they truly have. This part behooves readers to think back on themselves: Do we think the same way as what Berry tells? Is this the truth? Aren’t we missing something during daily eating? This stereotype view is similar with many readers and attracts them to keep listening to Berry’s analyses. After that, Berry keeps pulling out evidence by depicting the situation of food industry. He claims that patrons urge consumers to become uncritical and dependent so that consumers can eat what they’re told to buy. Berry even exaggerates that producers did not dump prechewed food directly into people’s stomach simply because this is not profitable. This claim is humorous but also sarcastic. Only in this way can the audience find that they don’t have much freedom on choosing what to eat than they thought they should have.

Berry makes the best of Pathos. Sympathy is easily felt through the author’s words. After claiming the hard and cruel fact of the people facing food, Berry mentions the “dream home” mode when people do “effortless” shopping. Without seeing the real items, shoppers save lots of time but instead lose even larger amount of useful information. They begin to abandon thinking about food, where they come from, whether they’re healthy, who grows them, etc. Then he considers this uncritical way of eating as industrial eating. He makes this an analogy to industrial sex to show that people having fast food hurry for nothing. All the things they do are by routine and of no value. By doing this analogy, Berry can make readers feel the sympathy he expresses and even start to feel sorry for themselves. In order to appeal to the readers, Berry declares that “a hamburger came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around.” This scenery is rather disgusting. By depicting this scene, many people can’t feel free to have what they previously had many times- a hamburger. The author simply describes the probable origin of the hamburger and the terrible scene urges readers to think on what they eat and how they are produced, even if they don’t want to at first. This strong evidence successfully conveys the idea that readers lack thinking when they are eating, and the author has no choice but help them to think before they eat. Comment by ms.3557: One place where you can add in more summary—why does Berry make this analogy? What impact does it have on the readers? Comment by ms.3557: Joshi—this is good because you are telling us what Berry did (describing the hamburger origin) and why he did so (to urge readers to think on what they eat). This is analysis—describing what the author did, what strategy or appeal he employed, and why he used that strategy or appeal. Look for other places in the paper where you are only summarizing what he’s doing and add in that second piece—why is Berry doing what he’s doing?

Logos is also great tool for Berry to support his idea that we should think about what we eat. He explains the reason why our health declines because of the growth of the food industry. In a word, in order to increase the volume of food, producers have to decline the diversity because only by producing certain categories of food can producers increase their efficiency. When diversity decreases, people rely on medicines to complement the food. That’s why health declines subsequently. (Berry, 1989) But producers are not down to solve this problem. What they seek is profit. They would rather advertise that the food they produce is tasty, healthy, etc. Once consumers believe what they say, they can’t find where the health problem is from. He tells the mechanism step by step, which is persuasive and easier for readers to consent to his idea. Readers who originally unconscious will find out where the problem is from and start to think on the food they have. Berry also uses simile. He claims that the ignorance of eating is like a trap. People voluntarily step into the trap. The only way out is to eat responsibly, understand and enact the relationship between eating and farming. Readers at this moment have been convinced by Berry’s evidence and analysis because they want to step out of the trap but don’t know what to do. That’s why he lists several suggestions. These advice is very practical and easy to follow. These methods will arouse people’s awareness of food. Berry also shares his feeling and methods. He chooses seafood instead of meat when travelling. He hopes the livestock he eats lived happily and freely but not raised merely for people’s consumption. This thought has a connection between the scene of what a hamburger might come from in previous paragraph. The author will throw up if he finds that the cow is raised simply for eating. He claims that the industrial farm in the central valley of California is more like a concentration camp. Here he appeals to emotion again. He feels sorry not only for the animals raised by industrial, but also for the people eat them without any consciousness. Berry tries to make resonance to the readers. Readers, who see the comparison between the valley and concentration camp, feel ashamed of what they’ve done unconsciously. They will find out eating as a process distressing and that they lose the spirit of eating when having what they want. Comment by ms.3557: Why is this approach persuasive? Comment by ms.3557: Another place where you could add more analysis—why does he make this comparison? How does he want his audience to respond?

Berry conveys the idea that the pleasure of eating meat should not just be obtained from gourmet, but most importantly, knowing how a livestock grow and eating with gratitude and understanding. Berry makes analogy of eating with growing flowers. People appreciate the good appearance and aroma of flowers, but for gardeners, the experiences of growing them is to be cherished the most. At the end, he draws the conclusion that we should abandon our ignorance of food. By understanding the correlation between food and lands and people, we can gain the full pleasure of eating.

This essay is published on the center for Ecoliteracy website. The organization mainly focuses on the ecological education, food and sustainability, healthy lifestyle, etc. This essay’s main point, which turns against the process of food economy, is same as the center’s opinion. But as we know, industrialized food economy does pursue profit but also solves the problem of starving in different parts of the world attributed to higher efficiency of producing. If a person always starves, he has no time to become realized of what he’s eating but what he can eat. It’s somewhat disappointing that the author doesn’t mention this part. But overall, the author makes good use of evidence, analysis, and rhetorical appeals including ethos, pathos and logos. The article is pretty effective in bringing up ideas and values and using them to support author’s standpoint.

Citations:

“Wendell Berry: The Pleasures of Eating.” Ecoliteracy.org, www.ecoliteracy.org/article/wendell-berry-pleasures-eating.