208 animal, vegetable, miraclein my psyche, even while living in some of the world’s major cities. It’s
probably this dual citizenship that has sensitized me to my nation’s urban-
rural antipathy, and how it affects people in both camps. Rural concerns
are less covered by the mainstream media, and often considered intrinsi-
cally comic. Corruption in city governments is reported as grim news
everywhere; from small towns (or Tennessee) it is fodder for talk- show
jokes. Thomas Hardy wrote about the sort of people who milked cows,
but writers who do so in the modern era will be dismissed as marginal.
The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban vot-
ers who aren’t well informed about the changes on the face of our land,
and the men and women who work it.
Those changes can be mapped on worry lines: as the years have gone
by, as farms have gone out of business, America has given an ever- smaller
cut of each food dollar (now less than 19 percent) to its farmers. The psy-
chic divide between rural and urban people is surely a part of the prob-
lem. “Eaters must understand,” Wendell Berry writes, “that eating takes
place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act,
and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world
is used.” Eaters must, he claims, but it sure looks like most eaters don’t. If
they did, how would we frame the sentence suggested by today’s food-
buying habits, directed toward today’s farmers? “Let them eat dirt” is
hardly overstating it. The urban U.S. middle class appears more specifi -
cally concerned about exploited Asian factory workers.
Symptomatic of this rural- urban identity crisis is our eager embrace of
a recently imposed divide: the Red States and the Blue States. That color
map comes to us with the suggestion that both coasts are populated by
educated civil libertarians, while the vast middle and south are criss-
crossed with the studded tracks of ATVs leaving a trail of flying beer cans
and rebel yells. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little. But I certainly sense a bit
of that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, “so far from
everything?” (When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually look-
ing out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden,
thinking: Defi ne everything.) Otherwise sensitive coastal- dwelling folk
may refer to the whole chunk of our continent lying between the Cas-
cades and the Hudson River as “the Interior.” I gather this is now a com-