In Wendell Berry's 'The Pleasures of Eating,' Berry
discusses the lack of attention humans pay on our eating habits.
He challenges the readers to educate themselves on where their
food comes from or how it is being produced. Throughout the
article, Berry utilizes logos, pathos, and ethos in order to
convey his negative view on the lack of care society has for
food and its origins.

Berry first implements logos to help support his argument
that humans are ignorant about their food when he reveals the
mindset of corporations.
The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering
that, in the food industry'as in any other industry'the
overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and
price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy,
from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of
supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, has been obsessed with
volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to
increase volume in order (presumably) to reduce costs. But as
scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so
does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and
chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it
does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for
human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the
soil. (Berry, 'The Pleasures of Eating')
Here, Berry is using factual information about how food is
produced and distributed to show his displeasure for the way
industries function. Berry argues that businesses such as
'supermarkets' and 'fast-food restaurants' are more focused on
producing food in mass quantity rather than the overall
healthiness of the product being made for consumption. It
appears as though Berry is arguing inductively due to the fact
that he is drawing on specific concepts in order to reveal his
more generalized conclusion that humans do not seem to care
about educating themselves on food. For the majority of the
essay, Berry appears to use dialectal reasoning to help support
his central claim. Through numerous logical arguments supported
with factual data, Berry is able to provide a convincing
argument to perhaps induce change in the way society handles the
food industry.

Another instance of logos occurs later on in the article
when Berry provides a 'check-list' of how to eat and educate
oneself about food. He provides tips on food that seem to be
beneficial to the overall health of the reader, as opposed to
the corporation that appear to only care about quantity and
profit according to Berry. By eating responsibly, preparing your
own food, and educating oneself about the origins of his or her
food, Berry claims that this will allow the participant to in
time become more knowledgeable about eating. Once again, by
laying out a guide that has been proven to be accurate, he is
implementing logos to help reveal his overall opposition to the
food industry and society's ignorance to the subject of food.

Another tool that Berry utilizes to strengthen his negative
view on society and the food industry is pathos. Towards the
middle of the article, Berry attempts to trigger an emotional
response from his audience by revealing alarming facts about the
process of farming.
And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is,
again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good
reasons to obscure the connection between food and farming. It
would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she
is eating 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. And, though her sympathy for
the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to
meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-
square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge
monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals'just as animals
in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other
drugs. (Berry, 'The Pleasures of Eating')
In this passage, Berry provides the reader with detailed
descriptions of what life is like for cattle in slaughterhouses.
Berry does this to anger or perhaps even to guilt the reader
into rethinking his or her opinion on food. Also, Berry
introduces the emotion of fear into the reader when he mentions
that a vast majority of vegetables are sprayed with toxic
chemicals. By informing the audience of this fact, it once again
causes the reader to think twice about how one's food is
prepared. It appears as though Berry is utilizing enargeia due
to the fact that he writes with such a sense of urgency and
stresses the importance of his argument by providing the harsh
truth for how the food industry operates. Berry is able to
reveal the unfortunate reality of livestock and plants grown to
feed the population of the United States through vast
descriptions of the food industry. This implementation of pathos
was a key element that reinforced Berry's negative view on how
our society lacks the appropriate knowledge of food industry.

The last main factor that Berry implements to voice his
displeasure for the failures of the food industry is ethos.
Berry draws in his audience by displaying his credibility on the
subject of agriculture and the food industry. It is evident that
Berry is highly educated in the field of agriculture from
textual evidence found in the opening sentence of the essay.
'Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of
American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has
asked, 'What can city people do?''(Berry, 'The Pleasures of
Eating') Here, Berry begins the essay informing his audience
that he is indeed an intellectual on the subject of farming.
Therefore, Berry is able to take advantage of his vast knowledge
of food to perhaps encourage the reader to be more inclined to
support Berry's argument. Berry applies his situated ethos by
demonstrating his vast knowledge and opinion on food production
and distribution. Also, Berry is able to gain credibility with
the audience through his experience on his own farm.

Throughout the essay, Berry was able to convey his
displeasure for how society handles the operation of the food
industry. Berry uses logos, pathos, and ethos in order to gain
support for his position for change in the way our society
thinks about food. Through educating our society on the
production of food and its origins, Berry claims that this can
in time, can improve the overall health and lifestyle of
individuals.

