It is impossible to speak intelligently about a society as having one culture. In America we have business culture, black culture, gay culture, political culture, indigenous cultures, and green culture to name a few. Culture is a handing down of value systems and ways of doing things to achieve the values. It is learned over time, through many generations, and knowledge becomes accumulated for better or worse. Obviously dealing with the decline of all America's cultures and their values would be both too much for a short essay and irresponsible. Not all these cultures are in decline or even facing the possibility of such.

So we need a focal point. What culture is so significant and primary to American society that we can consider it in lieu of all the others? Central to any understanding of a culture and its values is how it feeds its individual members. Native American hunting rituals, in paying respects and offering thanks to the deceased prey, emphasize that American tribes value a spiritual oneness of all living beings, seeing themselves as one group of creatures among many.

The honoring of proficient hunters with orally transmitted legends would tend to show that a tribe valued skill and bravery. The most widely known example of Native American agriculture, the Three Sisters (which was the creation of a mini-climate by interplanting corn, beans, and squash), shows that those gardeners valued time spent observing relationships between living creatures on the land around them.

Since food is center-most to life, every living creature is food for some other creature, I think it's fair to consider the values represented by the dominant form of agriculture in America, that which feeds the most people, and then discuss any possible decline. Americans are foragers of a sort. We certainly don't walk around picking acorns and blackberries to make pies with, but neither do most of us grow anything or hunt to provide our family's meals. What we do is walk around inside a building, selecting packaged foods, which we then take home to spend a minimal amount of preparation time (i.e. once known as cooking) before consuming said items.

Americans value efficiency and speed and getting things done. We only need to be able to do one thing quickly while having our hands free to do something else. We also value fancy packaging, as can be seen in the most popular items on the shelves. We value a good sales-job.

We also tend to value being inside and driving.

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