Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (31 page)

The closer your farmers are to the soil, the more they are your link to blessing the earth that feeds you.

The “farmer” has many faces: hunter/gatherer, subsistence farmers who own land, tenant farmers who rent land, truck farmers who bring crops to market as they mature, subscription farmers who grow for specific customers (CSAs or restaurants), family farmers who still grow a diversity of crops and livestock, industrial farmers who are more like industrialists than farmers—who hire farmworkers to actually do the work.

Whom you choose as the farmer for each product you buy—in the supermarket or farmers' market—gives you a different relationship with the soil. Knowing your farmer means you are only one step removed from this humus (healthy soil), a word that shares a root with
human
and
humane
and
humble
.

By contrast, buying industrial food puts you in relationship with a faraway soil-like substance, diminished of life but bulked up with soil “steroids.” The foodlike substances are half laboratory creations, with added flavors and stabilizers and genes for cold or poison tolerance.

Stepping into Your Farmer's Boots

The closer you are to your farmer, the more you see through her eyes and share his challenges.

You become sensitized to what he or she deals with daily in producing local food in an industrial system.

You see how the USDA and FDA, while protecting consumers from bad apples (so to speak) among industrial producers, regulate the life right out of small-scale producers who want to sell their surplus to their neighbors. Some trade is simply against the law. I bought Elsie's milk from Belinda and got goat cheese from Nina like I used to score marijuana. Both acts were illegal and therefore could not be spoken about. When we'd see each other around town, we couldn't speak out loud about . . . ahem . . . that.

Some of my farmers have worked around these restrictions by forming co-ops—owning a piece of a cow or a goat and therefore milking “their” animal legally.

Some products are constrained by legislation requiring permits, inspections, licenses—all adding cost to the product—too much cost for small-scale operations.

Vicky Brown of Little Brown Farm is a case in point. Another islander, Lynn Swanson, finally got her sheep dairy licensed, but at this writing Vicky runs the only remaining legal dairy on the island, milking her herd of twenty-two goats every day. The playing field between her cheese and anywhere cheese—goat, sheep, or cow—is so unlevel she'd have few customers if she hadn't cultivated local loyalists at the farmers' market and upscale wine shops. She turns the milk from her “ladies” into yummy handcrafted cheeses that she has to sell for top dollar—six times what bottom-dollar cheese fetches—because of the many dollars she has to spend to comply with all the regulations and inspections and pay all the licensing and insurance to sell her wares legally. I've stood in her barn, each of us nuzzling a baby doe with ears softer than my cat's back. I've looked around as she pointed out the special stalls and paints and bathrooms and sinks she has had to install to comply with regulations. She's run the numbers for me, punctuating the recitation with a snort at the people who ask why her cheese is so expensive.

Could she simply skip the rules and sell raw milk cheese in the underground food trading system that flourishes here via friendship networks? Of course, but then she would not be Vicky Brown who takes pride in her one and only profession—dairywoman. She left a high-paid corporate job—bringing with her all her professional skills—to build a real business and succeed. She is, therefore, on the front lines of confronting the unfairness of a system that does not make any allowance for scale of operations. A license is a license, no matter what size your herd. Inspection fees are inspection fees, no matter what size your operation.

The same playing-field tilt discourages people from buying five-dollars-a-pound chicken and Georgina's grain and Georgie's beans (at least five times the price of their industrial counterparts). This is not just a question of scale. Migrant labor and undocumented laborers earn a pittance and have little voice in shifting their conditions. Factory food isn't necessarily cheaper to produce than artisan food because some of the costs are hidden in our taxes. In addition to the low price we pay for it directly at the market, we also pay indirectly through Big Farm subsidies, environmental cleanup from shoddy practices, or the health costs of food-borne illnesses. With local food, we pay premium price because our farmer does not have those subsidies and does not take cheaper shortcuts that could endanger the environment and our health.

Many locals get around complying with costly regulations by trading in a person-to-person food system. Hundreds of people on this island raise animals for home consumption. They can sell a quarter or half of an animal to me legally, but not cuts of meat. To get a USDA certification on an island that has no abattoir means animals are either slaughtered in a very expensive USDA-approved mobile slaughter unit or loaded onto a truck to go to the closest USDA-approved slaughterhouse on the mainland. Several farmers, including the Long family and 3 Sisters on the north end of the island, do go this route, complying with USDA regulations as part of the “Whidbey Island Grown” brand that is slowly entering the marketplace. But a lot of hyperlocal meat here is traded in the relational web. In August, as I looked for 10-mile meat and milk, I actually dived beneath the surface of the food system into this web of relationships. I now know that hundreds of other people are like me: they know who grows their meat, milk, eggs, and veggies. By name. And know their kids' names. And show up to help when times are hard.

Can My Exotics Be Relational?

What about food from afar? Is that relational food? In the sense that we are all part of the web of life on this planet, every mouthful is a relational act. We are ingesting the hard work of every hand that touched the food from field to store, the migrant workers, the truckers, the two
A.M.
shelf stockers, the checker. It is harder to feel these relationships, though. They aren't our literal neighbors; they don't sit in church with us, or attend our performances, or send their kids to our schools. Accountability is more abstract with anywhere eating, but with local or regional eating your integrity is visible to everyone.

In fact, relational eating can lead us to a food ethic that governs every mouthful. Our food choices support healthy soils, family farms, thriving communities, fair labor practices, good agricultural practices, fresh air, and conservation—or not. Local is where you are accountable. All food is local somewhere. What's life like for my lemon grower? Do the pickers in the olive groves for my olive oil have enough to eat? Where does my coffee come from and what natural systems were mowed down for those beans to grow?

Relational eating, then, is exiting the revolving doors of the anonymous food courts of the world and entering a web of nourishing relationships where your eating is both receiving (great food!)—and giving (caring for the life and lot of your farmers). It is personal—eating for flavor, freshness, purity, health. And it is political—understanding that where you spend your food dollars is a vote for the health of the earth.

What If I Just Want to Buy the Food, Not Befriend the Farmer?

You can buy local food without being a relational eater—and still do a bushel of good. You can—and many do—keep an industrial food mind-set while buying local food. You can treat your CSA like a grocery delivery service rather than a chance to invest in a farmer, sharing the risks and rewards of the season. You can treat the farmers' market like a produce department, not realizing as you squeeze the fruit that the farmer in front of you nurtured that tomato from seed, picked it at peak ripeness, and offers it to you with love. You can comparison shop too, cruising the stalls for the best buys. It's an understandable way to behave in an industrial food world, but odd in a relational world. You can pick up your eggs or flowers from the farm stand, drop in your money, and never see the hands that picked them for you. These transactions are not transformational—but they are still likely good for you, good for the local economy, and good for the environment.

So yes, you can buy local food without any intention of making new friends or being such a stick in the mud that you start to grow roots, branches, and leaves.

Why Buy Local?

The following is my list of very good reasons—in addition to relational eating—for buying local food. I've tested them all in my own experience, but they are not “the gospel truth.” Chew on them for yourself, swallowing only what makes real sense to you.

This list can be a starting point for making local food part of your diet of beliefs and practices as well as what you eat. Is local food really fresher, tastier, more nourishing, more just, more expensive but worth it, and beneficial for local economies? The important thing is to develop your own relationship with food and the hands that feed you—and my observations might be a motivation to do that.

Seven Very Good Personal Reasons to Eat Local Food

Fresh!

The fresher the food, the more nutritious and delicious it is. No one who has eaten a sun-warmed tomato would argue with that. But let's take a deeper look. While “local” is a distance measure, “fresh” is a time measure. If you—or your farmer—harvest food in the morning and eat it by bedtime, it's really fresh! If you don't eat the fresh-picked food right away, though, it doesn't compete with anywhere produce, picked and packed at peak halfway around the world and, through an amazing feat of logistics, stocked in your grocery store by dinnertime the next day. Nor does it compete with flash-frozen-in-the-fields fruits and veggies. So local increases the likelihood of fresh—but you have to eat fresh, not just buy fresh.

Ripe!

Much of the produce in your market looks fresh-picked, but it might have been picked green and ripened later with ethylene gas. Peak ripeness is when the nutrients are in the highest concentration. Think about it from the fruit's point of view. It's that final burst of energy to make the best seed possible before the season ends. It's the pinnacle, you might say, of the plant's creative energies, giving its all before dying. Because local fruits are more likely vine- or tree-ripened, they may be imbued with that extra burst of energy, extra sweetness, juiciness, and nutritional richness. As such, they may be a day away from rotting, which is why square, flavorless tomatoes gained favor—no taste but boy do they last!

Tasty!

Yes, delicious can be a very good reason to go local. Besides taste from freshness, local gardeners and farmers are able to grow more flavorful varieties that don't stand up to the rigors of monocropping and shipping, that go from ripe to perfect to rotten in a few short days, that are super sweet or thin-skinned or oddly shaped. They can grow varieties bred over time, not in laboratories, to the precise combination of sun, rainfall, and soils of your valley, not the valley a few hundred miles south. As you eat a wider variety of apples or potatoes or greens, you really do start to distinguish between the flavors and textures. Eating the limited varieties of each fruit or vegetable grown by an industrial food system has dulled our “sniffer.” We no longer need taste to determine if something is good for us—the USDA assures us that we can eat whatever is sold in the store. Yes, 99 percent of the time they are right but we've outsourced a natural instinct to computer tracing systems. Encountering novel fresh foods grown around you may awaken your taste buds—and the flavors may be richer as well.

Wholesome!

Unless you live near a junk-food factory, local food (whether 10- or 100-mile) would tend to come to you in its unadulterated, unprocessed form. To paraphrase Popeye, “A yam is a yam.” And squash is squash and tomatoes are tomatoes and wheat is ground fresh and baked into a hearty loaf. You are less likely to consume toxins, additives, food coloring, stabilizers, and a host of other extras that you get in highly processed foods.

My friend Suzanne decided to make whole, unprocessed, and unpackaged foods the focus of her Lenten practice. It didn't have to be local so she had a wide variety of whole foods to pick from, but getting even whole foods home without putting them in plastic was a challenge. Like me, she discovered that fidelity to that values-imposed food constraint required a lot of attention in the beginning and then, by Easter, had simply become the way she ate. Along the way she saw, as I had, how complex and adulterated our food system has become. She brought used containers for food from the bulk bins, bought plenty of produce, and got her chicken right from the butcher's big delivery box before it was plastic-wrapped in the store. She got behind the
Wizard of Oz
screen and entered relational eating—at the very least with the butcher and bulk food buyers at the grocery store.

Frugal!

You heard that right. After all of my belly-aching about the cost of a chicken, how can I say local food saves you money? Cary Peterson of the Good Cheer Garden teaches classes on effective, productive backyard gardening, called Growing Groceries, so that the people who use the food bank (and anyone else) can supplement their income with this other kind of green stuff. In one Internet article I saw, the author claimed seven hundred dollars' worth of food on a ten-by-ten-foot plot. Such stories are all over the Web. Gardeners love to tell how they did it. When the going gets expensive, the frugal get growing.

Rebellion!

Occupy your food system! If you want to protest the creep of corporate control over what we hold dear—our food supply, democracy, justice, dignity—then eat local food. Withdraw your agreement with the industrial food system by withdrawing your participation to whatever degree you can consistent with your health and sanity. Integrity comes when your actions are aligned with your intentions and your values. Sometimes you just eat what's available as you work for whatever cause “works” your soul, but local food can be a powerful tool for walking your talk. Or I should say, eating your talk. As I discovered in February, you could substitute local foods for 50 percent of your anywhere foods and still eat like a queen. Some go to extremes on this—growing all their own food and shunning anything from the industrial system. The rest of us will stir up small rebellions in our purchasing and cooking and dining.