Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (22 page)

I was determined not to lay my head down without downing at least one homemade cracker. Somehow. I am nothing if not resourceful.

To thresh the wheat I put it in a wide-mouth jar and plunged my hand mixer down into it, breaking up the wheat heads and spinning off some of the chaff. I dumped the results into a colander and broke it up more by grinding it into the colander holes with a rubber ball. Okay, I had some wheat berries and lots of chaff. Now what?

Aha! The hair dryer! I took the colander outside, plugged my hair dryer into an outlet by the door, straining the cord so I could get as far away as possible. Pointing the dryer away from the house, I shot a few blasts of air that sent the chaff swirling up, up, and back in my face as a breeze blew by. My hair and clothes were dotted with chaff, but the berries stayed mostly in the colander. A few more chilly blasts and I had a cup of wheat for my hoped-for royal bit of bread.

To turn my berries into flour, I got out my handy-dandy coffee grinder, filled it with grain, whirred it until the rattling stopped, and indeed, when I lifted the lid there was something in there that looked like flour. And all it took was a jar, a hand mixer, a colander, a rubber ball, a hair dryer, and a coffee grinder to get it. Oh, and some fossil fuel.

Of course there is no baking soda in my ten miles, much less baking powder. But salt and oil are already on my exotics list, so I mixed flour, honey, salt, water, and oil, and something came out of the pan that looked like the ancient bread the Hebrews took with them when they fled Egypt.

But I'd done it! My resourcefulness had gotten me four little pancakes with just ninety minutes of work. I slathered them (okay, dotted them) with my hand-churned butter and every bite was heaven. All ten of them.

That ironic witness who floats around amused by the antics of my daily life laughed as she watched me do my little science experiment using household gadgets. My angelic witness, though, was deeply humbled. As I thought about those women in Thailand and Africa, about those donkeys plodding in circles, I thanked my lucky stars for how far my life was from such hard, repetitive, endlessly time-consuming tasks.

The next night I shared my cracker semivictory with a friend who runs a poverty-law agency concerned with, among other issues, immigration policy. We talked about the lives of the migrant farmworkers he serves. Up at four
A.M
., bused to the fields, bused back at nine
P.M
., sleep, and start all over again. They earn about six thousand dollars a year. Less than five dollars an hour. So that I can chow down the berries and tomatoes and beans they pick in minutes? To deal with my stress? I'm forcibly reminded that I need to be more mindful of what I eat when so many people have worked for so little money to bring it to me. These are also the hands that feed me.

Kvetch, Kvetch, Kvetch

For those of you who don't know Yiddish, that means “Bitch, bitch, bitch.”

If I thought that confronting my preferences was hard, confronting my privilege in this way was even harder. I was learning firsthand why “local” is practiced by only a few crazies. My next comeuppance came on my weekly bicycle milk pickup. Belinda came out the door to chat. I think she regarded me with a combination of amusement, pity, and respect.

“How's it going?” she asked, and she grinned when I admitted, “It's tough.”

“You bet it's tough,” she said, knowing full well that local eating isn't a sport, isn't for sissies, and isn't sincerely practiced by anyone but farmers, a few diehard eaters, and a whole bunch of free-range animals chewing local grass. She said she'd send me a link to an article on
Grist
(an online environmental news service) that would blow my mind.

She was right, and I'm excerpting it below—with permission—to give you the pleasure of that experience. It mirrors what Belinda said and I was starting to understand firsthand: that living our food values is a ball buster, a term I use because the article's author, Rebecca Thistlewaite, does. The piece is called “So You Say You Want a Food Revolution,” and it's a real call to useful action. Keep in mind that the term
farmer
used by Thistlewaite below refers to farmers of relatively small and local farms,
not
to giant industrial farms.

From your farmer—This article might challenge you, open your eyes a little more, or possibly offend a few, but the only way to make the food system better is to understand it more. Some of my most beloved clients sometimes comment about items being too expensive but I am going to answer that with a question, how many farmers do you know that live in sprawling homes and drive expensive cars? We've gotten so far away from understanding what it takes (physically and financially) to produce food that when you see it first hand it is quite surprising.

You watched Food, Inc. with your mouth aghast. You own a few cookbooks.

You manage to get to a farmer's market about once a month, but the rest of the time your eggs and meat come from Costco, Trader Joe's, and maybe Whole Paycheck now and again.

Guess what? You are NOT changing the food system. Not even close.

You're no better or different than the average American. You pat yourself on the back, you brag about your lunch on Twitter, you pity your Midwestern relatives eating their chicken-fried steak and ambrosia salad, but you secretly loathe your grocery store bill—which consumes only 8 percent of your income while your car devours 30 percent. Your bananas and coffee may be Fair Trade, but everything else is Far From It. The dozen eggs you splurge on once a month may be from local, outdoor-roaming birds, but all the other eggs you eat come from a giant egg conglomerate in either Petaluma, Calif., or Pennsylvania.

So. Want to make a difference?

Here's what a sustainable food system actually needs you to do, in no particular order:

Educate yourself:

•
Learn why farmers and ranchers who don't earn enough to cover their costs are not sustainable and that something has to suffer as a result, whether it be quality, animal welfare, land stewardship, wages, health care, mental & physical health, or family life.

•
Understand why sustainable food should actually cost 50 to 100 percent more than industrial, conventional food. Figure out how to buy food more directly from farmers and ranchers, if you want to avoid some of the transportation/distribution/retail markup costs.

•
Understand that if you want to see working conditions and wages come up for farming and food processing workers, that you will have to pay more for food. Be OK with that.

•
Learn about the Farm Bill and plan to write a letter/make a phone call when it comes up for re-authorization
.

Chill out:

•
Don't expect a farmer to have year-round availability and selection. Alter your diet to match the seasonal harvests in your area. Get used to not eating tomatoes until at least July, apples in late August to December, citrus in winter, greens in spring. Don't complain.

•
Realize that even animal products are seasonal because animals have biological cycles. Know that chickens produce much less eggs in winter when days are shorter and even come to a complete stop when they are replacing their feathers (molting). Consequently you may have to eat less eggs and pay more for them during that time. Don't complain.

•
Don't expect the farmer/rancher to sacrifice the health and welfare of the animal for your particular fad diet du jour (no corn, no soy, no wheat, no grains, no antibiotics ever, even if the animal will die, no irrigation, no hybrid breeds, no castrating, no vaccines . . . what is it this week?).

•
Don't call a farmer a week before you're having a pig roast to ask for a dressed-out pig, delivered fresh to you, for under $300. We are not magicians, just farmers.

Get your hands dirty:

•
Sweat on a farm sometime.

•
Participate in the death of an animal that you consume.

•
If you own land that's not being farmed, tell some farmers about it. If you rent land to farmers, offer a fair rental price or fair lease (long-term is better), and then stay out of the way and don't meddle or hinder the farmers. They are not your pet farmers nor your landscapers.

•
Throw your consumer dollar behind a couple beginning farmers or lower-income farmers. Be concerned about how landless, lower-income producers are going to compete with the increasing numbers of wealthy landowners getting into farming as a hobby.

Help your local farmers do their job:

•
Consider making a low-interest loan, grant, or pre-payment to a farmer to help her cover her operating expenses. Stick with that farmer for the long haul, as long as he continues to supply quality product and can stay in business.

•
Don't complain about prices. If price is an issue for you on something, ask the farmer nicely if he has any less expensive cuts (or cosmetically challenged “seconds”), bulk discounts, or volunteer opportunities. But don't ask the farmer to earn less money for his hard work.

•
Don't compare prices between farmers who are trying to do this for a living and those that do it only as a hobby (and don't have to make a living from what they produce and sell).

•
Share in a farmer's risk by putting up some money and faith up front via a Community Supported Agriculture share. And then suck it up when you don't get to eat something that you paid for because there was a crop failure or an animal illness.

•
Buy local when available, but also make a point of supporting certified Fair Trade, Organic products when buying something grown in tropical countries.

•
Buy organic not just for your health, but for the health of the land, waterways, wildlife, and the workers in those fields.

•
Pay for your values. If it hurts, don't have fewer values, just eat less food (sorry, but most Americans could stand to do a bit of this).

I admit, this is a lot to digest.

What I am saying is that we can't be casual about the food system we want to see. If more people don't show some commitment, and take part in some of the hard work that farmers, ranchers, and farm workers do on a daily basis, then we cannot build a sustainable food system.

You don't have to be a passive consumer. You are part of this system, too. Don't just eat, do something more!

I winced all the way through the article. I could see what it might take to really eat where my food and I are planted—and I was barely on the same planet. Whether for values or taste or ethics or belonging or ecstatic fusion with the natural world, if I wanted to be a local eater I'd need to get more than my mouth involved. If I wanted to live my values when it comes to food, I would have to do so much more. Double that if I wanted to challenge the whole dang system.

I did not—absolutely not—want to rise to that occasion. I had a life to live, a choir to sing in, a comedy troupe to rehearse with, a dance class to attend, teleclasses to teach, a house, friends, and, oh, did I mention a necessary daily full night's sleep? I was done with biting off more than I could chew, so to speak. I wanted to stay healthy and sane. I did not want to go, ahem, whole hog.

Vicki's To-Dos to Support My Farmers

I had already begun a running to-do list for supporting my local food system, should I ever want to hear the word
local
again once the experiment was over. It included the following:

1. Get farmland into the hands of young dedicated farmers like Eric—or at least get them reliable, affordable, and long-term secure access to farmland that they can invest themselves in and reap the rewards from for years to come.

2. Get the laws changed so that neighbors can sell not only their farm produce but their milk and meat, jams and jellies, canned dilly beans, and such freely to their local neighbors. Let those green libertarians among us take responsibility for the safety of our food. Don't so regulate and bureaucratize the lives of small-scale farmers that they can't legally sell to willing buyers out their back doors and in their farm stands. Yes, regulate the industrial system. Protect supermarket shoppers who want to think only about what's for dinner, not where it came from. Regulate the impersonal big guys to assure a generally safe food supply for all of us, but make “scale-appropriate” regulations for the little local guys.

Rebecca's article confirmed that if I wanted to make systemic—not just personal—change, I was already on the right track with those two points. Now I could add a few more.

3. Do something about the cost difference between local food and industrial food. At that time, I had no idea what to do, but I knew the gap between Tyson's and Tobey's chickens needed to narrow if local were to have a fighting chance in the marketplace.

4. Inform myself—and others. Stop leaving issues related to food to John Robbins and Frances Moore Lappé and Wendell Berry, to name just a few of the brilliant minds of sustainable eating and farming. Get up off your consumerism laurels and learn enough to really help.

5. Do that 50 percent within fifty miles in February. Rise at least to the challenge of a local winter diet.

We all choose how the food system grows through every choice we make—what to eat, where to shop, what to pay, who to vote for, and probably far more than I could at that moment imagine. Everything and everyone is, ultimately, part of the food system. We all eat.

The Industrial Food System Strikes Back (in My Mind)

This one-month experiment in eating hyperlocally was causing me to experience mission creep in the third week. It was threatening to occupy my life, reawaken that change maker who'd settled down as I settled in here in Langley. My better angels, of course, liked the drift of this line of thinking. My inner rabble, however, was not pleased.