Mama Don't Preach

And, lest anyone think this is taking a turn toward the preachy, let me make one thing absolutely clear from the get-go:  I am not in right relationship with food, despite going to relatively drastic lengths to get there.  I'm nowhere close – which means, by my own terms, I am not in right relationship with love.  I am not in right relationship with my family, my neighbors, my community, the world.

I am not writing these reflections from some vantage point where I've "figured it out" or somehow gotten my act together when it comes to food (and therefore love).  Not by a long shot.  In fact, the truth is very nearly the opposite: I feel compelled to write, in large part, precisely because I'm so far off the mark, still, despite the forty chickens in the coop and another dozen in the freezer with the butchered beef steer; despite the three dozen eggs on the counter and the few dozen winter squash curing in the sun for winter storage; and despite the goat cheese in the fridge and the dairy cow – the blessed, friggin' dairy cow – about to pop with her next calf, and all those gallons of milk that will come as a result. 

Yes, we've come a long way in a pretty short amount of time.  And yes, I'm proud of all the work we've put in, what we've learned, what we've built.  But I'm no doomsday prepper.  I harbor no illusions that my farm is going to "save me" and my family if society falls apart tomorrow.  Spoiler alert: it won't save us.  But that's not why I'm doing this. 

I'm doing this because it makes me feel alive now, and because I've read and listened to enough of the scientific and economic analyses of our current food system to understand that the way we produce and consume food "at scale" (I've come to hate that phrase) in North America is fundamentally not aligned with feeling alive – truly alive – in the present.  It is designed to give us a calorie-dense, synthetically-flavored series of dopamine hits, at the expense of a wide variety nutrients conducive to our health.  Nor is it designed to support our long-term well-being.  And forget the well-being of our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, or their grandchildren.  Our current petrochemical-dependent food system has profoundly sickened our existing society and also threatens to sterilize the earth (where it hasn't already), greatly diminishing the ability of future generations to produce food for themselves.*

Okay, that got a little preachy. Sorry.  

But hopefully you can hear my heart through the preachy tone.  I care about eating, and I care about food, all aspects of food, because I care deeply about quality of life, both now and deep into the future. 

But don't most people care about quality of life, both now and deep into the future?  I believe they do, and I sure as hell don't want to give the impression that I think people have to have a big garden, raise their own chickens, or buy a gosh-darned dairy cow to prove that they care.  That said, I do think the world would be a better place if a few more people did these kinds of things – like, if everyone who felt internally drawn to this kind of life could have the courage and the economic support to venture into it.  But I'm not on a mission to turn our society back to the days of Little House on the Prairie.  (Although there's a good deal to learn from those books, like how to capture cheese culture from the rumen of a slaughtered calf. Pro tip.) 

What I am on a mission to do is to issue an invitation, an invitation for my friends and my community to experience real food – or, as real as we can make it in our current circumstances – and then to pay attention to what that experience prompts them to do next.  Maybe it's trying to grow something yourself.  That would be awesome.  Or maybe it's simply forging a relationship – or several of them – with people who are growing some food themselves using methods that require little to no petrochemical or otherwise energy-intensive inputs in the process, what Joel Salatin calls "integrity food".  That is also awesome. 

I want people to find their own way to join in on this journey, and I don't want anyone to hold back because they think they have to "get it together" on some level before they can really start.  Hogwash.  None of us has got it together.  But I have a pretty good inkling, from my own experience on this journey, of how we can start to get it together: together.  Join us.

I promise I won't get preachy on you.  Or, maybe just a little . . . . (Wink.)  

*There are many resources available to begin examining this claim. Three that have had the biggest impact on me are the Kiss the Ground documentary film from 2020, Michael Pollan's 2006 bestselling book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and Wendell Berry's 1977 opus, The Unsettling of America.