WHAT WOULD BE THE OPPOSITE of centralized production? It sounds like lots of small farms, maybe even family farms: smaller, diversified, symbiotic, synergistic, and multispeciated. And lots of farmers. In fact, across the country, farmers are demonstrating that small- and medium-scale animal production is both economically viable and environmentally sustainable.
Every eater has a role in creating a new food and farming paradigm that honors the pigness of the pig, offers transparency from field to fork, and ultimately provides cultural healing. Here at Polyface Farm, nestled in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, we apply the healing test to every decision. If it doesn’t heal, it’s not acceptable. Healing comes in many dimensions.
SOIL Organic matter should build, not only to add tilth and water retention capacity, but also to sequester more carbon and provide a smorgasbord for the billions of critters that make up the microbial community. Perhaps an appropriate blessing would be: “May your earthworms copulate freely, and their tribe increase.”
WATER Muddy rivers should be a thing of the past. Clear-running streams and ponds brimming with aquatic life should be normal. Here’s a thought: Imagine if all the petroleum, labor, and machinery devoted in the last century to plowing, planting, and harvesting grains to feed multistomached herbivores (which shouldn’t eat grain in the first place) had been devoted to building ponds and installing gravity-based water lines across America’s landscape. Had such a resource allocation occurred, by this time the United States would no longer have floods or droughts because we would have nearly recreated Eden.
LANDSCAPE The field, forest, and riparian edge zones that indicate vibrant, diversified flora and fauna would crisscross the land. Gone would be miles of monocropping. Gone would be stream bank cave-ins. Dust storms and gullies would be a thing of the past. A haven for multitudinous species that require two environments for healthy living, the landscape would team with multispecies, some wild and some domestic.
EROSION Despite the billions of dollars spent on soil conservation efforts, the United States is still losing soil faster than it is being built. This is a disgrace. Unless and until we as a culture actually build soil faster than we are depleting it, healing cannot come to America’s food system.
ANIMALS Commercial domestic livestock in America suffers abuse that should become a thing of the past. Healing will require eaters to individually and collectively quit patronizing these abusive practices, opting instead for pasture-based, compost-driven, locally grown and processed meat, poultry, and eggs. A culture that views pigs as inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly the human mind can conceive will view its citizens the same way—and other cultures. It is how we respect the least of these that creates an ethical, moral framework on which we respect the greatest of these. Providing a habitat that allows the pig to fully express its physiological distinctiveness is the starting point.
PLANTS Ever since chemist Justus von Liebig told the world in 1837 that plants were composed only of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, incomplete soil management has gradually sickened plants. It’s time to heal them with complete soil nutrition, proper plant communities, and respectful husbandry.
FARMS Rather than being environmental and social liabilities, healing farms exude aesthetic and aromatic attraction. Relegated to the edges of humanity because of their noxious dust, odors, pollution, chemicals, and abusive animal practices, farms must be re-embedded in communities and villages. Farms should be places where people like to congregate. Healing requires that a kindergarten class can enjoyably sit down among the chickens. If youngsters don’t think the farm is “awesome and cool,” their disdain will inherently carry over to a disdain of the food they eat. Loving the plate starts with loving the farm, and loving to be on the farm, and loving all that happens at the farm.
FARMERS No culture has so quickly and completely decimated its agrarian base as the United States. We now have nearly twice as many Americans in prison as we have farmers, and our nation’s leaders are proud of this statistic. So proud that they think we should export this kind of farming around the world and that other cultures should emulate our success. The stereotypical redneck, trip-over-the-transmission-in-the-front-yard, tobacco-spittin’ flunky farmer causes rural brain drain as the best and brightest leave for city lights, 401(k) plans, paid medical, and paid vacations. Rather than priding ourselves on how few people need to be farmers, we should respect and honor the nation’s resource stewards. This must start in the collective consciousness before it can permeate to economic and physical returns.
REAL FOOD In a nation where parents are blessed for feeding their children Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs but cannot choose heritage-based raw milk, we have a long way to go before claiming we’ve healed our food system. The nutritionists, in true Greco-Roman Western reductionist linear systematized fragmented disconnected compartmentalized thinking, have dissected food components into parts and pieces. Generally, healing food is anything that was available before 1900; whatever the amalgamated, extruded, irradiated, reconstituted, genetically adulterated, industrial-prostituted manipulators offer is foreign to our 3 trillion intestinal micro flora and fauna. Food must replace pharmaceuticals as the best healer.
DIGESTIVE COMMUNITY Each of us has 3 trillion critters in our digestive system that metabolize our food. That’s a lot of committee meetings, school diplomas, marriages, and retirement programs. In the continuum of human history, the industrial food blip, which is really a petroleum blip, is definitely a blip. These critters have never heard of Democrats or Republicans, or Robert’s Rules of Order or the Geneva Convention, for that matter. They have been assaulted with corn syrup, tomato-pepper–human DNA–adulterated combinations, nutrient-depleted carrots, and toxin-laced feedlot beef. We must heal them with a historically consistent diet.
ENERGY The average food calorie requires some 14 calories in energy; this is a backward reality. Food should be produced using solar energy and be a net energy gain, not a drain. Efficient local distribution systems and grass-based livestock production can and must replace the energy-dependent industrial animal confinement system. The only reason that industrial food production has appeared efficient has been the abundance of cheap fuel; properly priced fuel will expose this charade for what it always has been.
THOUGHTFUL EATING, CONSCIOUS DINING We struggle to articulate the social, familial congeniality surrounding the dining experience. I like to call it reconnecting with our dinner dance partner. When the only association we have with our dinner dance partner is a plastic wrapper and the microwave, the historically intimate dining experience has been relegated to a one-night stand. Where’s the romance, the courtship, the consciousness of decision leading up to the intimate act of ingestion? We must heal this dinner relationship, affectionately, respectfully, and knowledgeably.
LIVING For the first time in human history, people can move into a community, hook a water pipe into one coming in, the sewage pipe into one going out, buy food at the Wal-Mart from unknown sources, flick on a light switch for energy from who knows where, and build a house out of materials covered in bar codes from Home Depot. We don’t have to know the local ecology, economy, society, climate, agriculture, or anything. Just hook up. Such a noninvolved existence inherently breeds contempt for the community that sustains our existence: physical, spiritual, mental. Respecting our humanness requires that we respect—by appreciating our codependence on—that community of air, water, plants, animals, soil, and microbes.
That’s a lot of healing to do. Ours is not the first culture to face a large healing agenda. We did not get where we are overnight, and we will not get out of it overnight. As a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist, I am not waiting around for government agencies, grants, or legislation to effect the healing. Even though you may be fully aware of our collective cultural food sickness, be assured that the overriding consensus of our culture is still running pell-mell toward the industrial food system.
The industrial food system’s plans to clone, genetically modify, irradiate, and microchip every morsel of food is apparent and moving forward at warp speed. That you and I react to this agenda with horror does not deter it in the least. Whatever can be grown faster, fatter, bigger, and cheaper is Wall Street’s mantra, the cry of the pinstripe-suited conquistadors commanding their field minions from high-rise offices in Metropolis, USA.
In fact, these experts, both USDA and corporate, view farm ponds as a landscape menace because they attract waterfowl, the alleged culprit in avian flu transmission. I’ve been called a bioterrorist for letting my pastured poultry commiserate with red-winged blackbirds, who in turn transport deadly viruses to the scientific, environmentally controlled concentration camp factory industrial houses. Perhaps one of the biggest shocks to the countless visitors who tour our farm to enjoy the aesthetic and aromatic romance of pasture-based livestock production is when I explain to them that within our conventional agrarian community, Polyface Farm is viewed as a threat. We don’t vaccinate, medicate, eradicate, complicate—we just don’t do what farmers are supposed to do. And that’s threatening.
What would be the opposite of centralized production? Sounds like lots of small farms, maybe even family farms. But for sure, smaller, diversified, symbiotic, synergistic, multispeciated farms. And lots of farmers.
I’m convinced that if the industrial dairy cartel had their way, they would prefer one massive genetically modified cow somewhere around Lincoln, Nebraska, with huge pipes hooked up to her four teats. Each 30-inch-diameter pipe would go to a fourth of the United States—one up toward New England; one down toward Alabama and Florida; one toward the Southwest, terminating in Los Angeles; and the other toward San Francisco Bay. The massive cow would eat a train-car load of grain and silage per bite and poop a train-car load every fifteen seconds. Thus the railroad would simply make a loop from front to back, with cars unloaded and reloaded every few minutes. This twenty-four-hour-per-day behemoth would be the ultimate economies-of-scale producer, and no farmer would be required to hook up, unhook, care for, or look after anything.
Global positioning satellite–guided John Deeres would plant and harvest corn with mechanical precision and dump it into the train cars. A robotic soil injector would dispose of the manure from the incoming train before it looped around to be loaded for the return trip. This would all be efficient and free up farmers to punch computer buttons in Dilbert cubicles for multinational corporate officers at the end of the expressway. Oh, and they could pick up their milk on the way home. Sounds fun, don’t you think?
Back to a less obscene vision, I see thousands and thousands of diversified farms serving their bioregional locavores. Imagine walking down the grocery aisle of any supermarket in the United States. Think how many products on those shelves could be produced within 100 miles of the establishment. Not coffee or spices maybe, or bananas or tea, but the list of possibilities is enormous: dairy, fruits, vegetables, meats, poultry, eggs, grains. If all that could be grown and marketed within 100 miles actually were, it would fundamentally change our food system beyond recognition.
And lest anyone think the local idea is quaint and cute but not really practical, consider that virtually all metropolitan areas could feed themselves within 30 miles. Since losing free petroleum from the old Soviet Union, the approximately 2.1-million-person city of Havana, Cuba, now grows 75 percent of its food within the city limits.
The reason the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker were chased out of town during the last century was because cities became antihuman in their smells, pollution, unsightliness, and treatment of people. And whenever economic sectors move to the edges of humanity, they always take environmental, social, and economic shortcuts because neighbors are not around to see what goes in the front door and what comes out the back door. A transparent food system must always be embedded in the community with a fairly open-door policy.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture considers it a food production health risk to let visitors come to farms. After all, people might carry disease to the animals or plants. What does it say about our food when it suffers such immunodeficiency that eaters cannot touch, smell, or look at it until it falls onto our plates from a plastic bag? Any food production model divorced from humans will produce an anti-human dinner. Appropriately scaled, aesthetically and aromatically romantic farms require diversity, synergism, lots of healthy relationships, and a nurturing rather than manipulative attitude. Indeed, the model must follow nature’s patterns.
That means that cows don’t eat dead cows even if doing so will grow them faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper. It means planting square miles of narrow-genetic-based potatoes is not efficient; it is vulnerable to disease. It means pouring concrete and planting rebar is not the secret to health. It means omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acid ratios are as important as egg production percentages. It means the why is as important as the how. And it means a moral and ethical boundary exists to keep human cleverness from exceeding its ability to metabolize its own inventions.
Perhaps the single most telling measure of our culture’s ailing food system is the declining number of farmers, the notion that fewer people on the rural landscape is a good thing. I would suggest that a healthy farming sector would house many, many more loving stewards rather than fewer. And that having more eyes and hands on the landscape, to care for it, would be a great thing. When will people who think it’s progress when more teens show up for river clean-up day realize that more farmers will steward the landscape better than a few megafarms?
Second, the opposite of centralized processing would indicate local abattoirs (slaughterhouses), canneries, cottage industry, and church kitchens. During the industrial era, a host of food safety regulations developed to protect citizens from shortsighted processors. But these regulations, unfortunately, have criminalized these embedded community-scaled processing facilities to the point that they literally do not exist.
The pendulum has swung far too much to one side and, in over-correcting for the abuses detailed in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 iconic The Jungle, has virtually annihilated the neighborhood processing infrastructure. Where are the canneries? Where are the local butchers? The infrastructure overhead required to make one quiche and sell it to the neighbor is of such magnitude that embryonic businesses cannot be born.
Our culture encourages people to go out on a 70-degree November day and gut-shoot a deer with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease; drag it a mile through the squirrel dung, sticks, and rocks; display it prominently on the hood of the Blazer in the afternoon sizzling sun; then take it home and pull it up in a backyard tree for a week under roosting starlings and sparrows. Then it can be skinned, cut up on a board in the backyard, and fed to the children. And this is all considered a wonderful thing.
But try selling one T-bone from a beef butchered on an appropriately temperate day and kept in a stainless steel walk-in cooler before being cut up, and the government will arrest you for selling uninspected meat. Make no mistake, these regulations are not about food safety; they are about denying market access to innovative competitors and keeping the current oligopolistic players in the game.
A truly transparent, decentralized food processing system needs a constitutional amendment to guarantee all Americans the freedom to choose the food they want to feed their 3-trillion-member internal community. We have the freedom to own and use guns, assemble, and practice our religion. But what are those freedoms if we cannot choose what to feed our bodies to give us the energy to shoot, pray, or preach? The only reason the framers of our Bill of Rights did not guarantee us the freedom of food choice is because they could not have envisioned a day when an American could not purchase a glass of raw milk or a pound of sausage from a neighbor.
Interestingly, any food item can be given away; it just cannot be sold. What is it about the selling that suddenly makes it a hazardous substance? And notice that the prohibition is only on the selling, not the consuming or buying. Most hazardous substances like pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs contain prohibitions on both buyer and seller. But on food, the prohibition is only on the seller. If you can procure illegal food, you can consume it freely and feed it to your children. Obviously, the food police do not really think this is dangerous food.
The kind of food system I envision does not exist because it has been summarily chased from our communities. Why can’t I get donuts from Aunt Matilda next door, pot pies from the homeschooling family down the street, milk and cheese from the dairy farmer deacon at church, and sausage from the acorn-fattened pigs up the road? If we really want an educated eater, the quickest way to accomplish that is to let people opt out of government-sanctioned food. The choices would stimulate study and discussion, research and discovery as people took responsibility for their own food choices.
For those too timid to take responsibility, the supermarket is ready and waiting with government food. But as soon as people began eating food free of corn syrup, feeling better and exiting hospitals, word would get around, and entrepreneurial community processors would proliferate beyond what we can imagine today. Innovation requires embryonic prototypes, but when these embryos, because of arbitrary and capricious, inappropriate food police, must be too big to be birthed, what could be never exists.
The industrial system that gave us economies of scale eventually exceeded its own efficiency. We can hear that excess every day, screaming from the bowels of the food industry: Campylobacter, E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, avian influenza. These words are nature’s language, begging us: “Enough!” When will we listen? When will we trade our conquistador hats for caretaker hands? And when will we realize that four-legged salamanders for our grandchildren’s world are certainly as important as today’s Dow Jones Industrial Average?
One doesn’t have to be compromised for the other. Community-friendly processing—thousands of medium and small businesses—can efficiently and effectively meet all the demands of a growing population. But these entrepreneurs must be emancipated from the slavery of the food police by giving them access to neighbor customers. Most of the government food in the supermarket is tainted with substances that did not exist a mere 100 years ago. I wonder how in the world our species survived until that blue USDA logo appeared? Our current epidemics of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and obesity are perhaps traceable directly to eaters’ abandoning the foods of our forebears and eating government food instead.
Indigenous, heritage-based food is what our 3-trillion-member internal communities are used to. Being a good neighbor to those communities is what all of us should aspire to be. That food will be found in our kitchens and neighborhood processors.
Finally, the opposite of long-distance transportation sounds like . . . well, it sounds like local, don’t you think? From farmers’ markets to community-supported agriculture to metropolitan buying clubs to farm gate sales, I envision a local food network that services a bioregion.
A truly functional, competitive local food system must have a smaller distribution energy footprint than the industrial system. And that will take some doing, because right now farmers’ markets have a larger footprint than Wal-Mart. Even though the average farmers’ market vendor is traveling only 40 miles one way, he is transporting only a couple of hundred pounds of product. When compared with the 1,500-mile Jolly Green Giant truck run, the shorter distance does not compensate for the much tinier volume carried.
Farmers must network to achieve similar economies of scale in hauling their products to population centers. To attain a credible competitive edge, a local system will necessarily involve what I call food clusters consisting of six basic components: production, processing, accounting, marketing, distribution, and customers.
PRODUCTION Somebody has to produce something to eat.
PROCESSING The raw material normally must be put in marketable form. Most people don’t want to go out on the back stoop and butcher their chicken for dinner. In fact, today many people don’t realize that a chicken actually has bones. “You mean there’s more than skinless, boneless breast?”
ACCOUNTING Someone must watch the money, balance the checkbook, pay the invoices, bill out sales. This is more than putting all the income in one box and the outgo in another box and hoping the income is higher than the outgo.
MARKETING In any successful business, at least one person must be a gregarious storyteller schmoozer. If you don’t have one, you don’t have a whole. And this is where too many farmers drop the ball. Many people farm because they really don’t like to interact with people. But you can’t have a viable food system without linking producers with consumers.
DISTRIBUTION You have to get the food to where people are. Whether that’s a scheduled drop point, retail store, farmers’ market, or UPS shipping point, a viable food system requires toting the stuff from point A to point B, and it had better be done efficiently. This is where most local food systems break down. Rather than every farmer owning a delivery van, the distribution needs to be operated as a separate, stand-alone business that services many farmers and many customers. Here at Polyface, we put food from a dozen other producers on our delivery vehicle every week. This moves our small operation into an economy of scale that competes even with the big boys.
CUSTOMERS Perhaps this seems too obvious, but if you’re located 100 miles from a Coke machine, the essential customer element of a local food system can be a challenge. I admit that I don’t have all the answers for those remotest of places. I do know that if everyone who could participate in a local food system just would, it would so fundamentally change America’s food system that morphs would occur that we cannot even envision today. At the end of the day, eaters—all of us—must share the responsibility for creating a local food system. It can’t all be done by farmers. It can’t all be done by farmers’ market masters. It can’t all be done by distributors.
The shared responsibility for a local food system to work is palpable. Many of us farmers become frustrated by the apparent notion that we have to be the ones to do all the innovation.
Imagine millions of kitchens taking in nonmanipulated food, preparing it for grateful families, and enjoying convivial conversation and communion around the table. That is how we close the loop back to the farmer, back to the land, back to the earthworm.
Notice I have not asked for a single government program, no agency grants, and no legislation except the freedom of food choice. All noble causes find their impetus from charismatic individuals who awaken on the inside, one by one, to the needs of the moment. At this moment, millions of us can be newly awakened to the need for healing, and we can make it happen. Today. Maybe for some it will be just preparing one meal from scratch this week. Maybe for some it will be eating one sit-down meal a month, as a family or a couple.
For others, it will be moving from the supermarket to the farmers’ market and then visiting some of the farmers. For many, it will require giving up some TV time and video games to reconnect with the vibrant, pulsing biological community in and around us. Living in that awareness will heal our food system, our bodies, and our land.