Quibbling Dot Net

Our beloved and much-missed friends The Wasyliks were in town this week for another beloved friend’s wedding, so we got to have them over for dinner on Thursday night.  We served steamed broccoli, mashed potatoes with chard, and garlic-rosemary lamb roast, and pretty much everything except the garlic and the butter and sour cream that went into the potatoes was from a local source. The potatoes, chard, and broccoli came from our CSA box, the rosemary came from our backyard, and the lamb came from our butcher, who specializes in locally raised and pastured meats.  Even the lemon olive oil the lamb was rubbed with, while not local to us, was purchased by Tom’s parents from a producer local to them and then given to us as a gift.

As you might expect, everything was delicious, even though none of it had a particularly fancy presentation. Mike and Tom, who generally eat broccoli because they should rather than out of any particular love for it, agreed that it was especially tasty.

During dinner conversation, Dineen asked what had made us jump so wholeheartedly into local sourcing of our food. It was a good chat, and I realized that I had written somewhat incompletely about these issues in this space before the Wordpress accident obliterated my archives, so I thought I’d ramble about that some more.

The more I learn about food production and our globalized food system, the more complicated it all proves to be. So I’m not saying I have all the answers, or that I’m doing anything but oversimplifying. At the same time, I can only act on the information I have as I understand it, and I find that preferable to throwing up my hands and buying a box of Froot Snax at the grocery store. I also recognize that I am fortunate enough to be in a financial position to act on this information, and that not everyone is. I am well aware that when you have $50 to feed your family with for the week, 14-cent ramen is high on your shopping list. However, since I DO have the financial means to make other choices, I will, and hope that as more people use their buying power to make similar choices, those choices will become more accessible to people who are less fortunate than I.

I suppose you could say that this really started way back when I was living in Pittsburgh. Tom came to visit me one weekend, and had promised to bring me caprese salad from the farmer’s market near his house. He showed up grinning, with tomatoes, basil, mozzarella, and a bouquet of wildflowers, “all produced within a hundred miles of [his] house!”  The wildflowers were a little wilty from the long car trip, but the tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella were some of the tastiest I’d ever had up to that point. 

Gradually, the farmer’s market became a regular part of our routine. And after all the food and Chinese product scares from last year and earlier this year, I started to think more about where it is that my food comes from.

We get rather a lot of our food from other countries. A great deal of what you see in your grocery store comes from other countries, where the regulations governing farming, processing, and production are implemented and enforced by governments we did not elect, and where the food is produced by people I will never meet. That’s all fine and good for my cell phone, my notebooks, and even my clothes, but it’s rather an overextended chain of trust for something as basic as the food I consume.

Aside from heavy thoughts about world trade policy, food that hasn’t had to travel as far to get to me is fresher (and therefore better for me) and tastes better. That makes me want to eat more of it, which is good for me too, at least as far as fruit and veg are concerned. That makes it a superior product, and deserving of my proudly capitalist dollars.

So for relatively non-controversial reasons, trying to get more local food into my diet seemed like a logical choice. We signed up for a CSA share with Great Country Farms, and wrote a big check in January. Now, let me tell you, in January, that check SUCKED.  But when you do the math, we spent about $15/week for 20 weeks of produce. And it was a LOT of produce. Our grocery bills dropped dramatically even as food prices were going up. We went to the farm each week to pick up our box of food and pick the additional portion of the share. We carpooled with Lisa so as to not eat up all the savings with gas money from the drive. My migraines, once a nearly weekly occurrence, dropped off to near zero. This is probably mostly because of the relaxation inherent in our farm trips, but I also don’t find it hard to imagine that as I consume better food, my health would be positively affected in all areas.

With all this great veggie consumption happening, I turned my attention to the animal products we eat- this one is harder to tackle. Modern methods of meat production are pretty appalling on a number of levels. At a visceral level, the conditions required to produce meat, milk, and eggs in the quantities we eat them are pretty wretched, and I can understand why people opt out of that altogether and go vegan. Animals are crammed into too-small pens and cages, chickens have their beaks cut off to keep them from pecking each others eyes out, and they’re all pumped full of antibiotics just to keep disease from spreading in the overcrowded conditions. Poultry has to be doused in chlorine before it can be packaged. In addition to all the cruelty, these practices contribute to antibiotic resistant strains of disease in both animals and humans. Meanwhile, feeding ruminants grain instead of grass contributes to e.coli contamination, because they can’t digest the grain properly.  

The argument in favor of these practices is that it makes meat cheap and plentiful. To which my response is… you know, I don’t NEED to eat that much meat. I’m perfectly comfortable with my place in the food chain. I do not believe that it’s immoral to kill an animal and eat it, any more than it’s immoral for my cat to kill an animal and eat it. But believing as I do that stewardship of God’s good Creation is a moral and spiritual issue, I am intensely uncomfortable with being cruel to the animal before killing it. If the cow’s ultimate destination is to be the burger on my plate, can it not enjoy some pasture time first?  If that makes the meat more expensive, would it be so terrible if I just ate fewer burgers?  The size of my ass assures you that it would not, in fact, be such a bad thing.

Besides, eating less meat is also good for the environment (stewardship of creation continues). Industrialized meat production is a huge contributor to climate change. While I’m skeptical of a lot of feel-good environmental practices (recycling is NOT always good for the planet, kids, and electric cars just move the pollution to a different part of the process), environmental stewardship by consuming fewer resources and creating less waste just seems obvious.  Between the methane produced by the animals themselves, the petroleum-based fertilizers used to grow animal feed, and the transportation and land-use issues involved, meat production produces more greenhouse emissions than every form of transportation combined. Meanwhile, you’re pouring all these calories of energy into raising cows for slaughter, and getting fewer calories of energy out of the meat than you put into it. It’s just wasteful.

So we’ve been attempting to decrease our consumption of conventionally-produced animal products and replace them with locally produced meat from animals that were pastured, rather than grain-fed. This is hard, partially because it can be quite expensive, and partially because we haven’t yet found a convenient way to do it- we’ve considered going in with some friends on half a cow, but our freezer space is limited and we don’t have much space for a second freezer. I have to plan ahead to get to the butcher shop, but there’s a grocery store right down the hill when I want a flank steak for that night’s chili.  The local eggs we’ve been getting have been so much better than eggs at the store that I’ve just given up buying those, but we can’t predictably get them. We can generally get local milk, but it seems that if I want local butter I’ll have to buy the cream and shake the jar for an hour myself. (Hmmm…)

You’ll note, though, in this entire rambling essay I have not once used the word “organic.” Organic is not necessarily my priority. All other things being equal, yes, I would rather have my food raised without pesticides, because pesticides are neither delicious nor nutritious. But I don’t necessarily object to genetically modified varieties of food that are pest-resistant or drought-resistant or whatever. I don’t object to the judicious use of pesticides to keep the worms out of my corn. And while antibiotics are dangerously overused in conventional meat production, I don’t have a problem with treating a sick cow with them when it’s called for. And yet, doing so means the farm can no longer be certified organic, so sick cows are just sent off to slaughter from large commercial organic farms. The “organic” label is basically a marketing tool, and often hides practices I find objectionable. Rather than sorting out that tangle of regulations, I choose to buy my food directly from the farmer whenever possible, which enables me to just ASK about their practices. Imagine.