Farm to Consumer Legal Defense

First off - did you know there was such a thing as the "Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund?" I'm sad to think of the circumstances that led to its creation. How uncool is it that in AMERICA we have the need of a fund to defend farmers who want to sell their products to people.

Last month they did report on something pretty cool though. Three towns in Maine have voted to adopt the Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance (pdf). I'm not a fancy lawyer or constitutional scholar that gets paid lots of money to determine the legality of the ordinance, but it basically has the groundbreaking audacity to say that farmers can sell food directly to their neighbors without having to navigate a system of rules, regulations and licenses.

In other words, farmers don't have to pay the state and conform to the arbitrary (and often costly) whims of bureaucrats to earn a living.

How novel, eh? It's like people want freedom in America. Crazy stuff.

The preamble is rather pretty:

We the People of the Town of (name of town) , (name of county) County, Maine have the right to produce, process, sell, purchase and consume local foods thus promoting self-reliance, the preservation of family farms, and local food traditions.

We have faith in our citizens’ ability to educate themselves and make informed decisions... We support food that fundamentally respects human dignity and health, nourishes individuals and the community, and sustains producers, processors and the environment.

Though I didn't ever meet them myself, I feel as if this is really one of those things the founders of this country would say is a pillar of America. Small farmers selling pumpkins to their neighbors without the state inspecting their pumpkin fields and demanding that there be an accessible toilet outside of the house and at least 50 feet from any pumpkins that is cleaned 5 times a day by a certified and licensed toilet bowl cleaner.

I will kill a chicken, dammit!

Sometimes I think Sharon Astyk writes blogs just for me. Back in October she wrote about sentimentality (the false kind) right before our chicken harvesting weekend. It helped me put my dislike of processing chickens in context - while, naturally, no one likes killing animals, I could rest assured knowing my birds lived good lives pecking for food in the grass and would have humane deaths. My very participation in the process assures this, just as the squeemish gasps of other meat eaters equally assures that slaughterhouses and Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) are horrible places. The false feeling that you *can't* be involved in processing meat allows bad things to happen behind closed doors.

Today, as I am eating one of the birds we killed in October, Astyk posted about food taboos and how American culture over the past 70 years has influenced the food we eat. In a country most interested in efficiency, modern technology and sanitizing everything, we have moved very far away from eating the way our great-grandparents did. For a very long time it has been very uncool - a taboo - to be a farmer. Only poor people had to raise their own chickens for eggs, so why would anyone *want* to have a backyard flock. It was a stigma.

Fortunately, I think this is changing. When the NY Times publishes an article about a 36 hour meal based on a single goat, when Chiptole advertises the methods farmers use for raising their meat, when insanely cool, beautiful, fantastic chicks like me say "I will kill a chicken," the taboo gets worn away.

My Cochin soup, by the way, is amazingly delicious. It has homemade noodles and it is by far the best chicken soup I've ever had. Bill (my husband, a professional white male) made it all.

An argument in favor of less government for better food...

The post is about the causes of perceived elitism in locally-produced small scale food, and adds to this outlook I have that the government will always favor the big guys at the expense of individual citizens. Food "safety" laws are far less about safety and far more about providing an advantage to the industry.

Is the Local Food Movement Elitist?

I [an individual farmer] can produce a gallon of milk from my barn for about $2.40 in hay, grain, amortized goat costs, and a tiny chunk of my mortgage payment....That's not too bad - my local Stewarts is advertising milk for 3.80 per gallon, so I could sell a few gallons to my neighbors and offset some feed costs, without costing them more, maybe even save them some pennies.

My friend Judy, who runs a dairy, observes that it costs $9 for her to produce a gallon of goat's milk. Now why the difference? Why does it cost her $9, which isn't even remotely competetive and me $2.40? Well the main difference is that she had to get set up to sell her goat's milk. She had to put in a bulk tank, build a barn to specifications, put in the second septic system between the milk room and the barn septic, add restroom facilities (even though her house bathroom is three steps away), and pay 16,000 dollars for pasteurizer.

As I'm adding up my costs, I don't have to count any of those things.

Of course, the big difference is that Judy *can* legally sell her milk, and I can't. In order to sell milk, I'd have to build the milking parlor, get the bulk tank, run power to the barn, and buy the 16K pasteurizer. Nevermind that for someone milking 6 does, this is ridiculous overkill - them's the rules. And look, my organic milk now costs $9 gallon - and gee, isn't that elitist, to think that ordinary people can afford organic *milk!?!*

The local food system is elitist in large part because it is forced to be. Others have documented the ways in which small producers are discriminated against - the way subsidies favor large producers, the way externalization of pollutants favors people who don't actually live where they produce their food. Joel Salatin in _Everything I Want to Do is Illegal_ carefully documents ways in which beaurocratic regulations have nothing to do with food safety - and indeed, the system that produces the 1,000 cow hamburger can't be said to be primarily focused on keeping eaters safe.

Chicken Weekend Approaches

I've been having an internal debate on how to start this post. I considered including a "Please Note" (but definitely not a "warning") that the post would include blunt talk about processing chickens and some readers might want to skip it. But I really think that all eaters (all consumers, really) should have an awareness of where their products come from. So, there is no disclaimer - I'm not giving you an easy excuse to ignore this post. If choose not to read any further, it's got to be your decision.

Perhaps a more appropriate warning would be that this post is a bit preachy. While it strongly conveys my views, I don't want it mistaken for a lecture or condemnation of anyone who disagrees with me. As I hope you understand after reading the post - it takes pretty strong feelings about food and the environment to raise your own meat. I just want to explain why we've decided to follow through with a seemingly radical food choice.

This weekend is Chicken Weekend. I'm not going to lie - I've been dreading it for months. We've got 20 chickens (mostly Dark Cornish) to butcher, which is twice as many as we did on our last Chicken Day.


It is a crappy, crappy day, and knowing that it will be twice as long as last year is not adding to my enthusiasm. But at the end of the weekend, we'll have one less flock to feed and worry about becoming hawk food (we've caught a Cooper’s Hawk feasting on our chickens three times in the last month).

More importantly, and the real reason we do this is the satisfaction of living our convictions of supporting sustainable, natural food and relieving some of the burden of outsourcing crappy jobs to other people.

These are the two biggies of why we endure Chicken Day. And for me, it’s "barely endure." Last year, I was on the verge of tears. My job is plucking, which compared to Bill's work is easy. But it's still hard work combined with the emotional toil of partaking in the direct killing of an animal…multiple animals. I've made a personal commitment to be present for the killing of all our livestock. Though I don't actually *do* anything, I don't want Bill to do it alone, and I think it's important to fully appreciate the sacrifice.


There was recently an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. He participated in a 36-Hour meal based heavily on a single goat, a cob oven, and a good community.

Ten days ago, Mike and I drove to the ranch to choose our animal and watch an itinerant butcher slaughter and dress it; Mike says the experience made him want to honor our goat by wasting as little of it as possible.

I don't know if it's possible to overemphasize that point. When you are involved in butchering, waste becomes intolerable.

As much as I am still dreading it, my resolve for Chicken Weekend has been bolstered by that article and blog posts, which were kind enough to have the excellent timing of being published this week.

One is from Sharon Astyk who farms and writes in upstate NY. Her post "On Sentiment...And Against Sentimentality" is about many aspects of farming and the attitude needed to be successful. She believes there is a difference between sentiment - "the logical emotions of love and attachment that emerge from knowing something well" - and sentimentality - "cheap emotion, the substitution of a weak thing for something deeper.”

Sentiment, Astyk argues, is essential for good farmers. You need to pay very close attention to your animals in order to care for them well. This attention naturally leads to feelings of love, appreciation and attachment. I understand this completely. I am jarred by the heartbreak that accompanies the inevitable loss of an animal to a predator or illness. It sucks. And not just for the loss of time, money and energy that went into growing something that is now gone. It is a feeling of failure (no matter how unjustified) in not protecting an animal who depends on me - an animal I care for physically and emotionally.

Sentiment - love, anger, attachment, affection - real emotions - these derive from knowledge, and they can't be faked.

Sentimentality, on the other hand, is the “cheap” emotion based on…well, nothing really. I think of it as manufactured – the stuff of Hallmark commercials and reality TV. This, here, is the bit of Astyk’s post that will be helping me get through Chicken Weekend:

I do want to stand up for sentiment in agriculture because I would argue that our industrial society discourages real sentiment, the emotion that emerges from knowing things, and exchanges it for sentimentality. This is an exchange that runs deeply to our detriment, in part because it enables us not to know things.

Sentimentality creates the CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) farm - the sentimentality that says we are too weak to bear the pain of knowing animals and watching them die. This is what turns our food into styrofoam packages and allows CAFO agriculture, where animals are carefully hidden from our view, and the relationship of our purchases carefully concealed.

In this instance, giving in to sentimentality and not wanting to know things (or read this blog post) creates the real evil. How evil?

something on the order of 98% of our meat in America comes from factory farms that raise thousands upon thousands of animals at a time. To satisfy our ever-increasing demand for cheap meat, the places where animals are raised for slaughter have changed so radically that it’s not even really fair to call them farms. (The Unappetizing Realities of Factory-Farmed Meat)

Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million — with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.

In CAFOs, large numbers of animals — 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs — are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. … To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. (Time)

You know these places. They give you salmonella. They are the target of news reports and documentaries. They are really gross. Horrible for the animals and the people that work there. Horrible for the farmers. Great for the big company and the bottom line.

According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. (Time)

This weekend, as much as I won't like the work, I am satisfied knowing that I am not supporting a system with which I disagree and believe is unduly harmful to the environment, the "farm" animals, the workers, and ultimately the people who eat the product.

Lazy Food

Nice article from BBC regarding our seemingly increasing distance from actual food preparation.

I am hopeless in the kitchen and resort to either eating ramen or laying pathetically on the couch, a slave to low blood sugar, whenever Bill isn't around to make food magically appear in front of me - so I completely get my hypocrisy in loving this article.

However, I will hedge my incompetence a little, because I think my lack of skills is largely a result of my not needing to know how to cook. I do help lots - I just need clear instructions. Shred this cheese! Chop this onion! I'm a kitchen follower, not a leader.

In general, it seems to me that the sort of distance from food described in the article is related to our distance from so many environmental processes and a general sleepwalking through life. We have such great distractions - tv, cheap stuff from China, career advancement, soccer/gymnastics/marching band - that we're spending less time living (and preparing the food we need for living) and more time doing.

Here's an added bonus hypocrisy - I know that my love of canning, for example, is one of those contemporary food luxuries that I get to *enjoy* because it is not necessary for my survival. I know that tv, cheap stuff from China, and career advancement have made my desire for a simpler life possible and...desirable.

There's got to be a middle ground, however, somewhere between a return to 1960s home economies (as described in this awesome article), and pre-peeled potatoes.

"...cooking is a bit of ritual, it's a process to start from the beginning with ingredients you prepare yourself. Preparation is an important part of cooking. You get a feel for what you are making. And food tastes better when it's made from scratch."

Productive chickens

Despite a bit of drama with a red-tailed hawk in our chicken coop on Friday (we lost a hen), we have been making use of the productivity of the chickens.

We're consistently getting one egg a day now. So Bill has been enjoying one home grown egg and one store-bought egg for breakfast. It is hard to tell from the photo, but the yolk in our eggs is more orange AND, our eggs (on the left) are now roughly the size of those found in the store:

Last weekend we cooked one of our meat birds. Bill boiled the whole bird in a stock pot for about 8 hours. When he took it out, the meat all fell off the bones - half of it was slathered in Dinosaur and eaten on a hard roll and the other half had garden beans and carrots added to it, along with a bit of stock and cornstarch and was eaten over egg noodles.

Yesterday we made our first attempt at canning apples (u-picked from our local orchard) to keep for winter baking. We learned valuable lessons on "packing" the jars. The first two jars looked really full to me...but then we added the syrup and processed them:

From Pictures

We did a little better on the third but there are still lots of air bubbles. I think I need special canning implements (and practice) to perfect this technique.

From Pictures

We also made our first jelly from local apple cider and store bought cranberry juice. Jelly is so easy - and very pretty:

From Pictures

Finally, we were inspired by Julie and Julia to start baking our way through a cook book. Ours, however, was probably a Barnes and Noble bargain book, though it is very pretty (also, as it is a cookie book, we won't have to worry about boning ducks.). First up: bacon cornbread muffins.

Reading through Julie Powell's initial blog, I came across this, alternative view of food, which I found interesting. Thoughts?

Enough of the $40 olive oils and imported semolina flour and "please, Turkish oregano only." If I read one more dining guru gushing about "honest ingredients, treated with respect," I shall vomit, sir. And "Market Menus"? Dont get me started. The well-meant "food revolution" Alice Waters instigated some thirty years ago has metastasized horribly. The Victorians served Strawberries Romanoff in December; now we demonstrate our superiority by serving our organic, dewy heirloom strawberries only during the two-week period when they can be picked ripe off the vine at the boutique farm down the road from our Hamptons bungalow. People speak of gleaning the green markets for the freshest this, the thinnest that, the greenest or firmest or softest whatever, as if what they're doing is a selfless act of consummate care and good taste, rather than the privileged activity of someone who doesn't have to work for a living.

Community Supported Fisheries

Heard a story on NPR this afternoon about using the Community Supported Agriculture model for fisheries in the north east.

Buying and eating fish always stresses me out because of the double worries about health and environmental consequences. The long-lasting guilt factor alone limits my sushi intake to about twice a year.

This seems like a possible solution to the environmental issues at least and, according to the story, the group organizing the program provides education for their consumers so they should have a place to go to get health questions answered. It has been well received with 500 people on a wait list to join the program.

Check it out!

Food, Inc.

There is a new documentary out this summer called “Food, Inc.” I don’t really want to see it, but felt a little guilty about that decision until Pajiba - my most favorite movie review site - gave me an out by saying “Food, Inc. is that warm smug self-satisfaction that comes with having a Trader Joe’s reuseable bag full of five dollar tomatoes.” And perhaps a blog about sustainable food?

So, I haven’t seen this movie, though we may Netflix it. I’ve only watched the preview and read some reviews. I’m going to talk about it anyway…

The movie seems to take a dash of food-related ideas that have been known for years, and combines with beautiful/shocking/inspiring visuals to goad people into actions they didn’t take when they initially learned the ideas without the beautiful/shocking/inspiring visuals. Maybe this works? But my cynical self seems to think it won’t do much beyond giving the hipster crowd fun new things to talk about over organic wine and stinky cheese. (Which, BTW, is a great activity, but perhaps detracts from useful action on these issues.)

Shocking thing you already know #1: Corn is subsidized by Uncle Sam (thanks for paying taxes!) and is in everything. Are there people who are not yet aware of high-fructose corn syrup?

Shocking thing you already know #2: Fast food/slaughterhouses are assembly lines and seriously, seriously gross. The inclusion of footage from slaughterhouses is one of the main reasons I, myself, have no desire to see this movie. This is for many reasons (including the fact that I sat through K-Pax) but mostly because I have slaughtered my own chickens and made the commitment to only purchase other meat from small or local family farms. We have found this to be the absolute easiest modification to our food purchasing habits. I will admit that I don’t pay as much attention to meat when I am eating out. We still occasionally eat at Olive Garden and I’ll bet their chicken is likely gross. And what are the possibilities that the cashier at Five Guys knows what their beef was fed? I think I’ll have to work on this…

Shocking thing you already know #3: Big Agribusiness is in it for the money. Disclosure: Big Agribusiness pays for my house. The film spends a lot of time talking about Monsanto owning patents on the “biology inside” the GM crops it produces which is an argument that has been a talking point of anti-GM lobby for years.

I also take serious issue with the idea that you can’t eat well inexpensively. Bill and I had a grocery budget of $30/week when he was a grad student. We were able to eat plenty of fine food without resorting to BK and Taco Bell.

There is something that seems to be absent from the reviews and previews that I’ve seen – the idea that we could not sustain 6-7 billion people on this planet without industrial agriculture. I wonder if the movie includes any consideration of the things we enjoy in life that are made possible specifically because we designate a small number of people to produce lots of cheap food for the rest of us. I would hypothesize that a well considered list would include such things as the women being able to “work outside the home,” children going to school for 9 months a year, a lack of serfdom and movie theaters for independent documentaries.

So, this movie isn’t so much for me. And I’m not entirely sure what my beef with it is…perhaps I’m just annoyed that it throws a glaring spotlight on the idea that people have been eating under this system for so long and not paying attention.

First Harvest

 

This blurry picture represents a transition of our garden from "place to get snack" to a productive source of food for a time that is not now. 

The radishes will be eaten this week, for sure. I was thinking of getting a brownie from Starbucks to compliment my lunch tomorrow, but instead, I'll have some radishes.

The peas (sugar and snow) have been put in the freezer to be used in stir fry and other dishes. I am not really a fan of cooked veggies, personally, but I believe that being a responsible eater means making a few sacrafices. It is dandy to live in a time when I can get a "3,000 mile" Ceasar salad every day of the week, but if I want to live in what I consider a more environmentally responsible and self-sufficent manner, I'm going to have to eat some damn cooked peas.   

Beans, lettuce and oats are on track to be the next harvest. 

Meat birds

Bill did a lot of reading and thinking when deciding which sorts of chickens we'd like to keep on our little farm. He went with the barred rock because of their low maintenance life style. As a traditional breed, they seem more natural in that they are good foragers and know how to brood their own babies.

But to fill out the minimum order of 25 birds, we also ordered a bunch of Cornish X (Cornish Cross, CC) meat birds.

While our barred rocks will live a fab-o organic, free-range (when possible) lifestyle, the cornish crosses will be in our freezer before they are big enough to live outside. According to this blogger, that is just as well.

For me, raising them has been a horrible experience. CC are not like real chickens. They are a factory farm cross breed made by crossing a Cornish with a White Rock. Their intelligence and alert foraging abilities have been bred out of them. They have massive, fast-growing bodies with short, thick legs. These legs will literally go out from under them when reaching about 8 or 9 weeks of age. They just can’t support their own weight. They have congestive heart failure quite easily. Rarely, and I do mean rarely, one will live as long as a year. But CC are an industry bird, and those grocery store chickens you see with the plump white meat, well, those are them. And they basically just eat, drink, and poop and prefer to be in a cool, confined space, unlike a normal chicken, who craves scratching, eating fresh grasses, and sleeping in sunlight. Cornish Cross chickens are the edible freaks of the chicken world.

She tried letting her cornish crosses out in the outside pen with the rest of her birds, but a few died within a few hours because they didn't know how to stay out of the sun or to drink water when it wasn't right in front of them.

The most complex issue concerning meat birds at all, at least for me, is the issue of “humane” meat growing. For some reason I believed that my way of raising Cornish Crosses would be more humane than their being raised on a factory farm. Now I’m not so sure. I thought raising them in fresh air and sunshine would be good for them, and they died. Where a factory farm has controlled heating and cooling specifically designed for meat birds, and they are bred to be comfortable under those conditions. Those who rally against factory farmed birds being mistreated by not having access to the outdoors (i.e. free-ranging), maybe have the wrong argument. Just because these birds have never seen the sun, never felt grass beneath their toes, or have lived long enough to mount or crow, doesn’t mean they are being mistreated. Cornish Crosses are engineered to eat, drink, and poop. It is all they care about and it is all they can manage to do, anyway.

Industrializing food has interesting consequences. Barred rock chickens, a current favorite of small farms and backyard chicken-raisers, were first bred in the early 1800 but were recently in danger of extinction because they lay cream colored (not white) eggs, which are not good for industrial processes. And while they are decent layers and decent for meat, they aren't exceptional at either. I assume as industry moved toward breeds like cornish crosses, more traditional breeds suffered.

Defining "local"

This dairy farm is around 80 miles from our house. We stopped there two "Cowtobers" ago on a trip back from Chicago. Bill has decided they aren't "local" for us though - his definition of local is "it came out of the ground within 50 miles of our house."


The Fair Oaks cheese we bought at a supermarket last week was not counted as local and has been included in our grocery tally.

This pie was purchased from a small pie bakery within Bill's 50 mile limit. While the pie was made from scratch in the shop, we don't know where the ingredients came out of the ground (we'll ask next time we visit). We have not added this to the tally based on the technicality that it is not from a grocery store (also, we like pie and are looking for excuses to not limit our pie consumption).


These two purchases bring up the issue of source. What is our goal in eating local? Is it environmental (reducing energy used in transportation - as in yesterday's post) or is it economical - to support local small business? If we bought Fair Oaks' cheese directly from them, would that be better? It seems less efficient for us to drive 80 miles to buy 13 pounds of cheese (we like cheese as much as pie) than for a giant truck to bring gobs of cheese to our local supermarket.

We have no idea, but our quest has already gotten us thinking and talking about these things, which is a good start.

And that is a cheesy ending for this post!

Calorie Return on Investment

Kelly posted an article about local eating and the energy costs of various low calorie foods like diet soda and iceberg lettuce. A Cornell group released a study with various shocking statistics such as:

• Americans drink an average of 600 cans of soda a year. Totally insane!
• A diet soda with one calorie requires 2,200 calories of fossil fuel energy to get into your hands.
  
• Nearly 20 percent of all energy in the US goes into the food system - almost as much as is used for all our cars.
• On average food travels 1,500 miles before we get it.
• Each calorie we consume takes about 4 calories of transportation energy.
• On average across the US a person spends only $15 per year on local food (the average family grocery bill is $3,000 per year).
  

New Yorkers should consider eating New York cabbage rather than California lettuce. A one-pound head of lettuce contains 50 calories of energy but requires 400 calories to produce in irrigated California. It then takes another 3,000 calories to ship it to New York state.

“So you've got a 50-calorie head of lettuce that now has an investment of nearly 4,000 calories. And it's 95 percent water,” Pimentel [the study author] said.

New York-grown cabbage also requires 400 calories but doesn't have to be shipped across the country. “And it has more vitamin A, more vitamin C, more protein than lettuce and you can store it all winter long here in New York state,” he said

Not really the beginning

With this blog post, Bill and I are sorta starting on a new food adventure...but the roots of these changes really began years ago.

Our quest (game, really) to see how long, and how well we can follow the rules posted on the right <-- was proximally spurred by a number of factors including a friend's goal to buy nothing new for 6 months, a trip to the Field Museum, dinner at Charlie Trotter's, and last year's minimally successful garden.

To get to a point where we will try limit our supermarket food spending to $50 a month, however, was actually the result of numerous small steps from banning doritos and fast food, to choosing the small package of Pillsbury cinnamon buns over the large and committing to grain-fed beef as to keep our brains functioning as long as possible.

When we first starting thinking about this quest, we were going to see how long we could make $600 last for groceries. But then we started considering the foods we could reasonably produce ourselves so as not to have to use money to purchase them and realized that we currently lack dairy animals, therefore, cheese was not on that list. This sent us into a panic.

As eating locally and seasonably is one of our goals, we decided that any local foods shouldn't count against our $600. We expect to get to know the folks at Traders Point Creamery very well.

This blog is mostly a self-imposed incentive to keep us accountable. We'll probably post our homemade food and garden adventures and information we come across on environmental and political issues. Hopefully this quest will change the way Bill and I interact with food and the blog will document those changes.

So, here the fun begins. An honest, uncensored look at our kitchen as it currently stands.

Nearly functional counter space:

Our fridge. I think the second shelf has two open jars of homemade applesauce (from very local apples). One is moldy. No idea what is in the styrofoam. Or a few of the jars in the back...though I think at least 3 of them are jelly.



Freezer, including at least 4 half-eaten and now freezer-burned containers of Ben and Jerry's.



And the pantry, where we do a bit better. Mostly ingredients and home-produced food including our last two jars of garden tomato sauce.




While this isn't the prettiest picture, we hope our new thoughtfulness about the food we buy will result in noticeable changes. Limited supplies of Ben and Jerry's will make each pint more precious. Knowing each purchase will creep us closer to the $600 limit will help us search the leftovers before buying more.

We hope this process will be fun, but challenging. Recipes, garden tips and helpful hints will be appreciated!!