11/12/04
I had never been even close to the East Coast before. But there I was in
mid-state Vermont, sitting in the middle of a hillside pasture that was green
as could be in September, and without a sprinkler in sight.
I was a fish out of water, to be sure. I was the token wild westerner, a
couple thousand miles from everything and everyone I knew, hanging out with a
bunch of funny-looking, funny-talking strangers with names I’d never heard
before.
There was the vegetable farmer with a long white beard who was also something
of a poet. There was a sugarbush tapper who, when the planes crashed into the
towers in 2001, started walking the next day, all the way from Burlington to
New York City, pushing a cart containing messages of hope from the children of
her home state.
There were hippie chefs who loved to eat red meat. There were Brooklyn Jews
helping African-American grandmothers grow food on vacant ghettos lots. There
was a woman in her 70s who fed herself year-round from her back yard in
suburban New York State. There were environmental activists. There was a
lesbian sheep farmer. There was a Buddhist monk.
And then there was me. I’m not exactly sure what qualified me to be included
with this particular group of people, but let’s just assume it was something
good, okay? Every once in a while I have to be reminded that this is a big
giant world, and that people really are different in different places, which
unfortunately means that I must be different too, and not just “normal,”
which is what I generally assume.
Anyway, I was to spend a week with these people, gathering each day in a
200-year-old hand-hewn hardwood barn to talk about the one thing we all had in
common: A deep concern for the fate of the American family farm.
Most of these people brought with them stories of decaying farm communities,
of dispossessed families, and of the seemingly unstoppable flood of pavement
and buildings rolling over the green grass, the dark soil, and the blood of
the generations. The city people talked about the insanity of their daily
lives, and the desperate flailing of individuals and communities that have no
memory at all of what it means to be truly, deeply connected to the land.
And the activists offered confessions. They talked about how much of their
work sometimes seemed so pointless. While they were saving an acre here or
there, 100,000 acres were being lost forever. They wondered out loud whether
all these years they had been missing the point, missing some critical piece
of the puzzle.
I myself talked about the Klamath, and frankly I was moved at the responses I
got from these folks – folks who fit just about every stereotype of “The
Enemy” as we’ve heard it described by defenders of the Klamath
agricultural community (myself included). I heard long-haired, left-wing
radicals from the biggest city in the world weep audibly as I described what
we – not just the farmers but all of us – had gone through over the last
couple decades.
I also ended up doing a great deal of listening. In fact I’m pretty sure I
learned a thing or two –the first one being this: There is nothing –
nothing – more important in our lives than food.
Sounds pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Well, I’m here to tell you it is most
definitely not obvious to the vast majority of people in this day and age –
not to city people, not to suburban people, and not even to most rural people.
We can’t even let farmers off the hook on this one. I mean, what’s crazier
than a guy farming a thousand acres who goes to the big chain supermarket for
most of his family’s food? Doesn’t that seem at all odd to you? If it
doesn’t, then it’s good evidence of how much we’ve lost touch with what
farming has always been all about. To me it’s at least as crazy as the city
kid who doesn’t know that milk comes from a cow.
It’s especially silly when we consider that, even in major farm communities
like ours, the store food we’re buying was trucked, trained, shipped, and/or
flown in, often from a half a world away. I mean, for pete’s sake, why is it
even possible to buy an Idaho potato in Klamath Falls?
For the week I was on this New England farm, we were fed three squares a day,
and not a morsel was grown outside 60 miles of the farm. And we ate good,
I’ll telling you, with meat and cheese and sweets to boot. Which brings me
to the second important thing I learned on that trip.
There’s something fairly powerful about keeping yourself and your loved ones
alive with food that came from the ground right in front of you. It makes you
feel a part of a place. It makes you feel like the place is a part of you,
too.
I don’t mean that in some mystical new-age kind of way, but in the most
practical, matter-of-fact way possible. If you work the land, and the land
makes the food, and the food makes you and yours, which makes it so you and
yours can go back and work the land -- then by God you’re part of the land,
and it’s a part of you, plain and simple.
There’s a holiday this month called Thanksgiving, and it’s no accident
that it falls during the harvest season. The pilgrims on our holiday
decorations were not grateful for shiny cars, big screen TVs, or presidential
election results. They were grateful for food.
There are lots of things that we can be thankful for this month, but at the
top of the list should be the food we are blessed to have on our table. This
food fills our bellies, but it also fills our hearts. It fills our hearts with
the love of the people seated at our table, and with love of the land where
all our lives come from, and where all our lives will someday return.