Yet another romantic yet strident photo expresses a popular sentiment on my Facebook wall today:
And, well, who can argue? Wait… is that my cue?
When was this time when none of us cared about where our food came from?
When was this time when people knew the people that grew their food and raised the animals they ate?
When did we stop cooking?
Michael Pollan tells us never to eat anything our grandmothers wouldn’t eat. Well, my grandmother might have been born in 1895, but she sure had a pantry full of cans and cartons, and she loved ’em. She could make a fantastic plate of pancakes or some fine Polish dinners, but when Science Marched On, she Joined In.
During the four months that farmers markets operate in Chicago, I go to my neighborhood market as often as I can. I’m lucky; it runs from 3 to 8 p.m. so I can get there after work and still find a few things. Most of the city’s farmers markets operate from 7 to 11 a.m. or so, and if you’re a working stiff who can shop then, congratulations. Still, my neighborhood has a lot of restaurants, so when I finally get there around 6 or so, some booths have already closed up.
And even though I do buy from most of the farmers who have stuff I want — and it seems they at least understand my effort to support as many of them as I can by buying just a few things from each — and have nice little chats and sometimes even shake hands, I don’t think I’d recognize them if I saw them away from their booths. This notion that, in the past, people knew their suppliers: I think that’s full-on bullshit. Have farms, real production facilities, ever actually been integrated into urban life?
I suspect Sustainable Man up there would shake his head at my mother’s cans of vegetables and little jars of dried herbs and supermarket ground round. But Mom knew when to drag us kids into the station wagon and where to go to find freshly harvested corn or watermelon. And that’s great for those five weeks each year. But, Sustainable Man, sometimes in the dead of winter with the snow falling faster than you can shovel, sometimes you need those tastes, you crave those tastes, because as weak as they are, they’re a reminder of what once was and what someday soon shall be. Mediocre corn chowder in the winter can be so much more satisfying than the best corn chowder in the summer just because how can this possibly be?
(And Mom didn’t know those farmers either. I mean, she probably recognized them and they her from week to week, but I can’t imagine names were ever even exchanged.)
And Sustainable Man isn’t even in this for the profit. I don’t know how he does it, but he sneers at profit, reminds us it’s a bad thing. Maybe for him, farming’s like animal rescue except with slaughterhouses. I don’t know. Li’l Lambchop there sure is unaware of her fate. Me, I hope my market’s farmers aren’t going broke by selling me stuff. There are weeks you can tell they’re stressed out, and there are weeks you can tell they’re pretty happy, and I really hope they like bringing home wads of cash at night and I hope those wads of cash get them through the week and leave them with extra to get them through the winter.
Finally, Sustainable Man, I’d love to Eat Local Grown, although it’s “locally,” but I get to go to farmers markets four months a year, and not every week at that. And maybe my South American blueberries will have your head shaking as surely as my grandmother’s cans and my mother’s little jars do, and maybe they don’t have all of the flavor of those blueberries that show up for three weeks after the two weeks of strawberries at the market, but each one is a little miracle, whether it’s in a pancake in the morning or on a pork chop at night. If I ate local, I’d never have another citrus fruit again. Or a banana; I like bananas. There’s a little deli down the street from me, Sustainable Man, run by a guy who lives nearby, and he carries the 00 Italian flour that makes my pizzas just that little extra bit better. There just aren’t any bags of flour at my neighborhood farmers market at all, not high-protein bread flour and not good old reliable all-purpose flour and certainly not 00 flour, but halfway around the world someone is grinding flour so fine that the increased surface area releases water faster when it hits my pizza stone so I get a crisper crust, and I can buy that two blocks from my apartment. Go on, Sustainable Man: Rip that out of my hands.
So I don’t know where Sustainable Man, Monsanto Man, and I break bread. (Let alone Cargill Man and ConAgra Man, but Sustainable Man doesn’t seem to be as worried about them.) Don’t get me wrong: I have little nice to say to or about Monsanto Man. But Sustainable Man, you seem to be pretty out of touch too. You create a false past and try to make us feel guilty that we don’t live in it. The USDA says that well over 8,000 farmers markets were open last year compared to only 1,755 20 years ago. During my lifetime, my grandmother never lived more than a short walk from a supermarket so she could stock up on the cans and cartons from which she worked magic. Can you tell us about the past you want us to live in again, Sustainable Man? I thought not.