Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [76]
We were still on vacation, headed north, now hungry. We pulled in for lunch at a diner with a row of shiny chrome stools at the long counter, and booths lining one wall. Heavy white mugs waited to be filled with coffee. Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette sang their hearts out for quarters. A handmade sign let us know the jukebox take is collected at the end of every month and sent to Farm Aid. The lunch crowd had cleared out, so we had our pick of booths and our order was up in a minute. The hamburgers were thick, the fries crispy, the coleslaw cool. The turkey wrap came with mashed sweet potatoes. Lily seemed so lost in her milkshake, we might never get her back.
The owners, Tod Murphy and Pam Van Deursen, checked by our booth to see how we liked everything—and to tell us which of their neighbors produced what. Everything on our plates was grown a stone’s throw from right here. The beef never comes from Iowa feedlots, nor do the fries come in giant frozen packages shipped from a factory fed by the world’s cheap grower of the moment. In a refreshing change of pace, the fries here are made from potatoes. This is the Farmers Diner, where it’s not just quarters in the jukebox that support farming, but the whole transaction.
It is the simplest idea in the world, really: a restaurant selling food produced by farms within an hour’s drive. So why don’t we have more of them? For the same reason that statue down the street clings to his hammer while all the real stonecutters in this granite town have had to find other jobs, in a nation that now imports its granite from China. The giant building directly behind this diner, formerly a stonecutting works, is now a warehouse for stone that is cut, worked, and shipped here from the other side of the planet. If ever a town knew the real economics of the local product versus the low-cost import, this ought to be it.
Buying your goods from local businesses rather than national chains generates about three times as much money for your local economy. Studies from all over the country agree on that, even while consumers keep buying at chain stores, and fretting that the downtown blocks of cute mom-and-pop venues are turning into a ghost town. Today’s bargain always seems to matter more.
The Farmers Diner is therefore a restaurant for folks who want to fill up for under ten bucks, and that is what they get: basic diner food, affordable and not fancy. The Farmers Breakfast—two eggs, two pancakes, your choice of sausage or bacon—is $6.75. The Vermont-raised hamburger with a side of slaw, home fries, or a salad is $6.50. At any price, it’s an unusual experience to order a diner burger that does not come with a side of feedlot remorse. For our family this was a quiet little red-letter occasion, since we’d stopped eating CAFO-produced beef about ten years earlier. Virtually all beef in diners and other standard food services comes from CAFOs. Avoiding it is one pain in the neck, I’ll tell you, especially on hectic school mornings when I glance at the school lunchroom calendar and see that, once again, it’s hamburgers or tacos or “manager’s choice.” (The manager always chooses cow meat.) But I slap together the peanut butter sandwich; our reasons are our reasons. In Lily’s life, this was the first time we’d ever walked into a diner and ordered burgers. Understandably, she kept throwing me glances—this is really okay? It was. The cattle were raised on pasture by an acquaintance of the owner. When Tod asked, “How’s your burger?” it was not a restaurant ritual but a valid question. We told him it was great.
Tod Murphy’s background was farming. The greatest economic challenge he and his farming neighbors faced was finding a market for their good products. Opening this diner seemed to him like a red-blooded American kind of project. Thomas Jefferson, Tod points out, presumed on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are intimately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the neighbors, and the community, and keeps people independent