Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [77]
For a dreamer, he’s a practical guy. “Thinking globally is an abstraction. What the world needs now isn’t love sweet love—that’s a slogan.” What the world needs now, he maintains, is more compassionate local actions: “Shopping at the hardware store owned by a family living in town. Buying locally raised tomatoes in the summer, and locally baked bread. Cooking meals at home. Those are all acts of love for a place.”
The product of his vision is a place that’s easy to love, where a person can sit down and eat two eggs sunny side up from a chicken that is having a good life, and a farmer that will too, while Tammy Wynette exhorts us all to stand by our man. It’s also an unbelievable amount of work, I suspect, for Tod, Pam, and their kids Grace and Seamus, who start the day early on their farm and keep things running here until closing time. The diner has had to create a network of reliable year-round producers, facilitating local partnerships and dealing with human problems, for better and for worse. Supplies have to keep running even if a potato grower falls ill or the onion farm gets a divorce.
Trying to make a small entrepreneurial economy competitive with the multinationals is an obvious challenge. Tod has met it, in part, by creating an allied business that processes all their breakfast sausage, bacon, smoked ham, and turkey, and also sells these products in regional stores. With the Farmers Diner Smokehouse and the diner itself both doing half a million dollars in business annually, they can create a market for 1,500 hogs per year. That’s just about how many it takes to keep a processing plant running. A nearby bakery stays busy making their burger buns and bread. The stonecutting jobs have all gone to China, but Tod taps every channel he can think of to make sure it’s Vermont farmers’ hogs, grain, potatoes, and eggs that end up on the white porcelain plates of his diner.
His unusual take on the ordinary has recently made the place world-famous, at least among those who pay attention to food economies. Here in town, though, it’s just the diner. The average customer comes in for the atmosphere and the food: the NASCAR crowd, or elderly Italians and Ukranians from a nearby retirement home. The old folks love the Chioggia beets and greens, farmstead fare that reminds them of home. Some of his customers also enthusiastically support the idea of keeping local businesses in business. But whether they care or not, they’ll keep coming back for the food.
How is local defined, in this case? “An hour’s drive,” Tod said. Their longest delivery run is seventy miles. Maintaining a year-round supply of beef, pork, chicken, and turkey from nearby farms is relatively simple, because it’s frozen. Local eggs, milk, ice cream, and cheese are also available all year, as are vegetal foods that store well, such as potatoes, beets, carrots, onions, sauerkraut, and maple syrup. The granola is made in Montpelier, the spaghetti and ravioli right here in town. Fresh vegetables are a challenge. The menu doesn’t change much seasonally, but ingredients do; there’s less green stuff on the plate when the ground outside is white. The beer is locally brewed except for Bud and Bud Light, which, according to Tod, “you’ve gotta have. We’re not selling to purists.” Obviously, at a diner you’ve also gotta have coffee, and it’s fair-trade organic.
The Farmers Diner does not present itself as a classroom, a church service, or a political rally. For many regional farmers it’s a living, and for everybody else it’s a place to eat. Tod feels that the agenda here transcends politics, in the sense of Republican or Democrat. “It’s oligarchy vs. non-oligarchy,” Tod says—David vs. Goliath, in other words. Tom Jefferson against King George. It