The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [104]
3. MONDAY SUPPER
Once the cows were settled in their paddock for the night, Joel showed me how to hook the electric fence to its battery and we rolled down the hill to dinner. We ditched our boots by the back door, washed up in a basin in the mudroom, and sat down to a meal prepared by Joel’s wife, Teresa, and Rachel, the Salatins’ eighteen-year-old daughter. The farm’s two young interns, Galen and Peter, joined us at the big pine table, and focused so intently on eating they uttered not a word. The Salatins’ son Daniel, twenty-two, is a full partner in the farm, but most nights he has dinner with his wife and baby son in the new house they recently built themselves, up the hill. Joel’s mother, Lucille, also lives on the property, in a trailer home next to the house. It was in Lucille’s guest room that I was sleeping.
The Salatins’ brick colonial dates to the eighteenth century, and my first impression of the big, cozy kitchen was that it looked strangely familiar. Then it dawned on me: This is exactly the sort of farmhouse kitchen—wood-paneled and decorated with all things quaint and hearth-like, up to and including the neatly framed needlepoints—that countless kitchens in American suburbs and sitcoms have been striving to simulate at least since World War II. This was what all that nostalgia pointed to, the real McCoy.
Indeed, much about dining with the Salatins had, at least for me, the flavor of a long-ago time and faraway place in America. Joel began the meal by closing his eyes and saying a rambling and strikingly non-generic version of grace, offering a fairly detailed summary of the day’s doings to a Lord who, to judge by Joel’s tone of easy familiarity, was present and keenly interested. Everything we ate had been grown on the farm, with the exception of the cream of mushroom soup that tied together Teresa’s tasty casserole of Polyface chicken and broccoli from the garden. Rachel passed a big platter of delicious deviled eggs, eggs that in this form or some other would appear at every meal that week. Though it wasn’t even the end of June, we tasted the first sweet corn of the season, which had been grown in the hoop house where the laying hens spend the winter. There was plenty of everything, and the interns endured many jokes about their stupendous appetites. To drink there was only a pitcher of ice water. Caffeine and alcohol, both of which I sorely felt the need of at the end of my first day, were nowhere in evidence. It was going to be a long week.
At dinner I mentioned that this was probably the all-time most local meal I’d ever eaten. Teresa joked that if Joel and Daniel could just figure out how to mill paper towels and toilet paper from the trees on the farm, she’d never have to go to the supermarket. It was true: We were eating almost completely off the grid. I realized that the sort of agriculture practiced at Polyface was very much of a piece with the sort of life the Salatins led. They had largely detached their household from industrial civilization, and not just by eating from land that had virtually no economic or ecological ties to what Joel variously called “the empire,” “the establishment,” and “Wall Street.” Joel, who had described his politics as Christian libertarian environmentalist, wanted nothing to do with “institutional anything,” but especially the institutions of government. Daniel and Rachel had both been homeschooled. There were plenty of books in the house, but, aside from the Staunton daily newspaper, which devoted more space to local car crashes than the war in Iraq, little media (and no television) penetrated the Salatin household.
The farm and the family comprised a remarkably self-contained world, in the way I imagined all American farm life once did. But the agrarian self-sufficiency that Thomas Jefferson celebrated used to be a matter of course and a product of necessity; nowadays that sort of independence constitutes a politics and