The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [123]
A chicken—or steak, or ham, or carton of eggs—can find its way from Polyface Farm to an eater’s plate by five possible routes: direct sales at the farm store, farmer’s markets, metropolitan buying clubs, a handful of small shops in Staunton, and Joel’s brother Art’s panel truck, which makes deliveries to area restaurants every Thursday. Each of these outlets seems quite modest in itself, yet taken together they comprise the arteries of a burgeoning local food economy that Joel believes is indispensable to the survival of his kind of agriculture (and community), not to mention to the reform of the entire global food system.
In Joel’s view, that reformation begins with people going to the trouble and expense of buying directly from farmers they know—“relationship marketing,” as he calls it. He believes the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye, something few of us ever take the trouble to do. “Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?”
Joel often speaks of his farming as his ministry, and certainly his four hundred or so regular customers hear plenty of preaching. Each spring he sends out a long, feisty, single-spaced letter that could convince even a fast-food junkie that buying a pastured broiler from Polyface Farm qualifies as an act of social, environmental, nutritional, and political redemption.
“Greetings from the non-Barcode people,” began one recent missive, before it launched into a high-flying jeremiad against our “disconnected multi-national global corporate techno-glitzy food system” with its “industrial fecal factory concentration camp farms.” (The dangerous pileup of modifiers is a hallmark of Joel’s rhetorical style.) He darkly warns that the government “and their big-food-system fraternity-mates” are exploiting worries about bioterrorism to regulate small food producers out of business, and beseeches his customers “to stand with Polyface during these paranoid, hysterical days.” Like any good jeremiad, this one eventually transits from despair to hope, noting that the “yearning in the human soul to smell a flower, pet a pig and enjoy food with a face has never been stronger,” before moving into a matter-of-fact discussion of this year’s prices and the paramount importance of sending in your order blanks and showing up to collect your chickens on time.
I’d met several of Polyface’s four hundred parishioners on Wednesday afternoon, and then again on Friday, as they came to collect the fresh chickens they’d reserved. It was a remarkably diverse group of people: a schoolteacher, several retirees, a young mom with her tow-headed twins, a mechanic, an opera singer, a furniture maker, a woman who worked in a metal fabrication plant in Staunton. They were paying a premium over supermarket prices for Polyface food, and in many cases driving more than an hour over a daunting (though gorgeous) tangle of county roads to come get it. But no one would ever mistake these people for the well-heeled urban foodies generally thought to be the market for organic or artisanal food. There was plenty of polyester in this crowd and a lot more Chevrolets than Volvos in the parking lot.
So what exactly had they come all the way out here to the farm to buy? Here are some of the comments I jotted down:
“This is the chicken I remember from my childhood. It actually tastes like chicken.”
“I just don’t trust the meat in the supermarket anymore.”
“These eggs just jump up and slap you in the face!”
“You’re not going to find fresher chickens anywhere.”
“All this meat comes from happy animals