The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [126]
(Sometimes, but not always, for the antipathy of city and country still runs deep—and in both directions. I once encouraged a food writer from a big city newspaper to pay a visit to Polyface. The day she got back she telephoned me, all in a lather about the alien beings she’d had to spend the day with in Swoope: “You never warned me he had a Jesus fish on his front door!”)
WHEN JOEL AND I arrived at Bev’s office that afternoon, we were greeted by an intense, wiry, blue-eyed fellow in his forties wearing shorts and a Polyface baseball cap, and talking a mile a minute. Joel had explained on the way down that Bev was at the moment operating under excruciating financial pressure: He had mortgaged his family’s farm to build a small meat-processing plant. Bev’s experience at the farmer’s markets had convinced him of the growing demand for pastured meat, but supply was limited by the shortage of small processing plants willing to work with the state’s grass farmers. So he’d decided to build one himself.
Bev was nearing the end of his financial rope while the USDA dillydallied on the approvals he needed to open. Yet when he’d finally secured the necessary permits, hired a crew, and begun killing animals, the USDA abruptly pulled its inspector, effectively shutting him down. They explained that Bev wasn’t processing enough animals fast enough to justify the inspector’s time—in other words, he wasn’t sufficiently industrial, which of course was precisely the point of the whole venture. I realized Joel had wanted me to see Bev’s predicament as proof of his contention that the government is putting obstacles in the path of an alternative food system.
Remarkably under the circumstances, Bev—whose business card gives his full name as Beverly P. Eggleston IV—had not lost his sense of humor or weakness for bad puns and high-velocity patter. When I told him what I’d been up to on the farm all week he cautioned me that “trying to follow Joel around will give you carpool tunnels and oldtimer’s disease.” Joel thinks Bev is the funniest man alive. He also fervently wants him to succeed and has been advancing him thousands of dollars’ worth of Polyface product to help float him while he does battle with the bureaucrats.
After Bev took us on a tour through the shiny new processing facility, a million dollars’ worth of stainless steel and white tile built to exacting USDA specifications and sitting idle, we repaired to the trailer home parked out back, where Bev appeared to be living on potato chips and caffeinated soda. Every weekend he drives the three hundred miles up to Washington with a truckload of product from Joel and other grass farmers from all over Virginia. I asked him about selling pastured meats at farmer’s markets, about exactly what it took to get people to pay the extra money.
“What I sell them on is where they’re coming from,” Bev explained. “There’s a whole wheel of reasons to work with, and you’ve got three seconds to figure out what their issue is. Animal cruelty? Pesticides? Nutrition? Taste?” Joel had told me Bev is a born salesman (“He could sell a hat rack to a moose”), and it wasn’t hard to imagine him working the Saturday crowd, hitting the adjacent chords of fear and pleasure and health, all the while barbecuing free samples and unspooling his high-speed shtick. “This is food for folks whose faces itch when the wool’s being pulled over their eyes,” Bev said, giving me a taste of his spiel. “Instead of mad cow disease, we’ve got glad cows at ease.”
Not many farmers can do this; indeed, many farmers become farmers precisely so they don’t have to do any such thing. They’d