The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [127]
Sitting around the trailer’s tiny kitchen table drinking sodas, Bev and Joel talked about the economics of selling food locally. Joel said the farmer’s market was his least profitable outlet, which is why he had stopped doing them himself a few years ago. All the same, farmer’s markets have blossomed in recent years, their number increasing from 1,755 a decade ago to 3,137 at last count. Joel was even higher on metropolitan buying clubs, a scheme with which I was not familiar. A group of families gets together to place a big order once or twice a month; a lead person organizes everything, and offers her home as a pickup site, usually in exchange for free product. The size of the order makes it worth the farmer’s while to deliver, in Joel’s case sometimes as far as Virginia Beach or Bethesda—half a day’s drive. Metropolitan buying clubs represent the fastest-growing segment of Joel’s market.
Who were these consumers? In Joel’s case mostly young mothers concerned about the health of their children, many of them drawn from the homeschooling community (“People who have already opted out once”) or from an organization called the Weston Price Foundation. Dr. Weston Price was a dentist who in the 1930s began to wonder why isolated “primitive” tribes had so much better teeth and general good health than people living in industrialized countries. He traveled all over the world researching the diets of the healthiest, longest-lived populations, and found certain common denominators in their diets: They ate lots of meat and fats from wild or pastured animals; unpasteurized dairy products; unprocessed whole grains; and foods preserved by fermentation. Today the foundation, which is run by a nutrition expert and cookbook author named Sally Fallon, promotes these traditional diets in books and conferences, as well as on its Web site, where Joel is one of the producers often cited.
“The beauty of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find their tribes, and then for the tribes to find their way to us”—all without the expense of marketing or a storefront. Eatwild.com, a site that promotes the benefits of pastured meat and dairy, is another route by which consumers find their way to Polyface. “It’s never been easier for people to opt out.”
“Opting out” is a key term for Joel, who believes that it would be a fatal mistake to “try to sell a connected, holistic, ensouled product through a Western, reductionist, Wall Street sales scheme”—by which (I think) he means selling to Whole Foods. As far as both Joel and Bev are concerned there isn’t a world of difference between Whole Foods and Wal-Mart. Both are part of an increasingly globalized economy that turns anything it touches into a commodity, reaching its tentacles wherever in the world a food can be produced most cheaply, and then transporting it wherever it can be sold most dearly.
Late in our conversation, Joel asked Bev and me if we’d seen a recent column by Allan Nation in Stockman Grass Farmer about “artisanal economics.” Drawing on the theories of Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, Nation had distinguished between industrial and artisanal enterprises to demonstrate why attempts to blend the two modes seldom succeed. Industrial farmers are in the business of selling commodities, he explained, a business where the only viable competitive strategy is to be the least-cost producer. The classic way any industrial producer lowers the costs of his product is by substituting capital—new technologies and fossil-fuel energy—for skilled labor and then stepping up production, exploiting the economies of scale to compensate for shrinking profit margins. In