The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [130]
Joel told me that when he first began selling eggs to chefs, he found himself apologizing for their pallid hue in winter; the yolks would lose their rich orange color when the chickens came in off the pasture in November. Then he met a chef who told him not to worry about it. The chef explained that in cooking school in Switzerland he’d been taught recipes that specifically called for April eggs, August eggs, and December eggs. Some seasons produce better yolks, others better whites, and chefs would adjust their menus accordingly.
Both Joel and Art evinced the deepest respect for their chefs, who not only seldom argued price and wrote checks right on the spot, but clearly appreciated their work and, very often, acknowledged it right on their menus: “Polyface Farm Chicken” is something I saw on menus and specials boards all over Charlottesville.
This informal alliance of small farmers and local chefs is something you find in many cities these days. Indeed, ever since Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1973, chefs have been instrumental in helping rebuild local food economies all over America. Waters made a point of sourcing much of her food from local organic growers, cooked only what was in season, and shone the bright light of glamour on the farmers, turning many of them into menu celebrities. Chefs like Waters have also done much to educate the public about the virtues of local agriculture, the pleasures of eating by the season, and the superior qualities of exceptionally fresh food grown with care and without chemicals. The Roman writer Livy once warned that when a society’s chefs come to be regarded as consequential figures, it is a sure sign that society is well down the road to decadence. Livy’s rule might have held up until the 1960s in America, but clearly no longer. Who would ever have guessed before then that America’s chefs would be leading a movement to save small farmers and reform America’s food system?
To talk to the chefs, customers, and farmers working together in this one corner of the country to rebuild a local food chain is to appreciate that it is a movement, and not merely a market. Or rather it is a novel hybrid, a market as movement, for at its heart is a new conception of what it means to be a consumer—an attempt to redeem that ugly word, with its dismal colorings of selfishness and subtraction. Many of the Polyface customers I met (though by no means all of them) had come to see their decision to buy a chicken from a local farmer rather than from Wal-Mart as a kind of civic act, even a form of protest. A protest of what exactly is harder to pin down, and each person might put it a little differently, but the customers I met at Polyface had gone to some trouble and expense to opt out—of the supermarket, of the fast-food nation, and, standing behind that, of a globalized industrial agriculture. Their talk of distrusting Wal-Mart, resenting the abuse of animals in farm factories, insisting on knowing who was growing their food, and wanting to keep their food dollars in town—all this suggested that for many of these people spending a little more for a dozen eggs was a decision inflected by a politics, however tentative or inchoate.
Shortly before I traveled to Virginia I’d read an essay by Wendell Berry called “The Whole Horse” in which he argued that reversing the damage done to local economies and the land by the juggernaut of world trade would take nothing less than “a revolt of local small producers and local consumers against the global