The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [133]
Shopping in the organic supermarket underwrites important values on the farm; shopping locally underwrites a whole set of other values as well. That’s because farms produce a lot more than food; they also produce a kind of landscape and a kind of community. Whether Polyface’s customers spend their food dollars here in Swoope or in the Whole Foods in Charlottesville will have a large bearing on whether this lovely valley—this undulating checkerboard of fields and forests—will endure, or whether the total economy will find a “higher use” for it. “Eat your view!” is a bumper sticker often seen in Europe these days; as it implies, the decision to eat locally is an act of conservation, too, one that is probably more effective (and sustainable) than writing checks to environmental organizations.
“Eat your view!” takes work, however. To participate in a local food economy requires considerably more effort than shopping at the Whole Foods. You won’t find anything microwaveable at the farmer’s market or in your CSA box, and you won’t find a tomato in December. The local food shopper will need to put some work into sourcing his food—into learning who grows the best lamb in his area, or the best sweet corn. And then he will have to become reacquainted with his kitchen. Much of the appeal of the industrial food chain is its convenience; it offers busy people a way to delegate their cooking (and food preservation) to others. At the other end of the industrial food chain that begins in a cornfield in Iowa sits an industrial eater at a table. (Or, increasingly, in a car.) The achievement of the industrial food system over the past half century has been to transform most of us into precisely that creature.
All of which is to say that a successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore. One whose sense of taste has ruined him for a Big Mac, and whose sense of place has ruined him for shopping for groceries at Wal-Mart. This is the consumer who understands—or remembers—that, in Wendell Berry’s memorable phrase, “eating is an agricultural act.” He might have added that it’s a political act as well.
This is precisely the mission that Slow Food has set for itself: to remind a generation of industrial eaters of their connections to farmers and farms, and to the plants and animals we depend on. The movement, which began in 1989 as a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, recognizes that the best way to fight industrial eating is by simply recalling people to the infinitely superior pleasures of traditional foods enjoyed communally. The consumer becomes, in founder Carlo Petrini’s phrase, a “coproducer”—his eating contributes to the survival of landscapes and species and traditional foods that would otherwise succumb to the fast-food ideal of “one world, one taste.” Even connoisseurship can have a politics, Slow Food wagers, since an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig. It’s all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
ON MY LAST DAY on the farm, a soft June Friday afternoon, Joel and I sat talking at a picnic table behind the house while a steady stream of customers dropped by to pick up their chickens. I asked him if he believed the industrial food chain would ever be overturned by an informal, improvised movement made up of farmer’s markets, box schemes, metropolitan buying clubs, slow-foodies, and artisanal meat-processing plants like Bev Eggleston’s. Even