The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [134]
“We don’t have to beat them,” Joel patiently explained. “I’m not even sure we should try. We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse—we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.
“And make no mistake: It’s happening. The mainstream is splitting into smaller and smaller groups of like-minded people. It’s a little like Luther nailing his ninety-five theses up at Wittenberg. Back then it was the printing press that allowed the Protestants to break off and form their own communities; now it’s the Internet, splintering us into tribes that want to go their own way.”
Of course! Joel saw himself as more of a Luther than a Lenin; the goal wasn’t to blow up the Church, but simply to step around it. Protestantism also comes in many denominations, as I suspect will the future of food. Deciding whether that future should more closely resemble Joel’s radically local vision or Whole Foods’ industrial organic matters less than assuring that thriving alternatives exist; feeding the cities may require a different sort of food chain than feeding the countryside. We may need a great many different alternative food chains, organic and local, biodynamic and slow, and others yet undreamed of. As in the fields, nature provides the best model for the marketplace, and nature never puts all her eggs in one basket. The great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock. The important thing is that there be multiple food chains, so that when any one of them fails—when the oil runs out, when mad cow or other food-borne diseases become epidemic, when the pesticides no longer work, when drought strikes and plagues come and soils blow away—we’ll still have a way to feed ourselves. It is because some of those failures are already in view that the salesroom at Polyface Farm is buzzing with activity this afternoon, and why farmer’s markets in towns and cities all across America are buzzing this afternoon, too.
“An alternative food system is rising up on the margins,” Joel continued. “One day Frank Perdue and Don Tyson are going to wake up and find that their world has changed. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen, just as it did for those Catholic priests who came to church one Sunday morning only to find that, my goodness, there aren’t as many people in the pews today. Where in the world has everybody gone?”
FOURTEEN
THE MEAL
Grass Fed
Before I left the farm Friday, I gathered together the makings for that evening’s dinner, which I’d arranged to cook for some old friends who lived in Charlottesville. I had originally thought about filling a cooler with Polyface meat and bringing it home with me to California to cook there, but decided it would be more in keeping with the whole local food chain concept to eat this particular meal within a leisurely drive of the farm where it had been grown. After all, it was the sin of flying meat across the country that had brought me to Swoope in the first place, and I hated for Joel to think that an entire week of his instruction had left me unimproved.
From the walk-in, I picked out two of the chickens we had slaughtered on Wednesday and a dozen of the eggs I’d helped gather Thursday evening. I also stopped by the hoop house and harvested a dozen ears of sweet corn. (In consideration of my week’s labors, Joel refused to accept payment for the food, but had I paid for it, the chicken would have cost $2.05 a pound, and the eggs $2.20 a dozen—prices that compare very favorably with Whole Foods’s. This is not boutique food.)
On the way into Charlottesville, I stopped to pick up a few other ingredients, trying as best as I could to look for