Fields of Plenty
I think a lot about where our food is coming from and how it’s grown these days. Things like genetically modified organisms, mad cows, e coli spinach, tainted food from China, and monocultured organic crops grown by agribiz giants and delivered thousands of global-warming miles to a WalMart near you. Oh, and how about the mercury content in that fish. What to do?
Many people are turning to local farms. For everything. Not just some nice veggies but for meat, eggs, milk, cheese, grains and fish, too. I recently read Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about living for a year consuming nothing but locally grown and produced food. It was a really funny, interesting book; part cookbook, part gardening book and partly a study in sustainable community-based agriculture. So I was delighted to find Michael Abelman’s book, Fields of Plenty, subtitled “a farmer’s journey in search of real food and the people who grow it.”
It seems obvious that if we are to survive the catastrophic consequences of global warming one of the most important things we need to do is secure our food supply. We have to be able to feed ourselves without transporting food thousands of miles using fossil fuels. And this is something we can actually do.
Fields of Plenty is about a summer’s journey all over the United States visiting small farms. We are introduced to the people who work these family farms, how their personal lives are inseparable from the food they produce, their hands, hearts and creativity evident in each tomato, each plum and each round of cheese. It is a delightful book.
The farmers are as different as the Vietnam vet with the PhD in organic chemistry who brews a microbial wine to nurture his fig trees; the family farm that has been passed down through the generations in a little village in northern New Mexico with it’s crops of chilies and tomatoes and the traditional adobe oven in the yard; the Four Season farm in Maine that transformed itself from a hippie farm in the 70s to a successful year round supplier of produce (with the help of large greenhouses) and the chicken farmer in Virginia who describes himself as a Christian Libertarian capitalist environmentalist.
Then there’s the Falks, the cheese makers in Wisconsin, who “have built a national reputation with virtually no funds, a flock of sheep of their own chance breeding, a 1950 Allis-Chalmers tractor, and a milking barn built for stabling horses.”
Some of the farms he visits are small and sell only to local farmer’s markets, some are much larger like Harmony Farms in Wisconsin with a 440 member CSA (Community supported agriculture is a plan where members receive weekly boxes of produce in return for dues paid once a year. You can find your nearest CSA by going to http://localharvest.org). The farmers sell to local restaurants in many areas. There is a farm on Long Island owned by a famous chef and several greenhouses of produce growing on rooftops in Manhattan owned by the restaurant below.
The tour of farms is interlaced with an ongoing discussion of the political and philosophical realities of farming and rural living. Sitting in a mayor’s office in a small black farming community in Illinois listening to the mayor say, “We can’t separate the land and the people. We have to get these kids to appreciate the art of agriculture . . .” the author wonders . . . “there is so much good intention and insight here, I am struggling to understand how conviction will prevail in this battle to preserve alternatives for the next generation. I want some simple answers, some explanation as to the huge gap between insight and reality, between the inspiration I am hearing and the poverty and discouragement I see.”
The farmer in Maine, who is producing $100,000 a year on an acre and a half, says ” . . . the best land preservation, food-security and farm-ecology strategies lie in getting young people involved. . . . How is anyone going to take us seriously and how can we do what we want to do if we can’t make it financially?”
Fortunately, many of these farms are surviving because people in the local community appreciate the fruit of their labors and support them. As individuals we vote for either healthy, locally grown food or big box food from who knows where everytime we shop. Not everyone can have a garden but most of us can shop at farmer’s markets or join a CSA for at least part of our food. And we can encourage local grocery stores and restaurants to buy locally, too. Our future is up to us.
The people in this book are at the leading edge of the future of human life on this planet in my opinion. Unless we learn to feed ourselves simply and sustainably, not much else is going to work. Nothing gives me more hope than seeing what these farmers are up to these days. And did I mention there’s an abundance of really interesting looking recipes I’ll bet you can’t find anywhere else interspersed through the book? Enjoy!
