Twelve years ago I began cooking as a volunteer. One Sunday a fellow volunteer told me about a CSA--Community Supported Agriculture, a type of subscription service for farm product--from Riverview farms. I subscribed, then became a regular at a weekend farmers markets, and then I read books by Michael Pollan, and then I graduated from college and got a job at one of the restaurants in Atlanta that was buying from the same farmers.
At the time farmers, cooks and chefs, and people that grew the market for farmers markets and sustainable restaurant seemed to be making gains. The system was broken but there was a dialogue and media coverage.
Every year I met more new farmers and producers: heritage hogs, foraged vegetables, charcuterie, cheese, and more and more everyday vegetable and animal farmers. More restaurants opened and bought from them.
Atlanta is still growing but we’re approaching saturation at farmers markets, and the farmers that I talk to tell more stories of thinner margins, being unable to sell wholesale to restaurants, and the uncertainty that they’ll be around next year. I don’t think Atlanta is unique.
For all our optimism and desires to buy and taste the best, freshest and newest products we’ve changed little agricultural policy at the local and national levels. The changes we’ve made--like doubling EBT (federal food benefits for the poor) at farmers markets--have come through private organizations and don’t apply everywhere. They’re laudable, but they’re small, slow gains against big, complex problems.
We continue to subsidize the production of food that is harmful to consumers and our land, giving money to market players with little to no morality, and no need for subsidies while training consumers that food should be cheap.
We’re at least two generations removed from day to day subsistence cooking with whole foods and have nurtured a food industry that will happily help us not to do the hard work of breaking these long term habits.
Our obsession with food is as strong as ever: tasty videos populate our feeds, we talk about food while out at dinner, waiting for a table at a new restaurant, and even while cooking other meals.
Most people meanwhile couldn’t tell you how their food got to them, and this makes all meals more or less equal unless something is either objectively bad or transcendent.
I don’t intend to tell people to stop loving food: that’s the opposite of my business. I don’t intend to rail against every entity larger than a mom-and-pop operation, or gleefully point out the latest ridiculous processed food product (though I make no such promises in my private life). This is not a polemic.
This blog is an introduction: to farmers, the system that feeds--or does not feed--all of us, great gear, technique, the human lives of chefs (sparingly and lightly), and places, as I find them, that move me forward. This is a declaration of faith in human ingenuity; the shameless, naive assertion that people want to know more, and that knowledge moves us forward in the good, chasing perfection.
