I recently spent a weekend at a
farm in Iowa. Three days without a shower, without cell phone service, without
junk food. No Facebook, texting or TV for 60 straight hours.
It was wonderful.
To many college students, this
might be the closest thing to torture one can imagine and, while I was less
than thrilled about the lack of running hot water, I thoroughly enjoyed being
disconnected from the outside world and connected instead to the things that
really matter—the earth and the people, plants and animals that inhabit it.
There’s something magical about a
crisp, quiet fall morning where the grass is crunchy with frost and the cows
are grazing contentedly in the field waiting to be milked. We woke up minutes
before the sun, fumbled around in the pitch black for as many warm layers as we
could find, slipped on our rain boots and trudged through the field to milk the
cows. I could feel the earth warming gently as the sun began to slowly peak over
the horizon. Soon it was a brilliant, golden orb casting beams of light across
the pasture and melting the glistening frost that encased each delicate blade
of grass.
You know your food is local when it
is grown so close to home that you can point in the direction of its origin.
When someone asks you where your food came from your answer can be, “Farmer
Ben” or, even better, “my backyard”.
Getting involved in the process of growing, tending and harvesting is a great feeling. You feel very accomplished and satisfied when you sit down to a steaming hot plate of home-grown food and know that you were instrumental in its creation. Better yet, you are thankful for the people and animals that contributed to your meal. As agricultural hero Joel Salatin puts it, we must respect and honor the animals that we intend to consume. This brings us closer to them and, in turn, creates a beautiful and humane carnivore-animal relationship. In the same way, if we tend our plants with care we appreciate each crispy pea pod, each tender leaf of lettuce, each spicy sprig of cilantro.
I recognize that it is not possible
for everyone to grow their own food but even a simple change in mindset makes a
world of difference. Maybe we don’t have fifteen acres of lush grassland on
which to raise cows but we can source our meat from local farmers and suppliers
who treat cows as the grass-eating herbivores that they are. If we don’t have
the time to grow 25 varieties of produce in our backyard, we can shop at
farmer’s markets and support our local economy. If we aren't able to raise our
own chickens, we can purchase free-range eggs and meat from farmers we know do
not subject their animals to the atrocities that are rampant in factory farms. Perhaps
we can’t spend three hours preparing every dinner from scratch but we can avoid
processed products that travel an unfathomable number of miles to arrive on our
grocery store shelves.
We can contribute to the proliferation of sustainable, locally grown food if we learn to appreciate the
plants and animals we consume and avoid the dreadful modern habit of
thoughtless consumption.
