If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, and if you are sixty years or older, chances are good that your parents and certainly your grandparents ate food that they grew themselves or was grown by farmers they knew. The folks of these past generations ate fruits and vegetables in season and preserved quantities of it for the winter months. They may have raised chickens or other small livestock for food. Some of you may have experienced these traditions, or the end of them when you were children. Today we are far removed from that reality. When was the last time you plucked a chicken!

 

In a 1989 essay, "The Pleasures of Eating," essayist, novelist, and short story writer Wendell Berry wrote that people who eat, which is of course all of us, "mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure and clean is it? How free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been 'processed' or 'pre-cooked,' how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value?"

 

Berry goes on to conclude, "Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know which farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are." (from Bringing it to the Table)

 

Though this was written almost thirty years ago, it is still an apt description of food production. But the good news is that there is a growing awareness of Berry's "critical questions." Things are changing. Wendell Berry was one of the early voices, one of the heralds of what is a small but growing movement called "farm-to-table."

 

Berry is eminently fitted to write about this. Born in 1934, he is a native of Henry County, Kentucky, and the families of both his parents go back through at least five generations of small farmers. After college and University and a brief teaching stint in New York City, he returned to his roots and since 1965 has lived and farmed in Henry County while publishing many books of essays, poetry, and fiction. During his lifetime he has seen and written eloquently about the decline of the family farm and the rise and deleterious effects of agribusiness and processed foods.

 

A counter argument could be made that people wanted choices and the freedom from growing their own food. As our country developed and we grew in wealth, we came to enjoy this even more. When you combine this with the drive for efficiency, which in most businesses is considered admirable, though with agriculture it is often put in a negative light, you have major factors behind the growth of agribusiness and more processed foods. Free of the need to produce their own food, consumers embraced this in order to pursue other careers. So people came to buy the food this process produced, creating the situation we have now - an affordable food system with broad reach. Americans spend less of their earned dollar on food than any other country in the world. But all this happened at a cost, and the food-to-table movement has arisen in response to the down-side of this huge change in how we handle food.

 

Since 2000, the farm-to-table movement has slowly been gaining momentum. It emphasizes food that is locally grown and eaten in season. It encourages buying at local farmer's markets that sell fruits, vegetables, and meats from nearby, within in a 50 to 100-mile radius. In the 2008 Food, Conservation, and Energy Act, the U.S. Congress asserted that an agricultural food product may not be transported more than 400 miles to be considered local or regional.

 

Food cooperatives have been practicing farm-to-table since the 19th century, but the last 40 years have seen a burst of growth. According to the Cooperative Grocer Network, there are more than 200 food cooperatives in the U.S. The National COOP Grocers represents 148 co-ops with more than 200 stores. Those figures point to stores and do not include the many smaller efforts underway across the U.S. In a co-op of today the object is to make organic and natural foods more affordable and available. Members decide what foods to buy and how to distribute it. One approach is to set up a store that is financed by shareholders who are also customers. Another is for a farm to sell shares and in exchange promise to deliver to shareholders each week a box of whatever produce is in season. Democratic in spirit and built on cooperation, food co-ops can take different shapes, though one common characteristic is a high level of social responsibility.

Another trend worth noting is that farmers markets have been springing up all over the U.S. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's national count of farmers markets, there were 1,755 such markets in 1994. Today there are 8,687. People have been advocating the use of local food for school cafeterias in a small but growing farm-to-school movement. A recent report to Congress by the USDA notes these developments, indicating that members of Congress are beginning to pay attention. In the years since 2000, farm-to-table restaurants have sprung up all over the U.S. These are still few and far between when you consider the plethora of fast food outlets and popular restaurant chains, not to mention the many coffee shops, diners, and family restaurants that depend on shipped-in, frozen, sometimes pre-prepared items.

 

Processed items, though quick and convenient, often contain large amounts of sugar, fat, and sodium, leading to health problems. Even the fresh vegetables and fruit we can find on our supermarket shelves have traveled great distances. In order to do so, they are sometimes picked before being ripe. Fuel is consumed to transport them, releasing pollutants into the environment. Fresh food, when it is eaten soon after it is picked or harvested, still has all the nutrients that can be lost through processing or transportation. It is better for you and it tastes better.

 

Then why do we buy so much processed food and why is much of our produce still shipped across the continent or even the world? Why don't we all buy from farmers markets or food coops or eat at farm-to-table restaurants? The answer is price and convenience. Mass-produced, processed food is cheaper. It can be harvested in greater quantities by huge machines or hundreds of migrant workers, processed in large factories by state-of-the-art machines, and shipped in vast quantities in trucks, railcars, or container ships to be placed in big-box stores and supermarkets, where we can get a whole week's worth of food by going up and down the aisles filling a large grocery cart.

 

Yet change is coming very gradually. Six of the National Restaurant Association's 2017 Top 10 Concept Trends point toward farm-to-table cuisine: #1 is "Hyper-local sourcing," such as restaurant gardens; #3 is "Natural ingredients/clean menus;" #4 is "Environmental sustainability;" #5 is "Locally sourced produce;" #6 is "Locally sourced meat and seafood;" and #10 is "Nutrition."

 

The benefits of farm-to-table are considerable: fresher food leading to better health, support for local famers, a stronger local economy, an increased sense of community through deeper inter-connections among people, a sustainable environment, and improved animal welfare.

 

Whether you are buying at a farmers market or a food co-op or eating in a farm-to-table restaurant, what do the words "farm-to-table" really mean? First, the term is imprecise and is sometimes loosely used. Pay attention to what is behind it. (Note: One common fallacy is that it means "organic." While this may be true, the fact that something is locally raised does not guarantee that it is organic. The USDA certifies the "organic" label.) So what characteristics determine if food is farm-to-table? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

How many of us can answer "yes" to the above questions? It's not hard to see why our current food system has evolved the way it has, it makes food so much easier. Unless we buy some acreage and begin to grow our own food, we cannot break the cycle. Even if we did, it's still hard not to support the system. Let's say we raise all our own food, but we have a craving for corn chips. When we purchase organic corn chips, we are still buying something that was grown somewhere else, shipped to the place where it was produced, and then shipped to the store where we bought it.

 

It is probably not possible to change a system that feeds millions back to a simpler food-to-table form. Few of us would wish to return to a horse and buggy culture. Even the Amish use trains and planes. Maybe large agricultural and food-production businesses are just another example of our rapidly changing world. But maybe there are ways we have not yet thought of to raise the possibility of more people being able to eat farm-to-table.

 

Until then, every time we raise some of our own food or buy at a farmers market or food coop or pay extra to eat truly fresh food in a farm-to-table restaurant, we make a choice for nutrition, for flavor, for our local economy and for the environment. And maybe we even bring ourselves a step closer to the earth that sustains us.