Hug a Farmer

Yes I know, I've been an awful blogger these past few weeks.  For that I apologize, and hereby present myself with a new challenge:  I, Hollie, vow to blog every day for the rest of October.  Can I do it?  Tune in and see for yourself!  I'm much more apt to follow through with these things if I feel monitored. 

Last weekend was Thanksgiving, and I did a lot of pie baking.  However, I feel like I've featured far too many pies on Magic Lantern over the past few months, and decided to refrain from posting photos of them.  Instead, I'd like to talk about something I've learned quite a lot about while working for the KTW:  farming.

Like many of my acquaintances, I was raised to believe that academics are the be all end all purpose of existence, and that absolutely everything else in life must bow to their mastery.  No one ever explicitly put down alternative options - it was simply always assumed that university was in my future, and taken for granted that other people would be around to fix the car and put food on the the table.

But where, exactly, does that food come from?  How does it grow?  My Dad grew up on a farm, so it seems kind of odd that I know so little about food (well, other than the eating of it).  I have never really talked to him about it, but suspect one of the reasons he abandoned hands on agriculture for academia is because he felt it was not economically sustainable.  In the 70s and 80s, many people left their family farms because they felt they were not making enough money.  This sort of apathy toward the production of food led to the ever-increasing prevalence of factory farms, infamous for their cruelty to animals and use of harmful chemicals, among other things.

Over the past month, I have had the pleasure of talking to some farmers who HAVE been able to make it work, and developed a deep respect for them in the process.  I spoke to farmer from who promotes local eating through his store in Verona, which sells only food from farms in the area.  I talked to a young woman who started her own community shared agriculture business; basically, people may put a down payment on produce from a particular farm for an entire season, and in turn receive weekly baskets of fresh fruits and vegetables.  I also spoke to many farmers at a protest to save the nation's six prison farms, slated to close down this winter.  Our government thinks that farming is an obsolete skill, and therefore of no use in the rehabilitation of inmates.

An obsolete skill?  Excuse me?  How many times did you eat today? 

 To me, this situation epitomizes our society's toxic relationship with food.  I think that anyone, if they actually gave it a second thought, would choose food that was grown organically half an hour away to that which is mass-produced and chemical-laden from god knows where.  And that's saying nothing for the environmental impact of the transportation.  Or the fact that those prison farms feed a lot of people in the area.

Sigh...I think I'd better stop before this becomes the longest blog post in history.