It occurred to me that farm food is about more than finding fresh vegetables. We don't just visit a farmer's market or roadside stand because of the fresh vegetables. We go there to experience a sense of community. At the market we get to relate to real people. To meet people. To talk to vendors who know what they sell, care about what they sell, and can answer our questions. A supermarket produce section is like a warehouse peopled by stock movers who know little or nothing about the produce they sell. You may find a knowledgeable individual here and there, but the system is designed to move produce like boxes at a warehouse. The produce guy at the supermarket is not there for conversation. The relationship gets very personal when you have the same grocer for many years, when you visit the same roadside stand, when you buy vegetables or eggs from a neighbor with a microfarm.
I always remember how refreshing it was as a child when my mother would take me to the grocery store to buy meat for hamburgers or roast. We would always ring for the butcher behind the mirrored wall of windows above the coolers. A real, live human being would come out from behind the supermarket slickness and suddenly the store seemed more real to me. Here was a real person we could talk to in a big empty store. There were employees in the store, here and there, to be seen occasionally stacking products on the shelves or moving boxes. There were the checkout people. There were customers pushing their carts about the aisles. But you didn't hold a conversation with these people, you couldn't ask anything of them or get anything from them. No relationship existed with them. But the butcher was someone, the last person in the supermarket you could engage in conversation with, interact directly with, to build a relationship, however small.
We would ask him to grind our selection of chuck for us. We didn't trust what went into the prepackaged ground beef and wanted to pick the piece of chuck with the marbling and amount of fat to meat we wanted (invariably, we wanted more fat than lean offered, but less than the real fatty stuff). He would grind our beef and return it to us in a white paper package, or later, in the same kind of Styrofoam and plastic wrap package the prepackaged meat came in. What I liked about going to the butcher was that we could participate in the making of our food. We could choose the cut of meat we wanted. Inspect it for the marbling, fat content, redness, etc. and then the butcher would grind our beef to order. There was something to seeing the cut of beef before it was ground, still whole, like a steak, which gave a feeling of satisfaction, knowing that it was a good cut and where the ground beef came from, unlike the prepackaged ground beef. It was a social interaction, requiring conversation between producer and consumer, which was very satisfying. Even a child could notice. We came away with ground beef we felt comfortable with, arrived at through a negotiation, had our say in the process, did not have to take what was offered to us. It felt good.
A farm is a lively place of growing things. It is more of a happening that never stops than a location. A farm is not a depot for food where we pick it up and move on. It is a center of activity, socializing and participation. The farm offers the same kind of interaction I enjoyed at the supermarket butcher's.
As the driving force and principal developer behind farmfoody.org, I am beginning to realize a social network connecting farm to garden embodies what I enjoyed as a child about going to the supermarket butcher. It is a model for why we enjoy visiting, shopping for produce at farm stands, farmer's markets and local farms.
I always remember how refreshing it was as a child when my mother would take me to the grocery store to buy meat for hamburgers or roast. We would always ring for the butcher behind the mirrored wall of windows above the coolers. A real, live human being would come out from behind the supermarket slickness and suddenly the store seemed more real to me. Here was a real person we could talk to in a big empty store. There were employees in the store, here and there, to be seen occasionally stacking products on the shelves or moving boxes. There were the checkout people. There were customers pushing their carts about the aisles. But you didn't hold a conversation with these people, you couldn't ask anything of them or get anything from them. No relationship existed with them. But the butcher was someone, the last person in the supermarket you could engage in conversation with, interact directly with, to build a relationship, however small.
We would ask him to grind our selection of chuck for us. We didn't trust what went into the prepackaged ground beef and wanted to pick the piece of chuck with the marbling and amount of fat to meat we wanted (invariably, we wanted more fat than lean offered, but less than the real fatty stuff). He would grind our beef and return it to us in a white paper package, or later, in the same kind of Styrofoam and plastic wrap package the prepackaged meat came in. What I liked about going to the butcher was that we could participate in the making of our food. We could choose the cut of meat we wanted. Inspect it for the marbling, fat content, redness, etc. and then the butcher would grind our beef to order. There was something to seeing the cut of beef before it was ground, still whole, like a steak, which gave a feeling of satisfaction, knowing that it was a good cut and where the ground beef came from, unlike the prepackaged ground beef. It was a social interaction, requiring conversation between producer and consumer, which was very satisfying. Even a child could notice. We came away with ground beef we felt comfortable with, arrived at through a negotiation, had our say in the process, did not have to take what was offered to us. It felt good.
A farm is a lively place of growing things. It is more of a happening that never stops than a location. A farm is not a depot for food where we pick it up and move on. It is a center of activity, socializing and participation. The farm offers the same kind of interaction I enjoyed at the supermarket butcher's.
As the driving force and principal developer behind farmfoody.org, I am beginning to realize a social network connecting farm to garden embodies what I enjoyed as a child about going to the supermarket butcher. It is a model for why we enjoy visiting, shopping for produce at farm stands, farmer's markets and local farms.
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