Our Sustainable Table: Essays

Introduction

MY HOME IS farm country in north central Kentucky. I have lived and farmed here all of my life, first by birth and then by choice. My great-grandfather said, after the first and only trip he ever took in his life, I didn’t see anything I like better than the field behind my barn. I am his true heir. While I am grateful for the traveling I have done and the places I have seen, nothing has tempted me away from the beautiful, maybe unremarkable, and now threatened landscape of my home country. Even now when this country so familiar to me is also strange to me it remains the only place I want to live. I know that it is strange to my husband, a lifelong farmer and a descendant of generations of farmers. I know from my father’s writing and my daily conversations with both of my parents that they feel the strangeness of it everyday. But here we stay.

Farmland and farming communities all over this country are in decline or have been swallowed up by our industrial economy. In that we are tragically the same as other rural places all over the United States—and, I suppose, our world, although my travels haven’t been that extensive. A difference here is that our decline in my part of Kentucky can be directly tied to the loss of the Burley Tobacco Program. The program ended in 2004, which gives us twelve years to see what happens to a farm culture when its economy is removed. The Burley Tobacco Program defended a crop that turned out to be indefensible, and so, I believe, the program and its principles have been quickly forgotten. It was the only farm program—a price support, never a subsidy—that served the people it was supposed to serve, the small family farmers. Because it limited production of a high-value crop, it protected farmers and the farms from over production and encouraged a pretty highly diversified farm economy from 1941 until the program ended. For a while we had a fairly stable farm population that supported the little towns in our part of the country. We had a farm culture of shared work. Differences in political and social issues didn’t matter much when our economy was stable but they now matter absolutely. The community is polarized because we have lost our shared culture. In spite of thirty years or so of a local food movement and our close proximity to urban markets, we are losing farms and farmers at a terrifying rate.

OUR SUSTAINABLE TABLE was first published in 1990, a year I remember very well. My youngest child, Tanya, was born in February and my grandfather, John Berry, Sr., turned ninety the following November. He would die the next year at ninety-one. My grandfather was a lawyer and a farmer who served land-conserving communities all his life. He was a principal author of the Burley Tobacco Program. My daughter was born onto a farm and into a way of life that would not have existed without the work of her great-grandfather. In the twenty-six years since her birth and the publication of Our Sustainable Table, that way of life has nearly disappeared. And maybe most importantly in relation to this book, my husband, Steve Smith, started the first CSA in Kentucky in 1990. We then thought it a historic event that would begin the change we needed. His accounting, shared publicly, proved that a farmer could make more per acre by raising vegetables than could be made on tobacco. He and I talk often of our attempts to keep farming without tobacco, which we did successfully. However, we believed all those years ago that our entrepreneurial work was to keep making farm payments while we believed, naively it turned out, that there would be a local food system that farmers would soon join.

My father says that his father did the important work and he and his brother, John Berry, Jr., just took it up. My brother Den and I have now taken it up at The Berry Center. That work was, and is, to put a sustaining economy under good farming. We are working to ask and answer what seem to me to be the most important questions of our time: How can farmers afford to farm well? How do we become a culture that supports good farming? We have a local food movement in full swing that has bypassed farmers. Right now farmers are offered two choices in American agriculture: either small and entrepreneurial or large and industrial, with almost nothing in the middle. After some initial excitement about local production for local markets in the late eighties and early nineties, most farmers have given up on an unpredictable market that they don’t understand and don’t trust. They need an organization in the middle to move product, consider parity pricing, protect them from overproduction, and take good husbandry into account.

What is left of a generational farm culture is cut off from the information it needs the most. Industrial agriculture, taking most of its information from the Farm Bureau, extension, and agri-industrial corporations, is not helping farmers free themselves from the people who could not care less what happens to them or their communities. The local food movement, coming mostly from urban places, doesn’t know much, if anything, about farming or the lives of farmers. It appears now that we can measure the success of the local food movement by how many people think that the situation for farmers is improving, when, in fact, it is not. Neither side of agriculture is working for farmers. Only 16 percent of us live in rural places now and less than 1 percent of us farm. Very few of the 1 percent are farming sustainably. My father heard a Kentucky farmer say in a recent meeting, It is hard to make the right decisions on your farm when you are wondering who will be the next person to live in your house.

If we agree that food is a cultural product then we have to think about what has happened to the rural culture. The demand for well-raised local products going up has met the rural culture coming down. There are fewer and fewer of us who can recognize what is happening. It seems to me that our work is to get hold of what is left of the old culture of thrift, husbandry, and neighborliness, and to strengthen it, we need to put an economy that values it around good farming. There are still young people who want to farm, who are the inheritors of the old ways, and who are called to farm. Our work must relate specifically to a particular farmer on a particular farm. What will work well for him or her, for this farm, for this community?

To help with this work I have been in need of teachers and a vision of what I believe we are after. I have been lucky in both. The agriculture of Henry County, Kentucky, declined quite a bit in the years between my father’s childhood and my own, but it was still pretty good when I was growing up. The farms and the little towns still looked well tended. People’s pride was in their homes and it showed. When I started farming in 1981 a farmer who was raised nearby showed up to help every day when we were harvesting our first crop of tobacco. I had to get a good deal older than I was then to realize what he was doing. He was offering himself to us to save us from mistakes that, with his help, we wouldn’t have to make. That is the culture we need again, and what the young people who want to farm now must do without.

And that is a need the authors of the essays and the short story in this book are helping to fill. They are giving us the benefit of their knowledge, history, passion, calling, and love. To hear for the first time, or again, from Wes Jackson that to help farmers you must help their communities is useful. Frances Moore Lappe’s argument for an agrarian and democratic economy is necessary. Paul Gruchow’s remembrance of his father gives us a vision of what a life well lived, within the limits of a place, can be. Ann Mendelson and Bruce Brown write about, respectively, the history of the apple in America and in the Columbia, salmon. Both pieces make very clear the problems caused when market or economic standards replace nature as the standard, to return to Wes Jackson’s essay. Every essay in this book makes the others stronger.

Maybe what I value most is that this book gives us the foundation for the change we must make in agriculture and in our culture. Our Sustainable Table asked us twenty-six years ago to think in a different way. This book is more necessary today than it was in 1990. Every problem discussed in this book has grown worse. The only improvement I see is that more people are interested in what we are talking about—and that is a big difference.

Our Sustainable Table is not an ain’t it awful book. It is a book that we can use to go forward intelligently, and, like the farmer who made himself available to some young people in a tobacco field in Henry County, Kentucky, some thirty-five years ago, it can help us go forward while avoiding some of the mistakes of the past.

Mary Berry

THE BERRY CENTER

Preface

GOOD FARMING MEANS good food; anyone who cares about good food has a stake in good farming and in methods of food production, processing, and distribution that accord with the long-term health and sustainability of farmers, farming communities, and the land upon which they—and we—depend.

But discussions of food and food policy in America have been dominated for most of this century, and certainly since World War II, by questions of quantity rather than quality: How much and at what price? has often seemed more important than how good and at what cost? Our criteria for evaluating the ways in which we farm, market, shop, cook, and eat have largely been economic in nature, whereas how food relates to the land, our communities, and our public and private selves has been a question relegated to the margin of contemporary concerns. The discipline proper to eating, of course, is not economics but agriculture, writes Wendell Berry. The discipline proper to agriculture, which survives not just by production but by the return of wastes to the ground, is not economics but ecology. Our Sustainable Table is inspired by that remark. It shares Berry’s distress with a society that divorces food production from food consumption while it shares his conviction that the fundamental element of our culture is agriculture: Since how we raise and eat our food reflects our husbandry of our selves, our communities, and the land that gives us life, we are what we eat not just in anthropological terms but also in moral and spiritual as well as economic and social terms.

Despite the apparent abundance that Americans enjoy, the specter of scarcity in general and hunger in particular continues to shape our view of agriculture and food. Contemporary attitudes to both agriculture and eating are a response to the desire to produce the greatest quantity of food at the lowest price. To criticize the environmental or cultural effects of this is considered, at best, crankiness and elitism and, at worst, insensitivity to hunger itself. But for its critics, such a system merely substitutes for death by hunger the possibility of death by environmental degradation. Similarly, for those who care about how their food tastes and the ways in which preparing and sharing it resonate through their lives and communities, modern agricultural practice and the food it produces seem to have brought about plenty at the price of both private pleasure and the public good—food that fills the stomach but starves the soul.

In recent years, individuals and organizations throughout the world have been actively attempting to reestablish an agriculture that is consistent with environmental, human, and economic well-being: among the contributors to this book, Gary Nabhan’s work to preserve native American food plants and crop diversity comes to mind, as do Wes Jackson’s efforts to create an agriculture that complements rather than ignores the prairie ecosystem of our nation’s breadbasket. At the same time, others have been working to restore food’s aesthetic, psychological, social, and cultural dimension—to point out that food that tastes good and is good for you is not just a private indulgence but a force for sustaining families and communities, the end result of larger goods that benefit everyone: Alice Waters, for example, has created a restaurant many consider among the world’s finest not just on the basis of carefully selected materials and good cooking but upon the idea that restaurants are a part of a web of interdependence that stretches from farm to market to cook. Frances Moore Lappé has been an influential force for an American diet that actively responds to the problems of global hunger and the economic and environmental crises of the Third World. These approaches suggest the possibility of nurturing a way of life that applies the same principles to individuals, communities, and their culture that sustainable agriculture brings to bear on farming.

Our Sustainable Table explores and encourages the link between the land and the table and urges the recovery of a vision of food in which agriculture and gastronomy are but two sides of the same coin. Lately, those concerned with growing food and those concerned with eating it have not had much to say to one another, tending to view the other side with suspicion or condescension. But the time is right to ask them to speak to one another’s concerns: to ask those who think about farming to think about where food goes; and to ask those who think about cooking and eating to think about where food comes from—in short, to ask both sides to consider the manifold economic, social, and environmental import of how food is grown and the equally significant cultural, social, and psychological dimension of how it is eaten. The result, I hope, will be a sense of the thread that runs from a glass of wine or a simmering pot to family meals to markets to farms, and thence to the past traditions and future life of all our kind and of the earth itself.

Robert Clark

EDITOR

ONE

Remember the Flowers

PAUL GRUCHOW

MY FATHER WAS a farmer with no use for fashions. He married and went into business for himself in the spring of 1946, raising laying hens, vegetables, and berries on a seven-and-a-half-acre truck farm. Small-scale horticulture was his real interest. For the rest of his life, he devoted as much time and care to his gardens and orchards and beehives as to his row crops. The eggs he sold to the local candling plant, the berries and vegetables to the local grocers. It was hard labor, mostly done with his hands and a two-wheeled garden tractor, and it afforded a very meager living. By 1947 he had infant twins as well as a wife to support, and sometimes it took all the eggs in the henhouse just to buy milk for the babies. In 1950, he rented 160 acres of land on shares. The move required investing in a collection of ancient farm machinery, but it also brought a barn and an above-ground house with three rooms and electricity (the family had been living in an unfinished basement). A decade later, my mother inherited 80 acres, giving our family the capital to finance the purchase of an additional 120 acres of land, about 40 acres of it in pasture and meadow, so, in the last years of my father’s life (he died in 1970), he became a landholding farmer, although still on a quite small scale.

The fifties and sixties were, of course, a time of great expansion in American agriculture, an expansion fueled by new markets in war-ravaged Europe, by rising demand at home as the postwar baby boom took effect, and by the introduction in 1947 of 2,4-D, the first