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By Grant Avis
“My food comes from a Sysco truck, same as yours.”
I had to take my eyes off the road when I heard this, looking at my friend in the passenger seat, smiling defiantly. I knew he wasn’t being entirely serious. Though some do seriously believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows, I do not think anyone thinks that meat spontaneously generates in a semi-truck trailer. Yet, the point still stood - most of us do not have any connection with the source of our food beyond a Walmart shelf, momma’s fridge, or a McDonald’s counter.
It’s been several decades since a cow was slaughtered and butchered on my family farm in Grayson County, Kentucky. The seemingly supernatural and certainly alien forces of “the market” meant more production was needed from the hundred acres of woods and hills. Men in slaughterhouses could work more efficiently and profitably (according to the farm journals and extension office experts) than my grandparents, uncles, and assorted neighbors, especially when Kentucky Gentleman bottles and Mason jars were passed around.
At the time, outsourcing the work seemed like the sensible thing to do. Now, decades later, the long line of sensible changes in agriculture has changed the landscape of rural Kentucky, hollowed out our small towns, and wrought devastation on land, animals, and people. It was sensible to fill in ponds, mow down fences, bulldoze more woods, spray chemicals on your tobacco, stop growing tobacco, to row crop your pasture, row crop your neighbor’s pasture, go into debt to buy their farm and another tractor or two. For most people, farming itself wasn’t sensible at all. Moving to Louisville and selling the land your fifth great grandpa crossed the Appalachian Mountains for to a “real” estate developer made a lot more sense than sweating, working with your hands, and living frugally. That good sense has destroyed bobwhite quail, monarch butterflies, and is currently threatening honeybees; it has created a class of confused people uprooted from their family, tradition, and culture; it has increased cancer rates in the heartland; it has turned once prosperous, or at least fair-to-middling, towns into eclectic assortments of abandoned buildings; it has sent opportunities for proud labor out of town or abroad, leaving drug addictions in the vacuum; it has turned hope for better days to hope that things will stop getting worse. Most of all, it has disconnected us from knowledge of the land and all it contains, and placed about half a dozen middle men between us and anything we put in our bodies.
You have to eat. At breakfast, lunch, and supper (or dinner for readers in Louisville) you consume something that was grown or raised. You have an immense stake in agriculture, and based on my experience, you have no idea of it. Think about the chicken that was once your Chick-Fil-A sandwich, or the cow that was once your McDonald’s burger. Do you know what the factory, not the farm, that raised it put in it? Do you know what you yourself are now eating that it once ate? What entered its body and now yours through mouth or needle?
Don’t be satisfied with willful ignorance over what you place in your body. Drive out of town, meet a farmer, buy a cow from him that ate grass and not slop. You can’t butcher or slaughter a Sysco truck - your food comes from somewhere else. The next time you eat, ask yourself where you want it to come from.
I had to take my eyes off the road when I heard this, looking at my friend in the passenger seat, smiling defiantly. I knew he wasn’t being entirely serious. Though some do seriously believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows, I do not think anyone thinks that meat spontaneously generates in a semi-truck trailer. Yet, the point still stood - most of us do not have any connection with the source of our food beyond a Walmart shelf, momma’s fridge, or a McDonald’s counter.
It’s been several decades since a cow was slaughtered and butchered on my family farm in Grayson County, Kentucky. The seemingly supernatural and certainly alien forces of “the market” meant more production was needed from the hundred acres of woods and hills. Men in slaughterhouses could work more efficiently and profitably (according to the farm journals and extension office experts) than my grandparents, uncles, and assorted neighbors, especially when Kentucky Gentleman bottles and Mason jars were passed around.
At the time, outsourcing the work seemed like the sensible thing to do. Now, decades later, the long line of sensible changes in agriculture has changed the landscape of rural Kentucky, hollowed out our small towns, and wrought devastation on land, animals, and people. It was sensible to fill in ponds, mow down fences, bulldoze more woods, spray chemicals on your tobacco, stop growing tobacco, to row crop your pasture, row crop your neighbor’s pasture, go into debt to buy their farm and another tractor or two. For most people, farming itself wasn’t sensible at all. Moving to Louisville and selling the land your fifth great grandpa crossed the Appalachian Mountains for to a “real” estate developer made a lot more sense than sweating, working with your hands, and living frugally. That good sense has destroyed bobwhite quail, monarch butterflies, and is currently threatening honeybees; it has created a class of confused people uprooted from their family, tradition, and culture; it has increased cancer rates in the heartland; it has turned once prosperous, or at least fair-to-middling, towns into eclectic assortments of abandoned buildings; it has sent opportunities for proud labor out of town or abroad, leaving drug addictions in the vacuum; it has turned hope for better days to hope that things will stop getting worse. Most of all, it has disconnected us from knowledge of the land and all it contains, and placed about half a dozen middle men between us and anything we put in our bodies.
You have to eat. At breakfast, lunch, and supper (or dinner for readers in Louisville) you consume something that was grown or raised. You have an immense stake in agriculture, and based on my experience, you have no idea of it. Think about the chicken that was once your Chick-Fil-A sandwich, or the cow that was once your McDonald’s burger. Do you know what the factory, not the farm, that raised it put in it? Do you know what you yourself are now eating that it once ate? What entered its body and now yours through mouth or needle?
Don’t be satisfied with willful ignorance over what you place in your body. Drive out of town, meet a farmer, buy a cow from him that ate grass and not slop. You can’t butcher or slaughter a Sysco truck - your food comes from somewhere else. The next time you eat, ask yourself where you want it to come from.