It’s time for people who care about food to quit navel-gazing.Photo: Jared Wong

One of its personalities is the foodie, who approaches the movement as a vehicle to increase sensual-aesthetic pleasure. Another of its personalities is the localizer, who views the movement through the lens of the foodshed radius and food miles. Another is small-is-beautiful — small farms, small artisan processors, small distributors. Two more of its personalities are the food-justice advocate and the broadener, who want the movement to expand to a robust, durable, fair, and deeply embedded system that really challenges the stranglehold that the industrial food system has on us.

If you look at the literature, the news media, the blogosphere, Twitterdom, and Facebookland, you’ll find that foodie-ism, local-ism, and small-ism are the dominant personalities, with a smattering of food justice and broad-ism here and there. You’ll find plenty of foodies slobbering over whipped Mangalitsa lard, braised pork snouts, and sliver-thin raw beef’s liver. You’ll find plenty of localists committing themselves with verve to the 100-mile challenge. You’ll find heaps of praise for all things small-ish.

What you’ll find little of is a critical line of thinking that asks a simple question: Can foodies, localists, or smallists supply our communities? What does whipped Mangalitsa lard have to do with feeding people? What is the true foodshed radius of 10 million people? At what cost, “small is beautiful”?

There is no question that the dominant personalities of the movement have gotten us where we are today. But where is that? We’re at a substantial and exceedingly definitive crossroads, with a deceptively simple question looming before us: What is important to us? The answers to that question will determine our choice of direction and the personalities of the movement for years to come.

As a broadist, I know what is important to me, and since I am a reformed localist and smallist, I have a sense of what is important to them. However, I am not sure about the foodies. Sometimes I think all that really matters to them is sensuous pleasure, gastronomic hedonism, couched in the language of localism. Let me be clear: there is a place for the sensuous pleasure of braised pig testicles, just as there is a place for tight radii and for smallness. I have no problem with multiple personality disorder; it can, in fact, be a good thing. I just want to have our multiple personalities engage each other in a critical discussion about what is important to us.

We should take the considerable momentum that the foodies, localists, and smallists have given the movement and turn it into something grand, something powerful, something that can move and change cultures.

But what does change mean for the movement?

First, that it will truly be a movement, rather than something that we, perhaps out of romanticism, call a movement.

Second, the movement needs to see that it is first and foremost a deeply ethical movement, and that its broad ethics trump the parochial ethics of foodism, localism, and smallism. The movement has an ethical obligation to feed all people in its foodsheds, especially those most harmed and marginalized by industrialism, not just the small percentage of us who embrace foodism, localism, and smallism. The movement has an ethical obligation to surrender its parochial interests to the broader interests of the masses while at the same time challenging, pushing, and changing those interests. To be blunt, the movement has an ethical obligation not to advocate for the impossible — foodists, localists, and smallists can only feed themselves, no matter their intentions, no matter how fervent they are.

Third, real change means getting real food — recognizable, familiar, comfortable — into the hands of tens of millions of people who otherwise would never see it and might never want it. This does not mean I think chains like Chipotle Grill should be the model. Given the choice by the Corbin Hill Road Farm program — which connects upstate farms with people in New York City’s low-resource communities — the people of the South Bronx came out in droves for simple, fresh, real, and good produce. Participation leapt from about 250 last year in its first season to 1,500 shares this year. How can we build upon that momentum?

Fourth, and finally, change means work — hard work. First we need to convince ourselves and then we need to convince as much of the rest of the population as possible.

So let’s get to work feeding ourselves and our communities — with ethics, ecology, and justice.

Let’s fill meat counters with ethical, sustainable cuts.Photo: Anthony Albright

Coming from me, if you know my politics and you know the history of my writings, this is a shocking claim. Nevertheless, I have been thinking about it very hard over the last few days, in light of the comments I have received, and I do still think it is the right thing to do. Given our meat-intensive culture, it is unfair to ask people of limited means to eat only cheap cuts and/or to substantially reduce their meat consumption. As I argued yesterday, bucking one’s cultural impulses often takes Herculean efforts. Being poor is challenging enough already; we shouldn’t also force counter culturalism on poor people. As much as I dislike our culture of rampant, unbridled meat consumption, I think, until we are able to change that culture — and I truly hope we are able to — that poor people have as much right to it as the well-off. I believe it so strongly that I see making local-regional meat broadly affordable and readily available as an ethical imperative.

Why, or how, is it that when supermarkets are so much a part of our food, socioeconomic, and health problems that it could possibly be supermarkets that can answer this call? It’s something like sleeping with the enemy, isn’t it?

Yes, and no.

First, I need to admit right up front that this effort could fail miserably, for a few reasons:

1. As far as being able to gather enough local-regional meat together to be able to satisfy the daily needs of supermarkets, I might very much be putting the cart before the horse. Without the necessary infrastructural developments already in place, making this effort might be impossible.
2. We can only move into supermarkets if it means not compromising our farming ethics, especially as it relates to animal welfare, environmental/ecological concerns, and our belief that farmers should be fairly compensated for their work. It might be possible that supermarkets are unwilling or unable to pay farmers what they need to be paid without compromising those values.
3. Even if we can get local-regional meat into supermarkets, it might only be possible by pricing meat at levels that are still out of the reach of people of limited means.

Nevertheless, right now, at this moment, I believe that supermarkets are the only way to make local-regional meat as broadly affordable and readily available as I would like to make it. As I have said, I want local-regional sales to account for 30 percent of total sales, not 2 percent.

In terms of expanding access by making local-regional meat more broadly available and affordable, volume is the key. Currently, local-regional agriculture is carried out very much on a small scale. Each individual farm produces a low-volume of meat. Many, perhaps most, of these farms raise a dozen or two, maybe 30, or as many as 40 pigs per year.

Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, the butcher shop I work with in New York City, alone needs 30 pigs per month. That means that in order to satisfy his needs, Jake Dickson would need to work with 12 different low-volume farmers in order to meet his needs. That would be a logistical and bookkeeping nightmare, not to mention that working with so many farmers substantially increases the likelihood that a farmer here and there is going to flake out and either not make a delivery or come up short or not send the sort of animal (finish-wise) that she/he promised. So, instead, Jake sought out and found just a few local-regional farmers to work with that are farming on a larger scale than the typical low-volume local-regional farm, including me. Working with fewer farmers substantially reduces the time it takes to manage logistics and bookkeeping, and it also makes it so the quality of the meat on offer at the shop is more consistent, and more reliably delivered, than it would be if it were coming from 12 different farms.

Jake’s is a small butcher shop, located in a high-end market, frequented by people that are definitely not of limited means, so in spite of the fact that he is buying wholesale — I will sell him more than 250 pigs this year — he is able to compensate his farmers fairly. Those of us who are working with Jake are able to make a living.

What about a supermarket? Assuming that it would be possible for us to meet the volume needs of supermarkets, which would be substantially higher than at Dickson’s, would they be able (and willing) to compensate farmers fairly, especially if they were offering local-regional meat at more affordable prices?

I believe they would be able to, but not without us making some changes on our end. We would need to add to our plethora of small-scale local-regional farms a large number of mid-sized farms, composing an “agriculture of the middle,” that raise not a couple or a few dozen pigs per year, but 500-1,000+. If you think that in order to raise that many pigs, animal welfare or environmental/ecological concerns need to be compromised, check out Jude Becker’s operation (6,000 pigs per year), or Greg Gunthorp’s (1,000 pigs per year), or Paul Willis’s (2,500 pigs per year). Also, Animal Welfare Approved, which has the highest animal welfare standards around, has plenty of pig farmers farming at this scale.

Scale does two things. First, it makes it so the supermarkets can work with us. They wouldn’t be willing to work with 100 different farmers to meet their needs. Second, it means that the farmers that they do work with can be paid less for their pigs and still make a living. If the farmers are paid less, and we have done the hard work to convince supermarkets of the value of making local-regional meat more broadly affordable, then that lower compensation can translate into lower prices for local-regional meat on the supermarket shelves.

Will it ever be as cheap as industrial meat? No, and I have never argued that it would, or should, be. Will local-regional meat on the supermarket shelves be substantially cheaper than at farmers markets, on the farm, or through CSAs (none of which we should do away with, by the way)? Yes, absolutely, but once again, to get it there requires a shift in our approach to local-regional farming; it requires scaling up from low-volume farms to an agriculture of the middle, which can be, and where it already exists often is, every bit as ethical and sustainable.

As ever, let’s get to work.

Buying sustainable pork shouldn’t involve breaking the piggy bank.

She came over to the stall and without looking up at me started looking over the meat case, and then after a moment, she fingered the edge of the price sheet for a moment and then picked it up to take a closer look.

As she looked, I waited, without saying anything, wondering how things were going to go. I had long ago stopped stereotyping people. Yes, I had imagined a hard life for her, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t willing to pay half a day’s wages on pasture-raised, local pork, or grassfed lamb. I’d been surprised by too many people to make that mistake again.

She carefully placed the price sheet back on the table and placed the small orange wee-bee little pumpkin paper weight back on top of it.

Then for the first time, she looked up at me. I smiled.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” she said, and then as we looked at each other silently for a moment, I was taken very much by surprise. Her eyes quickly welled up with tears; one slipped out and slid slowly down her cheek. She raised a hand up and wiped it off. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied.

“It’s just … it’s just that I am so frustrated.”

I didn’t say anything. It was clear that she wanted to speak her piece.

After  a moment, still with tear-filled eyes, she said, “You know, I want … ,” she wiped another tear away, ” … I want so badly to stop eating grocery store meat. It’s terrible. Terrible for you. It tastes terrible. It’s all full of crap, hormones, drugs, and God knows what.”

I nodded.

“But this,” she said, sweeping a hand over the meat case, “I just can’t afford it, any of it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, a little uncomfortable and slightly embarrassed. I looked away from her, around the rest of the farmers market. The people at the market were not monolithically well off, or white. It was not just soccer moms and exuberant well-off foodies. But, it was close.

I didn’t know what to say. I had often been confronted by people over the price of my meat. “That’s ridiculous!” “So expensive!” “Phhftt!” One old lady even said, “you should be ashamed!” Little did she know that I already was, always had been.

I had set out in farming with a mission, to offer ethically and ecologically raised meat at the lowest price possible, low enough even for people like the woman standing in front of me at that moment. But, I quickly discovered that this was a pipe dream. I couldn’t sell pork chops for less than $7.00/lb. and keep the farm going, and even at that price, my wife would still need to continue subsidizing the farm.

The low-volume, direct market system makes it impossible. The costs are simply too high. USDA slaughter and butchering alone doubles the cost of getting the animal to market. A lamb has $3.00/lb. of small-scale, local slaughter and butchering in it! A pig, $2.00/lb.

The woman standing in front of me had no idea how angry and frustrated I was. She had no idea that her tears were my tears. I had set out to make meat broadly affordable, but instead, I was selling exclusive, high-priced meat to the well-off.

As she stood in front of me, we were both pissed off, but I didn’t let on. She was the one crying.

“I’ve heard so many good things about local meat, but I’ve never even been able to try it,” she went on. “I’ve heard it tastes better, it’s better for you.” Her eyes were drying up.

“It does,” I said, “and it is.”

She looked at me.

Without thinking about it, I reached into the meat case and pulled out a package of two center cut pork chops and placed them in a paper bag. I folded the top of the bag over itself a couple of times and held the package out in the space between us.

“Here,” I said, “I want you to have this. You should at least get to try it.”

“No,” she said, taking a half a step backwards. “I can’t just take it.”

“It’s okay, really. I want you to have it.”

“No.” She took another half a step backward.

I was about to lose her.

“OK, wait,” I said, holding up my free hand to keep her from walking away. “How about this. Take the chops. Try them. If you like them, then you can come back and pay me whatever you can afford. Does that work?”

She took a step forward, returning to our shared space. I continued to hold the paper bag out between us.

“OK,” she said, reaching out to take the bag. She took the bag from me. “OK,” she said, “thanks.”

“No problem.”

“I’ll be back,” she said, “I will.”

“I know,” I replied.

She turned and walked away.

The next week, just as I finished up handing some change to a customer, I looked up and there she was, holding a $10 bill out towards me.

“That’s more than they cost,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I don’t care, they were awesome.”

“Keep it,” I said, “I wanted you to have them.”

“No,” she said, “take it,” in such a way that I knew I had better just take the money, so I did.

“Let me get you some change,” I said, opening the cash box.

“No,” she said, raising her hands up to her shoulders, arms bent at the elbows, hands palm out, taking a step back and starting to turn. “Keep it,” and then she walked away.

I closed the cash box and watched her walk away.

In spite of the fact that my interaction with that woman has been a driving force in my desire to scale up the farm so that I could be in a position where economies of scale would make it possible for me to lower the cost of my meat, I have failed miserably. Yes, now I raise over 400 pigs per year, but the meat is not any cheaper. In fact, because most of it is marketed through a butcher shop in Chelsea Market, it is even more expensive. But, I haven’t given up yet.

I believe I have an ethical obligation to find a way to provide real food security for people of limited means. Nobody should have to cry because they can’t afford real food, which is one of the reasons I want to sell my pork in Price Chopper.

Of course, real food security is not only about developing infrastructures to make it possible to get local meat into supermarkets like Price Chopper. There is cultural work to do as well, including changing the “race to the bottom” supermarket mentality. Supermarket executives and managers need to be convinced of the value of supporting farmers by paying decent prices for non-industrial meat, and in turn, taking less of a profit margin to keep the prices down to help provide real food security. That is asking a lot of large corporations acting in competitive markets.

Is it too much to ask? The corporate mantra is that all that corporations do is give customers what they are asking for. So, let’s call them on it. Let’s start asking for broadly affordable local/regional meat that supports our local/regional farmers by compensating them fairly.

No more tears. Real food security is an ethical imperative.

Bob Comis with his porkers. Will they leave the land more productive than they found it? Photo: Zach Phillips

However, sustainability does interest me as it relates to my own farm. Am I farming sustainably? That is, am I farming in such a way that the land I work will be as, or even more, productive for future generations? Or, am I farming unsustainably — that is, will the ability of future generations to produce on land that I am working today be compromised by how I’m farming?

Mine is a pasture-based farm, so one might intuitively say yes, that I am farming sustainably. However, because I raise pigs, I have chosen high-protein and high-energy annual pasture crops rather than mixed grass permanent pastures. This means that every year, at least once, the pig pastures are plowed and planted. To do this, I use a 100 horse-power tractor and a four-bottom plow. The fields must also be disked as many as three times to prepare a seed bed and to control weeds. Finally, the seed needs to be sown, and in the case of corn, the crop needs to be cultivated to control weeds. All of this takes diesel fuel, a lot of diesel fuel. Diesel, of course, is a form of refined crude oil. Our oil reserves, as we know, are depleting.

Therefore, in a peak oil, or post-peak oil, era, my farming practices are problematic. However, it is no large leap to imagine alternatively powered tractors that are every bit as powerful as today’s diesel tractors. So, for me, motive power is not a sustainability question, except in so far as the more diesel we use the quicker our oil reserves will dry up (and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that is such a bad thing).

As above, the sustainability question for me is about the land. Are my practices harming the land? Are they merely benign? Or, are they in fact improving the land, which is the highest form of sustainability?

Take plowing. It is highly problematic as it exposes bare, unanchored top soil to the elements, to wind and rain/snow, which causes erosion. I work a hillside farm, so I cannot afford to lose a lot of topsoil as there is very little to begin with, and because of the pitch of some of the fields, they are more highly erodible than flat ground.

To mitigate top soil loss, I leave the soil bare for as short a time as I can, and try, as best I can, to keep it covered with a cover crop (generally annual rye grass) over the highly erosive seasons of late fall, winter, and early spring. The cover crop anchors the soil. Nevertheless, bare soil erodes. Period.

Plowing also creates a compacted “hard pan” a few inches below the deepest penetration of the plow. Over time this hard pan can become so compacted that roots (going down) and nutrients (coming up) have difficulty penetrating it. Water drainage can also become a problem. Discing is also a compaction operation.

Thus, in addition to causing erosion problems, plowing and discing cause important soil structure problems. Hard pan can be mitigated by crop rotation, and crops planted specifically to break it up, such as tillage radishes which jab through the hard pan like spears, down as far as three feet, loosen the hard pan up. Hard pan can also be mitigated mechanically using a tractor-drawn tool called a sub-soiler or middle buster.

What about fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides? Am I “poisoning” the land or water in any way? I use no petrochemicals on the land. Fertilizer comes from animal manure (pig, primarily, but also sheep) spread directly by the animals themselves during the growing season, and by me in the spring, and also by spreading the winter bedding packs, compost (an excellent soil structure and slow release fertilizer amendment), and green manures like the clovers and buckwheat, which are not grown for harvest by animal or machine, but in order to plow or disk back into the ground, providing fertility in the process of decomposition. I use no herbicides or other pesticides.

Instead of utilizing annual crops that require plowing and discing, should I just keep the pigs on permanent mixed grass pastures to preserve the top soil and soil structure, even though these permanent pastures provide very little in the way of pig nutrition? Pigs need to get concentrated energy from somewhere, so if I am not plowing myself, I’ll have to buy grain grown on some other farmer’s plowed field.

So, am I farming sustainably? If not, what should I change?

This pastured piggy went to Price Chopper.Photo: Kevin Steele

Can this be done with integrity? Yes, yes it can. But, you’ll need to have faith and let me, the friendly face you like to see at the farmer’s market, recede into the background again, let me fall out of the limelight into the limeless light of the sun shining brightly on me and the critters living lovely on the fields.

Wither goest? To work: to build infrastructure enabling us to regionalize our farm and food systems.

What infrastructure? Here’s a list:

• Regional distribution:

• Trucking and rail, and yes, where appropriate, even barge
• Distribution hubs (logistics and storage) to gather produce into regionalizable quantities
• Regional distribution outlets
  • A plethora of mom and pop butchers
  • A plethora of mom and pop groceries
  • Supermarkets

• Regional wholesale markets and wholesale distributors without which regional distribution infrastructure is fruitless

• Regional processing:

• Slaughterhouses with smallish to mid-sized kill floors
• Mid-sized packing plants to break carcasses into primals and/or all the way down to retail cuts

• Regional-scale production infrastructures:

• Scaled-up farms producing enough that when gathered by the regional distribution infrastructures can consistently and reliably supply regional distribution outlets

Creating a regionally directed, ecologically sound food system that’s accessible to a broad swath can be done with integrity and with no loss of animal, farmer, or consumer welfare; and it must be done.

How much food consumed in the United States is produced under ethical, ecologically sound conditions  — 1 percent? Two percent or even three? Is that enough for you? It’s not for me. I want 30 percent. But, to get there, we need to get my pork in front of the consumer, not the consumer in front of my pork. It’s as simple as that.

When I started farming, just a few years ago, I had one goal, to know every single person that I sold every single piece of meat or whole or half animal to, to see them in person, to look into their eyes as meat and money changed hands. I believed, very strongly, that this face-to-face farming was the proper response to the ills of a century and a half of agricultural industrialization, the last quarter century of which had accelerated to an absolutely dizzying pace.

At first, I loved it. Every person I met was so excited about local agriculture. Most of them could barely contain themselves; they were bubbling over with genuine enthusiasm and sheer delight in the visceral emotionality of making food choices and cultural choices that really mattered. Some would gush about all things local farmish. Some would be thoughtful, pensive even. Some would excitedly jabber about farms, food, flavors, tastes, textures, smells, sounds. Some were shy. Some were absolutely matter of fact, acting as if they had been buying meat directly from a farmer for their entire lives. All seemed sure that we were doing the right thing: We were doing it like grandma did, and that was good.

And I believed it too. I believed that we were returning to a pre-World War II model of farm and food systems. I believed that before WWII all beef was grassfed (not true). I believed that before WWII, food distribution was local (not true). I believed that before WWII farmers farmed sustainably (not true). I believed, therefore, that in order to create a viable local farm and food system all we had to do was return to how grandma did it before WWII (not true).

So how could I have strayed so far from the path of localism?

Because I started to read books, old books, primarily on raising pigs on pasture. I was reading old books not because I thought the old books had more wisdom to share necessarily, but simply because after about the mid-1950s to early-1960s the subject of the farm manuals shifted from pasture-based pig farming to confinement pig farming. I learned — continue to learn — a lot from these old books, some of them going back as far as 1805. Other than using contemporary technology like electric fences, I have modeled my farm on what I see as the heyday of pasture-based pig farming, the half century from 1900 to the 1950s.

There was more, however, in these books than information on the day-to-day practice of farming. There was just as much information on marketing, and it was through the information on marketing that my fervent belief that we were doing things as grandma did was shaken, not merely shaken, but toppled, upheaved, pounded to dust.

I discovered that the history we were telling ourselves in the local farm and food systems movement was a myth. It was, in fact, a complete fabrication with no historical basis at all. We had simply wiped G. W. Swift clean from history. We had written away Sinclair’s Jungle (and his socialism!). In our tale, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia were fed by local, or maybe even regional, farms. In our tale, grandma, bought local meat from her neighborhood butcher.

Pigs do their thing on Bob Comis’ farm.Photo: Zach PhillipsMy old books say different. My old books say that we’ve forgotten the perfection of Swift’s refrigerated rail car — which by 1880, made it possible to slaughter hundreds of thousands of cows, millions of pigs, and millions of lambs in Chicago and ship them to the major population centers of the East. In other words, we wrote out of existence the great stockyards of Chicago where millions upon millions upon millions of animals from the Western range lands were slaughtered after being fattened on mountains and mountains of corn, which has also been wiped clean from our history.

My old books talk about selling not directly to local butchers, local grocers, or to grandma. They talk about selling at central livestock markets, almost universally, there being here and there an occasional reference to what we would consider local sales. The prices farmers received ebbed and flowed with the supply dropped off for sale at these central markets, because before WWII, before 1900 even, farmers were already selling commodities. We can go back even further than that. One of the major exports of the early American colonies to Britain was barrel upon barrel of brined pork.

So, I can say that I want to see my pork in Price Chopper, because behind the veil of the many myths of the local farm and food systems movement is a reality that we need to deal with. The energy and counter-cultural impulse to buy local, to buy directly from the farmer, is more than the vast majority of our population can or ever will be able to muster — heck, it is more than I can muster half the time! Historically, it has never been done this way. We tell ourselves we are going back to the future, but there is no there back there. We are attempting something brand new wrapped in a false veil of familiarity. If we insist on such a marketing model, local food will never account for more than a pittance of total sales, 1 percent, maybe 2 percent, possibly 3 percent (which is about where organic is right now).

To get beyond niche level, we need to radically change our marketing model. We do not need to sacrifice the integrity of our cultural model. We can and will continue to farm ethically. We can and will continue to be remunerated well enough to make a decent living. We can and will be able to afford to pay our employees living wages. What we cannot do is insist that we farmers look into the eyes of every consumer of local produce.

Newsflash: Grandma bought faceless commodity meat from a nameless farmer. That is not a past I want to return to. I want us to build a new, different, and I do think better, future.

I think we should take the considerable momentum of our farmers market, CSA, on-farm sales culture and direct it toward the broader population. Let’s convince supermarkets to buy local-regional meat, and sell it under our farm names and tell our farm stories. Let’s at the same time find a way to re-proliferate mom and pop butchers and mom and pop grocers who could do the same. These outlets can be a farmer’s proxy. They will know the farmer. They will tell her story. She can even occasionally visit the store and mingle with customers.

I do not think we should get rid of farmers markets, CSAs, and on-farm sales — I think they are lovely. But I do believe now that this more distant, but not quite faceless, way is the way to the future.

It can’t be stressed enough: this way requires a lot of work. We can’t just snap our fingers and go back to doing it how grandma did, because we now know that we don’t want to do it how grandma did it. Instead, we are setting out to do something absolutely new, and in order to get there, we have tremendous infrastructures to build.

Let’s get to work!