Wednesday, August 29: Day 29

Who is on your team?

Your doctor? Your accountant? Your lawyer? Your kids’ teachers? Maybe even your mechanic? Your team is those people who understand your needs and take them into account when they provide services to you. You trust your team to look out for you.

Are your food producers on your team? I think they should be. Food producers are the only people whose service you use every single day—the rest of your team you see when something goes wrong (sickness, audit, cracked radiator) or for preventative maintenance.

Throughout this project, we’ve campaigned for people to ask questions of their food suppliers. We've come to accept that we should ask questions of our doctors, to be active participants rather than passive consumers of health care. Are we willing to educate ourselves and become active participants in our food procurement system?

Fine, you say, but what questions do you ask?

It depends what you care about. I'll throw out what I see as some of the issues I have heard people express, just to stir the pot, and I'll also add some questions that have come up in discussions about this with consumers and with producers.

What are the issues? Everybody has their own, but here are some common ones:

1. Chemicals/Toxicity in food
2. Ecosystems and wildlife
3. Genetic diversity/heritage breeds/genetically modified organisms
4. Food miles (distance traveled) and other energy inputs (fertilizer, etc).
5. Small business versus agribusiness
6. Food safety and security
7. Humane treatment of animals
8. Human rights/treatment of workers/immigration

Without trying to create a list of questions specific to each point (because there are certain to be more that I have not thought of), here are some ideas for questions. And I should add that I recommend asking relatively open-ended questions both to avoid suggesting the answer you want to hear, and also to give the farmer the chance to demonstrate how much thought he/she has put into the process.

How do you choose what varieties to grow?

How do you promote soil fertility? (fertilizer, cover crops, rotation, etc).

What are your major pest/disease challenges and how do you deal with them?

Do you participate in any certification programs, such as Certified Organic or Integrated Pest Management?

If products contain other ingredients (such as sausages, jelly, or cheese, for example), what are they and where do they come from? Are any ingredients required by law to be in the product?

Who does the work of harvesting?

Where is your operation located?

Here are a few that are more specific to animals, and these are a bit less open-ended:

Are your animals able to move outdoors? Do they have access to shade and shelter in case of bad weather?

What type of bedding/nesting material do they have?

Are antibiotics or hormones routinely added to feed? If so, for what purpose?

What are the animals fed? Does the feed contain any animal by-products? Where does the feed come from?

How far must the animals travel for slaughter?

Kay Jensen of JenEhr Farm offered me the following recommendation: Write it down. There is bound to be more information than you can remember, and even if you can, you may not know what it all means. So go home and look it up.

On a busy market day, a farmer may be busy and have a hard time getting into specifics with you—please respect that. Maybe you can come at a different time next week, or perhaps you can email your questions (check web sites, many such questions are already answered there). But also realize that if you feel farmers are less than forthcoming with you or are being evasive, you can always find someone else who will shoot straight with you. I recommend finding team members who have sound reasons for doing what they do, and who don't mind telling you about it because they are proud of the work they do. And well they should be—they have chosen to use their work to nourish us, which is the greatest give we could ask of them. And to the farmers out there, my deepest apologies if you are bombarded by a zillion questions as a result of this!

What we ate:

Breakfast: "the usual", toast with butter (running out of peanut butter, yikes!), maple yogurt, cider.

Lunch: Jen had tortillas with Farmer John's cheese and homemade taco sauce and sauteed red onions. Evie and I had hot dogs. We shared watermelon and red pepper.

Dinner: We were invited over to enjoy a 100 mile meal at the home of friends: Summer vegetable ragout, sauteed Jordandal Farm pork, and yummy whole wheat rolls with Brantmeier Farm wheat flour. For dessert, homemade yogurt with Gentle Breeze honey.

Those of you who saw the newspaper article about our project will recall that we said that if we went to a birthday party we would have a piece of cake. Well, happy birthday, Maddie!

—SCL