A Farmer to Call Your Own?

Meals don't get much more local than this: home-grown lamb burgers (mixed with mint sauce, egg, bread crumbs, salt and pepper), roasted, home-grown Brussels sprouts, steamed, home-grown yellow beans. I haven't attempted homemade ketchup yet!

I have the best customers. They are really more like friends than customers. One of them told me of a time they were sitting around their dinner table with friends, talking about "their farmer." The friend inquired, "You have a farmer?" Their response, " Of course, her name is Gwen. Who's your farmer?"

Another time I overheard one customer on her cell phone say, "I'm at the farm, picking up my vegetables." The farm. I love that, as if there is only one farm that they could possibly be at, in the world!

To know who makes your food and how they do it is growing ever important. With GMOs, e coli contaminations, and salmonella in the foods you eat, it's essential you know what is in your food (and more importantly, what's not in your food). What was the crop or soil treated with and why? How was the food handled after it was picked? When was the last time the picker washed their hands and how healthy are they? I don't mean to alarm, but it is alarming to think about.

Recently, I watched an episode of the show, Dirty Jobs, where the actor goes to a turkey farm and works for a day. I was horrified. Outside, the "farm" was pristine, with nary an animal in sight, just long buildings. Inside those buildings were thousands of turkeys. They never see the light of day. They never live as a turkey, and can't even roost at the end of the day, as would a wild turkey. The actor's "job" was to turn over the litter near the waterers, to get the dry stuff to the top, as well as find all of the dead turkeys in the building. There were at least 10 dead birds per day. I was amazed that they let television cameras into these buildings. Won't people be disgusted at how their thanksgiving turkey spent their life? How they were raised? What they ate? How healthy is the meat from these birds, not to mention how healthy were the birds themselves?

I've sadly come to the conclusion that people just don't want to know. The majority of them (and this includes many members of my own family) want to go into a supermarket and buy the shrink-wrapped meat, and not think about that it once lived. They want the ease, convenience and flexibility of buying whatever they need at the moment.

I've done it myself, recently. Since our chickens haven't yet begun to lay eggs yet, I've been confronted with my own decision about where and how to buy eggs. Once, I admit, I bought them from the supermarket (organic, free-range ). And then I realized what a hypocrite I'd been. So I went to the local health food store... and bought eggs from New Hampshire. Now, I've gone onto Local Harvest and found a local farmer that grows chickens how I believe they should be grown, and feeds them accordingly. These eggs I can feel better about buying and eating. But if it was a challenge for me, a farmer, it could be insurmountable for people who don't live as close to the land as I.

So, I ask you: Who's Your Farmer?