I’d been driving since pre-dawn at an average speed of 72 mph heading west on I-90. My traveling companion, Zelda, a fifteen-year-old spaniel and I were on our way to a funeral in Cleveland. Passing the hours by the whirr of the motor, the scanning of random radio stations – Christian, country, easy listening, alt-adult, talk – had only compounded my road angst and an ever-creeping sense of rootless urgency.
Zelda? She slept.
Somewhere east of a Great Lake, I pulled off the road – looking for more than a bathroom, more than something to eat. I desperately needed a break. I need a quick fix of humanity with easy-on/easy-off access to the road. But that’s not what I got; not even close.
‘What’ll it be?’ asked the waitress with that genuine rote familiarity that’s really a corporate restaurant-chain edict. ‘A small order of chicken wings with blue cheese dressing, carrots, celery on the side. And an iced-tea, please.’ I requested, settling into the relief of un-momentum that can only found in a naugahyde booth.
Surrounding me were the living, breathing people with whom I’d so wanted to connect with. Families and fellow road warriors looking for the same thing I was: Breaking Bread.
The blaring jukeboxes playing shrill ‘50’s rock and roll, television screens and video games lining the walls precluded any possible ease dropping. It was like watching a silent film with the volume up too loud.
My waitress brought me my small portion of Buffalo ‘wings.’ What arrived was technically that, but more specifically a plate piled high with a dozen antibiotic+growth hormone-fed, commercially grown drumsticks (legs, actually) along with the avian equivalents of a forearm – all deep-fried and soaked in hot sauce.
It tasted as if it’d been drizzled with gasoline and run over by a tractor-trailer on an asphalt road oil slick. Hunger quickly excused itself, begging off a priori indigestion.
How many chickens – living squawking birds (more than likely de-beaked) – were represented on my plate? Where did this animal protein come from? How many miles had THIS traveled? How many farms (okay, industrial poultry factories) and how many lives, were represented on one plate? This product, product far more than any living thing – that just happen to have beating hearts, lungs and a central nervous system.
And the dried, shriveled, milled skinless carrots, the limp celery? What kind of yummy fertilizer had been used to grow these ‘fresh’ veggies cum E. coli-spinach?
Dry-eyed road weariness had been unnervingly replaced by an unwanted clarity and insight – like looking through the congealed petroleum jelly product known as Vasoline. This wasn’t a plate of food in front of me – it was a heaping plate of oil-byproduct. I had ordered, and I had been served one big helping of despair, desperation and disconnection, off a full-color laminated menu.
And then looking up from those oil-soaked plant and poultry products and into the crowded restaurant – all I saw was the multitude of mindless consumption and the meaningless motions of disconnected mastication. Without grace, without gratefulness. This… was not… Breaking Bread. There was no emotional nourishment or soulful satiation beyond shoving volumes of ‘food mass’ down tracheas into stomachs, then intestines and, well, then…out.
Maybe I’d been too far and too long on the road. But in that 15-minute-restaurant-wait, I felt alone at the table, more alone than ever before.
Even though Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma had felt like a long cool drink on a hot dry day because it made so much sense… when I look back over the last 15 months at the creation of a baby ‘buy local-eat seasonal’ non-profit on Martha’s Vineyard called Island Grown Initiative – I remember a lot wondering: What was the point? Because the reality of eating locally had been always been a frustrating experience for me.
‘Buy Local’ was a mystery, an inscrutable quest of inaccessibility amplified by my desire to do so. The local grocers didn’t seem to carry local food with any consistency or identification. Over the years, I’d been stymied about how to join the mythical CSA (though that has since improved). Getting local grass-fed lamb appeared to require a documented ancestral island pedigree. Fresh chicken, cheese, eggs – a secret handshake. There was the Farmer’s Market, but those Saturday mornings always felt like just another notch in the tourists’ wampum belt, a photo op as much about crafts and cut flowers as deep nutritional fortification. The reality was - local food had limited access.
The reaction to that and the inception of Island Grown Initiative (IGI) was simple. A group of people from a wide spectrum of this community’s food web got together for a potluck. After sharing a meal, a glass of wine – we talked about transforming the word ‘sustainability’ from catchphrase to a reality. Here.
The suggestions as to how to do that, were diverse, passionate: Connect local product to the Island Food Pantry. Grow more local meat. Slaughter on-island with certification. More Farmer’s Markets, at more locations. And the crux of the discussion focused on action – what were we going to do about it. Loud and clear the first, manageable step was get the information about where and how out in the most obvious, direct way there was. Come and get it: here’s a map. That – so simple and direct — is the how and why of IGI.
A farm map is really a treasure map, a manifest that takes the mystery out of buying local. With it, anyone who wants to can go to a farm and buy direct from the farmer. Anyone.
For me, the food that family farmers are feeding their families, is the food I want to feed to mine. They’re going to be absolutely careful about what they feed their children, which gives me confidence in a way blind-feeding industries don’t.
Supporting the small local family farmer helps sustain sustainable reality here - and any where - because it supports the farmers who actually grow food that we can eat. Small farmers are the stewards of the soil, growers of grass, keepers of open space – as opposed to the cogs in the industrial factory-farm-complex that grow miles of corn and soybeans that no human can actually eat until it’s altered - processed into one of the many value-added products like chicken wings and carrots, and then shipped an average of 1,500 miles to be on a plate.
Back in my kitchen with my best friend’s dead mother gone and buried – Zelda is underfoot – in hope that for something delicious will drop from the kitchen counter, into her mouth. I’m making soup from autumn. I roast butternut and delicata squash from Norton Farm. My son Max worked his first summer job there, out in the fields with Jamie Norton. The carrots and leek I add come the Whipporwill CSA. I split a full share with my friend, Julie, Friday is our pick-up day. The farmer, Andrew Woodruff, had a tough growing year that started early with the rains damaging the strawberry crop – to the raccoons in everything else. Jim Athearn from Morning Glory Farm down the road, helped fill the gaps when they could with corn and potatoes. For salad - I’ll serve the greens from Rebecca and Matthew’s, North Tabor Farm. There’s meat in my freezer from Liz & Jeffrey for another day. I’ve already bought my half a lamb that will be ready in spring. Oscar’s still selling his eggs at the feed store when I pass by on my way, but sometimes I buy them at Cronig’s – one of the local, independent grocer on the island.
Not everything I buy, cook and eat is local. And I’ll never be a 100% local-vore. But given everything I’ve learned about the industrial food system that has become this country’s paradigm – and the damage it does to the land, to us, the people (with E coli, chemical resistance and build up), I try to eat consciously. I figure every meal is a chance to make a conscious choice, and those choices are fast becoming imperatives.
Clarity came in an order of Buffalo wings.
