Feasting on Real Food

Since April, we’ve been participating in Community Supported Agriculture, sharing the risk and reward of an organic farm in nearby Lancaster County. We paid our part at the beginning of the season, and every Friday since we’ve picked up a box of produce from a front porch a few minutes away. Friday was the last pick-up day for our 2015 CSA share  

I’ve done more research than I would like on America’s broken food systems: overuse of antibiotics to prevent illness in overcrowded livestock; pigs warehoused on cement floors and kept alive with pharmaceutical feed; vegetables grown in soil so depleted the nutrition gained is a fraction of what should be there.

The industrialization of our food supply is one of those large problems that demands small solutions. Wendell Berry’s essay, Think Little, called attention to the problem of food, and the harm to the earth from large-scale production:   

We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand. Most of us are not directly responsible for strip mining and extractive agriculture and other forms of environmental abuse. But we are guilty nevertheless, for we connive in them by our ignorance. We are ignorantly dependent on them. We do not know enough about them; we do not have a particular enough sense of their danger. Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way – we don’t know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. . .

For an index of our loss of contact with the earth we need only look at the condition of the American farmer – who must in our society, as in every society, enact man’s dependence on the land, and his responsibility to it. In an age of unparalleled affluence and leisure, the American farmer is harder pressed and harder worked than ever before; his margin of profit is small, his hours are long; his outlays for land and equipment and the expenses of maintenance and operation are growing rapidly greater; he cannot compete with industry for labor; he is being forced more and more to depend on the use of destructive chemicals and on the wasteful methods of haste and anxiety.

For most of the history of this country our motto, implied or spoken, has been Think Big. I have come to believe that a better motto, and an essential one now, is Think Little. That implies the necessary change of thinking and feeling, and suggests the necessary work.

One of Berry’s “think little” solutions is for families to attempt to grow their own food. I’ve planted tomato plants, and watched the groundhogs and rabbits feast. And I’ve espaliered apple trees along my front yard, and watch the deer nibble the blossoms. My peaches are too high for the deer, but the squirrels pick them before they’re ripe and sit on my backyard bench, laughing at me as they nibble.

While attempts to grow our own food haven’t yielded much in the way of harvest, it’s made me more aware of the risks of food production. It’s also made me very thankful for the small scale farmers in

Wimer's Organics hoop house, 

our region who are relearning the forgotten wisdom generations of small-scale farmers, while adding new knowledge about plants and soil, and new technologies, like high-tunnel hoop houses that extend the growing season.

Bud Wimer, of Wimer’s Organics, is one of those farmers. His weekly newsletter gives insight into the planning and preparation, the hard work, the unexpected weather. With other organic farmers, he’s working to grow the healthiest food he can, as sustainably as he can, in ways that improve the soil, extend the harvest, and build community.

The food is wonderful: fat round beets, richly colored chard, greens of every description, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, garlic. Peas, beans, strawberries, delicious tart apples. My husband and I share our share with my daughter and her family, and we marvel at the wealth of goodness in every box.

SpringWood pastured chickens and cows 

Another part of our CSA is the option to order eggs, yogurt, or chicken from a partner farm in nearby Gap. I heard Roman Stoltzfoos, the owner of SpringWood Farm, speak at a sustainable agriculture conference several years ago about his experiments in growing organic feed, using solar energy to sprout grains during winter months when his animals can’t graze in his lush green pastures. I  was amazed at the beauty and love that radiated from his slideshow of his farm, and happy to learn of his partnership with Wimer’s Organics. I have never seen egg yolks as full of taste and color as the rich, brown eggs we enjoy from Springwood Farm.

Part of the joy of our CSA share is the weekly email explaining what’s coming. It lists what will be in the box, offers tips for storage, short and longer term, always includes a few recipes, and sometimes a verse of scripture or simple encouragement to take a walk with a spouse, spend time with a friend, get outside and enjoy the day. The highlight, though, is the description of what’s happening on the farm, the insight into challenges and joys, the lessons learned, the plans for the future. The emails are both whimsical and wise: 

Broccoli, cabbage, spinach and leeks all walk through these short freezes as though nothing out of the ordinary is occurring.  Cauliflower, on the other hand, starts complaining about having cold hands and feet and asking for a blanket and a cup of hot tea.  We gave it neither one and are hoping it survives. 

The frost effectively ended the season of Summer.  The crops we think of as summer crops all died, summer is over.  Another season is beginning.  Occasionally I think about the passing of the season of Bud Wimer.  Eventually it will come.  As I remember, at this moment, the Summer 2013 peppers, I wonder how my descendants will remember me.  The peppers this year started off a little slower than in other years, and they did not get quite as big on average.  The second round of peppers here in the fall was much less than in previous years and, again, they aren't quite as big.  Of course, we can also compare the soil at each location of pepper plantings and the weather patterns over the two years.  The pepper plants had no choice in those circumstances.  Those comparisons will affect how we esteem this year's crop.  Even though this was not the most productive pepper season, it was still a good one and we are thankful for the crop that was produced.  May my descendants and their generation be thankful for my existence and yours when they remember us.  Let's endeavor to be a good crop.

 I am very thankful for Bid Wimer and his work at Wimer’s Organics, and for the Stoltzfoos family and their work at SpingWood Farm.

And thankful for all the farmers like them, here in Pennsylvania, across the country, around the world, creating small, sustainable solutions to the large-scale problem of industrial food.

I wish them health, and thank them for their contribution to my own family’s health.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wimer's Organics Share

 I posted about both these farms last September as part of a series on God's Green Equity:

Imagining Wholeness, September 29, 2013

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome.Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments.  

Imagining Wholeness

I had hoped to go this weekend to a conference in North Carolina called “Summoned toward Wholeness: A Conference on Food, Farming, and the Life of Faith,” with speakers Ellen F. Davis, Joel Salatin, Scott Cairns, and Norman Wirzba.

But life happens, and that trip didn’t. So I’ve asked a friend who’s attending to post here next week with his own highlights and reflections.

In the meantime, I spend my days trying to imagine wholeness.

Have you ever seen a gardener, standing still at the edge of a garden, eyes slightly closed, head slightly tilted, just looking, listening, not moving at all?

It’s that moment of imaging: seeing what’s there, picturing what’s not. Wondering how to get there.

My back yard is the test plot on this: manageably small (exactly half an acre), wonderfully quiet. At the moment, lush and green. I wander through my stepping stone path, linger on my mossy trail, enjoying what’s there, imaging the next step toward the vision in my mind.

When we moved here 16 years ago, the squirrels ran around the edge of the yard on the old rail fence rather than walk through the toxic grass. The previous owners had been so intent on growing lawn in places it didn’t want to grow, they had doused the ground with chemicals. It took years to get the birds to move back in.

But I’ve imagined a place where birds would want to live, and here they are: house wrens, chipping sparrows, nuthatch, chickadees. This summer a flicker family drilled a hole in a locust. A pair of downies flits back and forth from suet to trees, and back again. An archway path festooned with honeysuckle has brought hummingbirds, regularly, whirring near my head.

Even so the world intrudes. A natural gas pipeline through the center of the yard reminds me: I live in Pennsylvania, tied to a grid that leads in every direction. That line ties to a larger line. In one direction are the fracking wells of shale country, not far away. In the other, refineries, gray fog rising over them most hours of the day. My imagination knows they’re there. But wholeness? I can’t quite see it.

A larger canvas for my imagination: a place called Exton Park. I’ve mentioned it before, 800 acres of degraded suburban land, some still farmed, some damaged by deer browse. Some brimming full of invasive shrubs, trees, vines. And yet, despite the damage, it holds a small pond where egrets and heron take refuge, acres of wetland where just yesterday we heard a sora calling. Open skies where osprey, kestrel and harrier soar. Amazing wildflowers: asters, goldenrod, New York ironweed.

Last Saturday I took part in Make a Difference Day: a morning of work grubbing vines and roots from the side of a berm, then helping organize volunteers to plant native grasses, reeds and forbs. It was my kind of morning: teen boys from nearby Church Farm School, some new acquaintances who bird the pond like I do, a few plant folks eager to see what plants we had in store, some families with young kids happy to scoop water and pour it wherever I pointed.

By the next morning I had poison ivy on both arms, and my face was starting to puff. Apparently, I’m part of the 30 to 35% of the population that’s “highly sensitive” to our industrious native vine. So I spent the morning in a nearby Minute Clinic, and I’ve spent the week itching, fighting the side-effects of prednisone, and reminding myself how much I love envisioning Exton Park as a place made whole, a beautiful, reclaimed landscape. Even when it costs me.

But the call to imagine goes far beyond my yard or local park.

For the last year and a half I’ve been involved in promoting and taking part in a national study on food and farming. I opened my mouth at a League of Women Voter’s planning meeting, and found myself leading a committee, then a caucus at a national convention, now serving on a national committee that sends me reeling down rabbit holes to ferret out information about corn subsidies, neonicotinoids , pesticide overload, industry-driven public policy.

This past week I had two deadlines: a third draft on genetic engineering, a first draft on factory farming. Do you want to know what’s in animal feed? The financial pressures forcing small farms off the planet? The abuse of workers, farmers, animals, water, land that are part of our quest for ever cheaper, more convenient food?

Ah. Maybe not.

I don’t want to know either.

Yet, knowing is the first step toward grieving.

And grieving, according to Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar and student of the prophets, is the first step toward imagining the new.

As my son wrote in a guet post last week, this world around us is a reflection of who we are, the choices we’ve made. The values we’ve held dear.

What I see gives me pause, and leads me toward repentence.

So I dig deeper into the studies, the reports. The testimony of small farmers to the Department of Justice, about coercive contracts, disappearing markets, tightening consolidation. The carefully worded scientific conclusions about what happens to bees, soil, rats, hogs, people, when we play with things we don’t quite understand.

And I grieve.

Yesterday I walked into a local food store – a place I go often – and found myself staring at the shelves and shelves of food. Mostly bad food. Full of corn syrup, carrageenan, other things I no longer want to eat. Over-processed, over-packaged, dusty boxes. To me, they looked like death.

So I grieve. Repent of my own collusion in fast, cheap, easy imitation food.

And imagine wholeness.

Here’s what it looks like, to me, today:

A farm not far from here. SpringWood Farm. In Kinzer, PA. It belongs to Roman Stoltzfoos and his family. I heard him speak at a conference last winter about his cows and the experiment his sons and he are running: trying to find out which grains to sprout in his high hoop tunnels as a source of winter fodder for his organic pastured cows.

SpringWood solar chicken house

He showed some slides of the hoop tunnels, the sprouting grains, the cows.

The beautiful, green, inviting pasture.

He showed slides of his chickens and their chicken tractors: little hoop houses on wheels he moves from field to field.

It wasn’t that long ago – forty years? maybe fify? – that almost all our food came from lovely places like SpringWood Farm.

Real food – brightly colored peppers, iron-rich dark greens, eggs with yolks so yellow they looked like melted gold.

I came home from that conference last winter with my head spinning. I’d heard a discussion about “complex, chronic environmental exposures,” and the invisible nanomaterials already in our food supply.

I’d sat through sessions about new food safety regulations – and how they cater to the industry model, burden the small scale farmer, and leave our food no safer.

And I wondered: how far away is SpringWood Farm?

One of my daughters had been challenging me to join a local CSA – a Community Supported Agriculture program. The one she had in mind: Wimer’s Organics. A Lancaster farm that delivers in our county.

I checked, and found they also deliver eggs: farm fresh eggs. From SpringWood Farm.

So, yes, we joined Wilmer’s Organics CSA.

And ordered a weekly dozen eggs.

Every week I show up to a porch in the next town over, leave last week’s empty box, pick up this week’s box of lovely color. And my carton of beautiful eggs from SpringWood Farm.

Does it cost more?

Yes. It does.

More than a big Mac. Or a box of mac and cheese.

More than a Coke. Or an order of fries.

But every penny goes to the farmer, supporting his vision of a healthy, wholesome food supply.

Unlike the dollars I spend at the store down the street, where only pennies on the dollar go to a farmer, pennies go to underpaid farm workers, and the larger share goes to advertising, packaging, transportation, and the corporate powers that propel us toward an ever-more abusive global food system.

I’m still learning what I can about how to advocate for wholeness. How to stand up for local farmers, how to speak back to the ideathat industrial farming is inevitable, the only way to feed a hungry world.

In the meantime, I’m pulling weeds, planting reeds, sauteing and grilling vegetables I still can’t name.

And imaging a world where beauty, health, wisdom, wholeness are more than ideas we see with our eyes closed, but part of the daily fabric of our lives.

This post is part of an ongoing series on God's Green Equity.

·                     God's Green Equity: August 4, 2013

·                     Seed Parables: August 11, 2013 

·                     Miracle Seeds of Sorrow's Kingdom: August 25, 2013   

·                     How Much  Does Justice Cost? September 1, 2013

·                     Taxonomy of Ignorance and the Unknown Unknowns: September 8,2013

·                     For God so Loved the Earth, September 15, 2013

·                     Reflections and Refractions on the Anacotia River, Sept. 22, 2013

 Earlier posts on the same topic:

·                     Green Grace: May 15, 2011 

·                     Earth Day Shalom: April 22, 2012

·                     Hungering Far Past Rightness: March 3, 2013

As always, your thoughts, comments, questions are welcome.