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Why Buy Fresh, Local Foods?
For natural, local farmers like myself, these are encouraging times.
Farmers’ markets and buyers’ clubs are popping up everywhere. New books such as Michael Pollan’s Omnivores Dilemma and In Defense of Food and Nina Planck’s Real Food: What to Eat andWhy, cover stories such as Time magazine’s August 31 “The Real Cost of Cheap Food,” and movies such as “Fresh” and “Food, Inc.” are awakening consumers to the significant differences in real food as opposed to the food supplied by industrial agriculture.

Candidate Barack Obama told a reporter for Time shortly before the presidential election that “our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil.” Pollan stated in a compelling op-ed in the New York Times, September 10, “Our success in bringing health care under control ultimately depends on whetherWashington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry. The American way of eating is the elephant in the room in the debate over health care.”

Both comments are timely and challenge us to think.

The ecological conversation that draws the lines of connection between “a hamburger and the price of oil or between the vibrancy of life in the soil and the health of the plants and animals (that) people are eating from that soil” (Pollan) has been around at least since the 1960s. Sir Albert Howard, the British agronomist, challenged scientists, farmers and medical researchers to look at “the problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject. ”Wendell Berry observed simply, “eating is an agricultural act.”

He added in Conservationist and Agrarian, 2002, “Why should conservationists have a positive interest in ... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat. To be interested in food and not in food production is clearly absurd. Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can’t be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy. They can eat only if land is farmed on their behalf by somebody somewhere in some fashion. If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.”

The participants in the 2009 Rappahannock Farm Tour hope that you have fun while learning more about the links between soil and health of animals, plants and people, keys to a sustainable environment.

Cliff Miller, Owner, Mount Vernon Farm

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