Commentary—

Love Your Farmer

By Debra Eschmeyer

Good relationships take time; great relationships take work. One has to learn to compromise and sometimes to do what’s not convenient. You may immediately think of your relationship with your best friend, siblings, parents, co-workers, or partner, but I am referring to your relationships with food and with those who provide our food.

Would you consider your relationship to food healthy? And I don’t mean do you eat whole grains and lots of fruits and vegetables. Think through the following three questions for a moment to determine the state of your plate:

1) What five foods do you eat on a regular basis?

2) Do you know where each food item comes from? (Not just milk from a cow or tortillas from corn, but where the food originated?)

3) Do you know the farmer who grew or raised the food?

So you may think it is absurd to know who drove the combine to harvest the corn that fed the chickens that laid the eggs for your omelet (and if that is the case, you have probably already stopped reading at this point), but that just goes to show how disconnected we are to where our food comes from in the 21st Century. For millions of years we foraged or raised our food and knew exactly where every tasty morsel came from. But where is the relationship to our food now?

Do children know that potatoes grow underground and aren’t picked from a french fry tree? Or that true maple syrup comes from tree sap and not high fructose corn syrup? Our reliance on processed food is not only victimizing our health, but also destroying the all but forgotten relationship factor to food and those who grow it.

Like a Hollywood marriage, our relationships to processed foods are fleeting, and leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. Our loyalties should belong to our hardworking family farmers instead of brands such as Doritos and Coke. In the spirit of showing our love this spring, let’s love our farmers. Some ways you can demonstrate your love immediately:

1) Eat seasonally and buy direct from a local farmer as much as you can. I’m not asking you to stop eating chocolate because there isn’t a cocoa farmer nearby, but head to the farmers’ market or find a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group. You’ll find food with a face is a relationship you won’t want to cheat on.

2) Plant a garden — whether you have room for a plot in the backyard or just for some herbs on the windowsill, growing your own food will make you appreciate everything farmers do for you, while pleasing your own palate.

3) Go to your local supermarket, favorite restaurant, school cafeteria, etc, and ask for the manager and/or a comment card to request more locally grown products be stocked on their shelves.

4) Policy — it’s not a four-letter word. Learn about the 2007 Farm Bill and how it affects our supply of healthy, safe, affordable food. Plenty of consumer and farm organizations have their proposals on the table and sifting through them all by yourself can seem like trying to read Greek. So call up an agricultural organization and ask what its farm bill proposal does to ensure that a healthy relationship will exist with the farmer. Try National Family Farm Coalition’s farm bill proposal: the Food from Family Farms Act. Then relay your opinion to your representatives in Congress.

As environmentalist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author Paul Hawken so eloquently states, “In this upside-down world, we pay the least to the people who give the most of their lives: nurses, teachers, and farmers. Today, at the very least, we can offer those who care for our land and bodies the most: our utter gratitude, our amazement at the splendor of their gifts to us, and our unvarnished oath that we will take their offerings and multiply them in the world, and never take for granted those people who care for and nurture life on this Earth.”

Debra Eschmeyer belongs to the National Family Farm Coalition. The National Family Farm Coalition was founded in 1986 to serve as a national link for grassroots organizations working on family farm issues. For more information, www.nffc.net.