Posted by gwendolyn on August 26, 2004 at 11:53 AM

You Are What You Eat

When I was a kid the family that owned the place we lived in owned a huge farm and their house was right up the road from us, in between our house and my grandparents house. Their daughter was a year or two younger than me and their son was the same age as my brother. We road the school bus together and occasionally I would go up to their farm and hang out with their daughter.

They were never allowed to play in the house. Ever. If it was light outside they were to be out there pretty much year round. They had a lot of chores too. They owned chickens and cows and I think some pigs, I can't recall clearly now. I remember being afraid of the chickens. They were freaky. They were real farm kids. They grew all their own food, eggs, meat, and dairy, the whole nine yards. I think they sent the animals off to a butcher. I don't recall them killing the animals themselves. I do remember no one thinking it was a huge deal to send Betsy off to become liver and onions back on their plate the next winter. I did always think that was very sad to know your dinner.

Unfortunately, it wasn't an organic farm. However, I do know that their cows, while avoiding the dinner plate, were rotated in huge pastures with plenty of fresh air and stuff to chew on and the chickens were always running free all over the place. At least I do know that. As for the chemicals that were constantly getting dusted all over the fields around our house, I don't even want to think about it.

We would play in the barns and cribs and she showed me how the dairy worked and the milking machines and the huge tanks where the milk was kept until it was picked up by a big tanker truck. Their parents and my grandparents used to milk all the cows by hand. At some point they acquired milking machines. My grandparents quit raising cows and raised just tobacco. That is also so wrong on a whole other level. Anyway, Once we sat up on top of the milk tank and she took a huge ladle and scooped some fresh milk out of the tank to drink. She did this all the time but only once while I was there. She wanted me to taste fresh milk. It tasted disgusting to me. No one I know realizes that milk in the jug in the dairy case at the store doesn't taste like it just came out of the cow. I guess you wouldn't know that unless you had ever had fresh milk, which hardly anyone does. Not many people I know knows what milk really tastes like before it is processed.

When I was very young I can remember things being generally very normal at their house. They had to work a lot but they had two semi-normal parents and a whole lot of things to keep them occupied. A few years went buy and then I remember their parents started fighting all the time like when the cows would get out or when there were problems in the fields or whatever. As the years went on the fights got worse I suppose. At the time I didn't understand it, I just thought everyone fought like that. Now I realize that the stress of the failing farm and probably a number of other factors led to the complete break down of that family. Finally one year their mother just left.

Sometime in the few years that followed my mother bought the acre of land and the place we lived in from him. After I moved out and got married and then my brother went to live with my grandparents. She then demolished the structure we grew up in and built herself and her new family a two story house where my home used to sit. Come to think of it, that in itself is kind of symbolic, eh?

At some point the farmer's cows disappeared. They started having a lot of financial problems. I can remember some people talking about how hard it was for them. He grew corn, soy beans, and tobacco for awhile but then he didn't grow tobacco anymore either. I think the government paid him not to or something. I am not really sure though. I have no idea if his farm is functioning on any level anymore. I just remember that around the time I left home and got married he was a very sad, lonely, broke man with two children. At the time I kind of thought he brought it all upon himself for treating his wife so badly. However, I am sure there are two sides to the story. The kids were sort of orphaned for awhile before they got in touch with their mother later who had obviously moved on with her life and their dad got his shit together a little bit. The children grew up, I think both of them spent some time living somewhere on the property. I don't know what happened to them or if they are still there now.

I didn't realize until I started learning about the differences between organic farming and factory farming that this is one of the reasons organic humane farmers and even farmers like him and their families have been put out of business like they have. Imagine farms that have been passed down generation after generation being completely wiped out because of greed. We all probably have known or at least heard of someone who lost it all to big corporations. Farming or otherwise. It is devastating to a lot of people. Stupidly we all call it "progress". Progress would have been the government educating him and his generation on the evils of pesticides and herbicides and entering him into a co-op program for organic sustainable plant food farming.

This is what is happening while all of America turns a blind eye to what is actually lying on their plates. You don't have to be a vegan or a radical animal rights activist to know the truth, however ugly, is just wrong.

For lunch today we had a spinach salad with sun-dried tomatoes, capers, pine nuts and a homemade balsamic vinaigrette , red cabbage and carrot slaw, and Caribbean Wild Rice.

Even on the hardest days of being raw I would rather be this than any of the pictures in that brochure.