Know Your Farmer?

Amazing. The relatively recent momentum involving trends such as "locavores" with their Eat Local Challenge and "sustainable" priorities, the detailed labeling on restaurant menus supplying sources for produce and meat, the rising popularity of Farmer's Markets, is actually being taken up by the USDA in a new program called: "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food". I suppose they could have come up with a catchier slogan (personally I like "No Farms, No Food") but what ever, it is a message whose time has come. And Kent County is an ideal place for this sort of initiative to thrive. There are already people out there marketing their products to the local consumer, but wouldn't it be pleasant to be able to buy local flour (like you used to do here at the Radcliffe Mill, with their Rosebud Brand), soybean oil made from Kent County beans, milk and cheese and butter directly from the dairy (we'd wish for raw milk, but that is probably just asking too much), along side the produce and meat we can find today? I am sure there are controversies swirling around this move by the USDA - after all, it is Government interfering again - but I sure would like to see Agriculture, both locally and nationally, be a sincerely profitable and proudly self-sufficient way of life. Can't we have both high-yield fields of corn and soybeans sharing the soil with heritage maize and wheat? Pastured hogs and chickens from Millington in the grocery store, selling next to Mr. P's birds from all over the state? If the small farmer wants to produce for a smaller market, it would be terrific if the playing field were made level so s/he could do so.

Meanwhile, check this out... The Meatrix...whoa, scarey stuff. But the Sustainable Table deserves a look. Could things really be changing for future generations? There have been many historic movements in our own lifetimes - the YouTube videos of Peter Paul and Mary shown all over the Internet this week, at Peace Marches in the early seventies, comes to my mind of course - and this "real food" movement could be the one we can all really get our teeth into.

Sorry. Couldn't resist. I better get to work.