What's On Your Plate Today?
How We Farm, Cook and Eat in America, and How We Pay For It
I live in Northern Michigan, among the apple, cherry and grape orchards of our little peninsula, surrounded by the waters of the Big Lake. I retired from my career in technology last year, but I didn’t want to spend my last years on a golf course - not that there’s anything wrong with that. I actually used to enjoy golf, just not 7 days a week.
Instead, I decided to plant some apple trees on our small acreage; 100 trees eventually turned into 900, and I now have a business where I raise a kind of bittersweet apple for use in hard cider. I sell the apple juice to the breweries and wineries that are abundant where I live, so I’ve found a little niche to fill my time and keep life interesting.
I spend a fair amount of time planting, pruning, spraying, picking and processing apples. Farming, even on my small scale, has been a huge learning curve. We laughed and laughed when we saw Michael Bloomberg compare the farming he learned while watching Green Acre reruns and the ‘information economy’. If you haven’t seen it you should take a look; it’s always hilarious when a twit makes a huge jackass of himself, in public.
Farming on a small scale is not, to be generous, economically sustainable. The costs of land, equipment, time, trees, plus annual inputs, is simply not sustainable unless you are talking several hundred acres, at least. I do it as a hobby farm because I’m at a point in life where I have no debt, no children to support and the time to enjoy it without the need to make it a big living.
The orchard business where I live is still many small farms, but the bulk of the really expensive work is done by contract farming companies. They contract with the small farms to manage the orchard on a weekly basis, handling the spraying and then the picking, processing, sale and distribution of the fruit. Some of the individual farmers still plant and prune and do weed control. The equipment for these tasks is relatively economical.
This is how small farms manage to stay in business. But the trend is definitely to larger farm companies, and there’s no way around it. You see young families come in and try to make a go of a small farm but it’s simply not feasible. They try all the latest ideas, like organic farming for the farmer’s market, but it’s a slog. They eventually realize that other families make two or three times their income, with less work and worry. Small scale farming is best undertaken as a side hustle, if you have the energy, or like me, you have the time and cash. Living in an advanced economy requires farmers to also be advanced, and to be advanced means being large enough to sustain advanced equipment and advanced skillsets, otherwise known as employees.
The other realization that’s become abundantly clear is that ‘organic’ is not a sustainable practice in most of the country, at least for some crops. There are regions of the country with organic orchards but they have the rare quality of having almost no rain in the growing season. Eastern Oregon and Washington can go several months without rain, lessening the need for various pesticides, including the antibiotics. Though all of us will use antibiotics in our lives, some consumers and farmers won’t have them in an orchard. But without them, in Northern Michigan where rain is common, apple trees don’t stand a chance when the blight catches fire.
Cooking and eating have undergone just as much change as farming. How few restaurants there were when I was young compared to today. Your options were a nice meal at a club or hotel, or a diner. And the grocery stores were completely different as well. There were some fresh fruits and vegetables, but no comparison to today’s abundance. In many large cities the traditional American grocer now shares the marketplace with ethnic stores, Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern. If Boris Yeltsin was impressed with the American grocery in 1989, imagine his head exploding today!
What arrives on the table reflects these changes. What percent of American homes have soy sauce, salsa piquante and, at least occasionally, hummus, on a shelf? I imagine it’s at least 60%. My boyhood included fairly tame versions of chili, and Mom used to buy La Choy sauce for stir fry once in a while, which we called Chinese dinner!
But you don’t have to eat at a restaurant or prepare a full meal at home. There are now several other options including receiving a meal in the mail that you assemble. I tried one of these from a company known as Blue Apron and was not impressed. The food industry keeps nibbling away at the market to find some way of feeding a customer that saves the customer the expense of the restaurant and the food industry the labor of preparing a full meal. So far they have not found the silver bullet. Distribution appears to be the main issue. When we went to Florence, Italy on our honeymoon 35 years ago, I was amazed at the stalls in the central market that sold cleaned and cooked vegetables, or multiple types of fresh pasta and pasta sauces; we saw the same ideas later in Nice, France. It makes sense when you have high populations living in small apartments, and without a sizable grocer nearby. More American groceries are now offering similar services, like this Vince and Joes in Washington, Michigan (see below). Over time, the store’s floor space has changed from fresh foods to prepared, take home foods, both hot and cold and reheatable. So the prepared foods to go looks like a local business that has not yet been captured by the big food giants.
I remember quite well the early 1980’s when the country fell in love momentarily with French cuisine, followed closely by Italian cuisine. Stewed or braised meat suddenly became a ragout (beef or veal), a civet (game), a blanquette (veal), a navarin (lamb), a fricassee (chicken), or cassoulet (white beans with duck or goose). My goodness, how many words do the French have for something mundane like hat? Ok, they have 13 words for hat, evidently. Thirteen words for everything, that’s the French; sophisticated and banal at once.
It wasn’t just a cultural curiosity either, that led the elites to swoon for all things French. Gourmet magazine, already in business for 40 years in 1981, hit its stride with restaurant reviews that included hyperbolic descriptions of food items French people consider run of the mill; a ‘toothsome’ pork appetizer, actually a dressed up meatloaf made with parts of the pig that can’t be mentioned in polite society. But call it pate and you not only elevated the dish, you elevated the status of the diner, they who had successfully navigated the Paris metro and wanted you to know it.
In the early 80’s most people experienced one of several wines you will likely no longer find on any shelf, but Boone’s Farm was the most common, especially in tv commercials - “one sip and it’s strawberry hills forever!” Serve over ice, lots of ice. From there the country graduated to pink wine called White Zin. A little less sweet, and a little less red, than Boone’s Farm. Then it was onto Merlot and very oaky Chardonnay. Walk into Costco these days and you find some pretty good wine from all over the world, and prices even I don’t mind, and I’m as tight as the bark on a tree, as my neighbor Ed likes to say. The same is true with bread, cheese, pizza and most ethnic foods. They all improved and improved democratically. Status climbers like the Crane brothers kept trying to take control of the food culture as it evolved, and were hilariously defeated at every turn.
They’re left in a dank cellar with a bunch of snobbish old boozers who think Bordeaux or Napa valley cabs at $300/bottle are worth the sipping. They aren’t. Any honest wine drinker knows it’s impossible to tell what you are drinking after the first half glass. I’ll take Costco for $13 please.
It’s unfortunate when I see young people who try to recreate that 80’s moment in precious restaurants that really no longer have a constituency. The huge baby boomer generation is on meds now, for everything, so no wine or alcohol, and they don’t like shoes that need to be tied, or ties. Sure, you might go for an anniversary dinner before the kids arrive, but eventually you’ll find more fun and better food at lower prices, and that often means cooking at home. A return to sound home cooking would be good change. We are racking up a lot of debt at restaurants, and too many young workers have been been lured into restaurant careers with a shaky future.
One trend that’s been documented is that 2nd generation children of Asian immigrants generally do not stay in small business. They move on to other jobs and careers. So it has become difficult, outside of our largest cities that boast lots of new immigrants, to find good ethnic food. Chinese food outside of New York City or California is not very good. But there are several good Chinese cooks on YouTube that show the process and ingredients of some of your favorite dishes. Likewise with Thai and Mexican. We purchased a wok and a few ingredients and make some delicious Asian food. We also own Rick Bayless’s Authentic Mexican cookbook and we watch his videos on YouTube. Most of this year’s venison was prepared as Chile Colorado or as a mole. Goose legs became ‘tacos carnitas’ with Rick’s help.
And American eating, has it benefited or suffered as a result of the great infusions of international foods and cooking practices? We put more different things in our mouths in the last 35 years than in the previous 350, that’s for sure. One result at the professional level has been a lot of ‘fusion’ food. Some of it’s been ok, but most attempts leave much to be desired. Ingredients, cooking methods, the meal presentation of multiple accompaniments are hard to manage with so many cultural imports on one menu. Stewed or braised dishes in the western style deserve a decent bread to mop up some sauce, and dishes in the eastern style might deserve a properly steamed white rice. I’m not going to dip bread into a soy based sauce. This is how the term ‘cultural appropriation’ became popular. It was just diners pissed off at the not inexpensive meal that no one had thought through very well. Now of course whiny academics have taken the phrase for their own, and why wouldn’t they, the miserable always need a new whine.
For home cooks as well the game may have become more difficult to play because it’s become harder to compete with the wide variety of foods offered by professionals in their restaurants. Preparing meals similar to the ones you have out is rough sledding for most home cooks. They would be better off, in my view, to learn a dozen dishes over time and repeat until they are family winners. It just takes practice to get dishes right. Also, the old standards like pot roast and stuffed peppers are now passed over I’ve noticed. Dishes like these have several things going for them - they included several key food groups none of which are expensive: Peppers, onions, garlic, carrots, celery and tomatoes, ground beef or chuck roast, rice or potatoes, and crusty bread. While it takes a little time to make these dishes, their preparation includes the sauce, the most difficult element to nail for home cooks, and the dish can be prepared in advance and just reheated for a weekday meal. And most important, it’s delicious. We had a wealth of poblano peppers from the garden this year and the stuffed peppers were excellent.
Like so many aspects of American life, when it comes to food, how we raise it, prepare it, eat it and pay for it, it sometimes seems like we are having a fight when it’s not necessary. It’s hard to find an article complimentary of American farmers or farming, for example, in the mass media. They’re doing it all wrong! Our food is poison! Statements like this get made all the time, glibly, like we all agree that this is the case. The laptop class sits in climate controlled surroundings built by the world’s most capitalist society and dreams about a really cool farmer raising a couple of perfect chickens just for them, accompanied by organic vegetables and a delicious and calorie free sauce. Someone else will prepare it and the whole meal will be close to free. I’ve even seen a farmer who raises 10,000 chickens a year on 20 acres for a net profit of $25,000 say that there’s no reason we couldn’t feed the country chicken like he raises them, for a country with 330 Million people. At 10 chickens per person per year we need 3.3 Billion chickens (we actually consume 8 Billions chickens a year, btw), or at 10,000 birds per farmer we’ll need 330,000 chicken farmers. There are only 2 Million farms in the country - you get the picture. It’s not realistic, and this from a person on the inside of farming. But hey, we put a man on the moon why can’t we just figure out a new chicken arithmetic?
While we recruit all the new chicken farmers, we’ll also continue to find new ways to stay ahead of the pack, whether it’s the wine we drink, the food we buy, the recipes we follow. In the world’s most democratic society food continues to be the great status differentiator.
Love your writing, Tom!
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