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Posted 01.30.06 Cage Free Eggs What would it take to know our food? -- Published in Topic Magazine, Issue 6: Food By Ira Boudway For the past several months I have been an employee at the Cambridge, Massachusetts, branch of a specialty grocer. As such, I get my bread, both literally and figuratively, by way of the checkout counter. I spend a large part of each shift behind one of the registers, and much of what I eat passes by the same registers. Recently, in an effort to make small talk with one of the customers, I pointed out to him that the Arizona Ice Tea he was purchasing was bottled in New York. The man, who appeared to be in his forties, smiled at my observation. "Some of these labels," he said, "I'll tell you the one that gets me: cage-free eggs. What does an egg care if it's in a cage or not?" There wasn't a hint of irony in his voice. The store is part of a successful chain marketed toward the urban sophisticate. Among the binder-full of papers that I had to read before I could begin work were a series of pointed claims about the sort of people who shop there. These people, I was warned, hold advanced degrees and travel widely. They read The New Yorker and not People. They want to know where their food comes from and what's in it. In order to satisfy these people, the store carries a wide variety of organic and gourmet foods, as well as food produced without the use of preservatives, artificial flavors, antibiotics or caged animals. It offers brochures listing kosher, vegan or gluten-free products. During my first few weeks at the store, a more senior member of the crew sat next to me during a break, nodded toward the customers in the parking lot and said, "In a few weeks, you'll come to hate these assholes." Many of our customers are indeed demanding, often due to an over-active sense of entitlement, but sometimes out of a seemingly sincere effort to reassess their place in the global food economy and reconnect with the sources of their food. Several weeks ago, a man came into the store to inquire about the origins of the house-brand products. In most cases, the labels reveal only a country of origin. A manager explained that the house brands are distributed and sold exclusively by our chain, which is to say that they're house brands. "On what sort of scale?" I heard the man ask. The manager, who had plenty else to do, gave him a number to call at the company offices. Though the man was asking the right questions, I marveled that he did not recognize the futility of his project. Was he really expecting to find out the details of production and distribution for hundreds of items, which themselves are part of an intricate network of technological, financial and political arrangements that represents decades of industrial development? Despite the good intentions, was his request much less ridiculous than the man's comment about cage-free eggs? ** It is an indication of the problem with our food economy that a person would have to ask a store manager, who is as removed as any customer, to learn about the sources of his food. In this regard the differences between the upscale store where I work and the standard supermarket are largely cosmetic. The real alternative is not to have to call an office to find out about your food. The real alternative is to be intimately connected with the people and places that produce what you eat. And for shoppers in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, that's rarely an alternative at all. Of course, I am also an uneasy consumer in the same food economy. For most of my life I have eaten food that originated, as far as I was concerned, in a supermarket or restaurant. As for how it arrived at the market, by whose labor and from where, I had only vague images of trucks, packing plants and some distant place where food grows. This disconnect, I have come to believe, both allows for and requires all manner of degradation-the loss of meaningful work, destruction of priceless resources, decay of rural communities and, for me personally, an infantilizing level of dependence. Exploring the nature of our food economy has made it both more difficult and more alluring to continue as if there were no crisis. To try to do something about it means re-examining nearly every transaction by which I survive. I would like to believe, when, for example, I pull into a Burger King during a long road trip, that I didn't know better. The grocer where I work does little to make anyone know better. As at any modern grocer, the motivating idea is to present an atmosphere that encourages and accommodates every impulse toward reckless consumption. This fantasy atmosphere is created by careful efforts to maintain separation on every scale. The stock rooms, boxes, clamshells, wrappers, bags, cartons, sliding doors, isles, shelves, carts, registers, barcodes, parking spaces and pay scales are all meant to distinguish one customer, employee, product or transaction from another. The store itself is separated from its delivery trucks, warehouses, wholesalers and, ultimately, from the places on earth where the food comes from. It takes dozens of people working day and night to keep the shelves full or full-looking-to bring pallets off the trucks, cart boxes onto the floor, remove spoils, price the items, set them in place and, as the shelves are shopped, "face" the stock to preserve the illusion of fullness. The work requires a good measure of patience. You must accept that your work will be undone, sometimes faster than you can do it, and that you will have to repeat it endlessly-like building a sandcastle against a rising tide. No matter how great your patience, you come to imagine the customers as a kind of enemy; the goal is to eliminate them as quickly as possible and to fix the damage they've done. In the meantime, you must maintain all the fantasies of shopping in a modern grocer: workers content to serve, shelves magically full, and the absence of pests, decay and waste. In the final moment when a customer brings his basket to the register and I run his purchases by the scanner, the only connection left is the money passed into my hand or wired through the credit card machine. We often have no direct, physical contact with our food until it reaches our mouths. ** In this illusory environment, we are like theatergoers who cannot see, or even imagine, what goes on backstage and therefore cannot make a coherent account of the spectacle before us. An ontology of disconnect has grown up alongside our economy of disconnect, each enabling the other, such that we have even begun to believe that the spectacle is all there is -- that, as Jack Miles articulates the observation of Mark Taylor and other postmodern theorists, "life can be lived ... without the usual steady certainty that the world is really there." You may begin to wonder if anything is really real when a hot meal can be made to appear with a phone call. While people have always questioned the existence of the world around them, it is not until modern times that this sort of doubt has been understood as something other than a crisis-that such skepticism could become just another aspect of what Wendell Berry calls our "passively consumptive way of life." Now when we're told that reality may as well be illusion, we can say, "Yes...and? Should we do delivery or carry out?" Or course, the store's customers do not intend any harm, nor do the rest of us who benefit from the gross inequities of the global food economy. We are simply taking advantage of what is available to us, leading the comfortable lives we've learned to expect. We do not want to be told that the way we eat implicates us in the hunger of others or that our habits make us responsible to those who live in our service. We seem to have lost sight of a fundamental and unchanging fact: food is had by work, and the way we arrange and participate in this work both reflects and informs our understanding of what it means to be human. But it is simpler not to try to connect the dots and reckon with the ugly image they form. To do so would mean we might have to make radical changes, to surrender our luxuries or to risk going without. Why not pretend that we don't know or, better yet, that we cannot know? The answer, of course, is that this won't do, which is why a growing number of people are making efforts to change their patterns of consumption and re-integrate themselves with the natural world. Caretaker Farm, where I worked one summer five years ago, sits in a valley cut by the west branch of the Green River near Williamstown, Massachusetts. If you stand behind the farmhouse and look east, you will see the flower and herb gardens in the foreground, then a slope of grass pasture where chickens feed, below that about two acres of vegetable garden, then the narrow river and a stretch of wooded pasture where a small herd of cattle graze, beyond that two cabins for the apprentices, and finally, barely visible at the foot of the opposing hillside, another acre of garden for potatoes, pumpkins and squash. This modest spread is at the vanguard of a movement toward accountability and responsible consumption. The food we grew at Caretaker fed the farm's shareholders, more than two hundred adults and children who came to the farm on one of two weekly distribution days and took home what they needed-a system known as Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) that now numbers more than a thousand farms nationally. The cost of seasonal shares came out to a little more than $300 per person. Sam and Elizabeth Smith, the caretakers of Caretaker, received roughly $30,000 per year as well as health benefits and a pension. The CSA system gives shareholders direct contact with the source of their food and the chance to enjoy the farm-its flowers, animals, and views-and gives Sam and Elizabeth financial security, a connection to the people they feed, and the freedom to devote their energies to the care of the farm, rather than transporting and marketing food. Sometimes shareholders simply picked out the produce they wanted and left. But more often, they stayed a while to talk with Sam or Elizabeth or to go for a walk in the fields, to drop off garbage for the compost pile or to bring their children to see the animals. They came to the farm for picnics and dances. Some of them contributed their work and expertise in exchange for a part of their shares, and all them participated in the governance of the farm. (It was the shareholders who set Sam and Elisabeth's salary.) Not every interaction and relationship was without strain, but the atmosphere on distribution days was neighborly in a way that had nothing to do with customer service. In fact, the word "customer" was never used and hardly would have applied to people who had so much invested in the place. In many ways the farm's shareholders resemble the customers at the Cambridge store-middle class professionals discontent with standard supermarkets. Like the customers at the grocer, they took advantage of what was available to them. Had they lived in Cambridge, they might very well have shopped at the store. The ways in which the shareholders differ from the Cambridge customers reflect the differences between the two towns. The shareholders generally were settled families, rather than short-term residents and commuters. They were rooted enough in the community to commit to the farm on a yearly basis, and they knew how to make use of and preserve large amounts of fresh produce. Of course, they supplemented the food from the farm with food from other sources. (Likewise, many of the shoppers at the Cambridge store also buy from local farmers' markets.) When it comes to everyday consumption, it is not a simple matter of good and bad, but of developing habits and connections that are healthy and sustainable, which is what the farm's shareholders were doing. For my part, that summer as an "apprentice" farmer at Caretaker gave me the sense of belonging to a place, of being a member rather than a resident or parasite on earth. At Caretaker, work, food and rest were integrated to a remarkable degree. I would plant and cultivate a head of lettuce, then cut it from the ground, carry it up the hill to the kitchen, prepare it along with tomatoes and scallions from the field and eat it. I burned calories helping a plant grow and consumed them from that very plant. I cared for One-One, the farm ram, helping Elizabeth topple him and sitting on him while she clipped his nails. And later I ate bits of him in a stew. My leftovers were thrown in the compost pile; my waste stayed around and became something else. I worked dawn to dusk five days a week and Saturday mornings and was paid $100 per week. The physical demands were strenuous, but the tasks offered their own satisfactions and pleasures: digging potatoes in freshly turned soil, rattling beetles from the branches of the potato plants, dodging the rooster and the ram, and tossing musk melons during harvest. And while I might have liked to earn more money or to belong to the farm (or some farm) on a more permanent and meaningful basis, I believed in the larger economy of the place. In market terms, input and output at Caretaker moved in a nearly closed system (fuel, plastics, clothing, and some food had to come from off the farm), and I began to imagine life in these terms. Energy and substance moved recognizably through my surroundings-from the sun, rain and soil, into the crops, into my body and through me back into the soil. So it must have been for many generations of men and women. You took your life, every part of it, from a place and gave it back until you died, and even then you continued in the work of your children and in the generations of life that grew in your rotting. You knew that the world was really there because you could not separate yourself from it. The world was as evident as one's own consciousness of it; to question one was to question both. Life, as it turns out, could not be lived without the usual steady certainty that the world was really there. But, as I was taught in grade school, we have been freed form such work. Technological progress has given us the opportunity to seek our happiness elsewhere. It went without saying, since no one in their right mind would get up at dawn to milk a cow if they didn't have to, that our happiness must lie beyond the farm. What we have done, in essence, is place a great maze of machines between ourselves and the sources of our food. The grocer where I work in Cambridge sits at an endpoint and allows its customers to enjoy the cheese, so to speak, without navigating the maze. It fosters our collective irresponsibility and allows us to pretend a childlike ignorance of it. ** During my stay at Caretaker, I met the Smiths' ten-year-old granddaughter, Ali, who moved and lived within an almost entirely impenetrable innocence. One day, as I was working in a row of snap-peas, I looked up to watch Elizabeth finish rounding the chickens into the coop so that Sam could hitch it to the tractor and move it to a new section of pasture. While she chased the last few hens through the rear entrance, she called to Ali, who was standing at the front, and told her not to open the coop's latch. I remember the moment unfolding like a bit of comic cinema, as Ali flipped the latch and the hens came scrambling out. Her grandmother scolded her and Ali broke down crying. "Biddy," she repeated, "I didn't know." At this, Elizabeth took pity on her and relented. The story has stuck with me mainly because of its cartoon humor, but also because I often identify with Ali in her moment of helpless irresponsibility and her impulse to plea ignorance. In her case as in ours, willful ignorance is not the same thing as innocence. |
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