Be a better traveler than your food

Michael polan chapter thirteen the market one the average meal travels over 1500 miles and is usual better traveled than its eater

of food on an American’s plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater.

A chicken— or steak, or ham, or carton of eggs— can find its way from Polyface Farm to an eater’s plate by five possible routes: direct sales at the farm store, farmer’s markets, metropolitan buying clubs, a handful of small shops in Staunton, and Joel’s brother Art’s panel truck, which makes deliveries to area restaurants every Thursday. Each of these outlets seems quite modest in itself, yet taken together they comprise the arteries of a burgeoning local food economy that Joel believes is indispensable to the survival of his kind of agriculture (and community), not to mention to the reform of the entire global food system.

markets in the Washington, D.C., area. On the drive, Joel and I talk about the growing local- food movement, the challenges it faces, and the whole sticky issue of price. I asked Joel how he answers the charge that because food like his is more expensive it is inherently elitist. “I don’t accept the premise. First off, those weren’t any elitists you met on the farm this morning. We sell to all kinds of people. Second, whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food- borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water— of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food."

All those things— all those pastoral values— globalization proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth.

Joel Salatin and his customers want to be somewhere that that juggernaut can’t go, and it may be that by elevating local above organic, they have found exactly that place. By definition local is a hard thing to sell in a global marketplace. Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy as well as a new agriculture— new social and economic relationships as well as new ecological ones. It’s a lot more complicated.

“We don’t have to beat them," Joel patiently explained. “I’m not even sure we should try. We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse— we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.