Will Obama Help Us Towards A Good Dinner?

by Natasha Chart

Published January 21, 2009 @ 07:01AM PT

The morning of the inauguration, my partner and I got stuck in the now infamous Purple Line. There was neither useful signage nor crowd control. Gates that were supposed to have opened at 9am remained shut until after 11am, after people from other areas had apparently filled the allotted space. With frozen feet, we left a huddle that started feeling dangerously tight and watched the ceremony near the Union Station Amtrak gates, where the televisions had been turned to CNN and the sound turned up.

We were wiped out. Two nights of short sleep and hours of being pressed in a crowd caught up with us and we fell fast asleep as soon as we got back to our friends' house. We woke up to the preparations for a small, quiet dinner that finally focused my inauguration day sustainable food hopes. We ate, we talked, we had a little to drink.

Like most people, I want things. Like most people in politics, any day of the week I could tell you all about them. Those things are fairly perennial, new administration or no. The question with a new administration is more of emphasis: what do you think you can get, or what will your backers support you in trying to get?

I'm not going to tell anyone anything they haven't heard in an essay about why I'm glad it was Obama taking the oath today instead of the other guy. But I was stumped for something I'd consider a genuine hope in the realm of sustainable food.

You may recall the 2007 Farm Bill, when it passed in 2008, was vetoed by President Bush. It went on to pass the House and Senate both (and 'chronically deadlocked' is a charitable description of the Senate during the 110th Congress) by veto-proof majorities. Obama's just-confirmed Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is forward-thinking as regards meat industry consolidation, but as far as I can tell, on little else.

Food is a subject on which bipartisanism of the most opaque, corporate-centered, industry lobbyist-driven kind prevails. The meatpackers and the biotech conglomerates (who've largely engulfed the seed and fertilizer and grain distribution industries) drive farm policy, and the major food processors (the ones who'll sew up access to 70-80% of the worldwide market in a given foodstuff between 1-4 companies) drive hunger and nutrition policy. The activist base on the issue is tiny and fragmented, and there are very few establishment champions for food sustainability. Which is to say that my expectations are low.

For hope, as I said, I looked to dinner with my friends.

"She Doesn't Know How To Make Toast"

Our friend Bev, a former chef, made a beautiful dinner for six. She's losing her healthcare because she was laid off from the only full time job she could find several months ago and her COBRA is about to run out. She and Penny can't get married because of people like the Rev. Rick Warren, so she can't get on Penny's coverage. Bev needs six medications a day for optimal health, but she's cut back to three to stretch her part time salary. When she loses coverage, she's only going to be able to afford her emergency inhaler. For now, though, she's managing well and doing the things she enjoys.

A couple who traveled down to the inauguration with us in the morning joined us again for dinner. We had brine-soaked pork chops crusted with crushed herbs and cheese, baked acorn squash with maple butter, and a wild rice mix with lima beans. Dessert was baked pears with cream. It wasn't fancy in the sense of being made from rare or expensive ingredients. Pork chops, squash, rice, pears; these are easy things to find. Though it was memorably delicious, because Bev knew how to turn those simple ingredients into a fine meal.

During dinner, we talked about how common it was for people "our" age (30s to early 40s) to know nothing about how to cook. So acorn squash, which bakes up easy and is very nutritious, usually gets passed by in the produce section. The dicussion turned to a friend of Bev's who didn't even know how to make toast, let alone anything more complex.

Penny, who works for a large company in Maryland, cleaned up the dishes. She studied sustainable agriculture, but couldn't get good work in it. Loves talking about it, though. She told me the story of an organic farmer she met on a class trip after dinner, right before we got into sharing weird botany factoids for the brief entertainment of the assembled.

(And yes, when your allergies are acting up because the pollen count is through the roof, you're breathing in plant sperm. And yes, that pollen is an independent organism, a zygote. Even if it does only have a half set of chromosomes.)

"They Wanted Them To Fail"

When Penny was studying sustainable agriculture, she got to meet a farmer who told her the story of why his family farm went organic. A story that makes him a hero to her even still.

He was once a confinement hog producer on the way to going broke. His wife had Lyme's disease, and she had tried every doctor, but she wasn't getting better. His wife, out of options, at the end of her rope, tried a holistic practitioner. She finally started improving and got better.

As his wife was getting better, business was getting worse. The hogs were passing each other respiratory diseases that there weren't any drugs to treat. The animals were dying and the family was close to losing their farm. At some point, his wife said that maybe, as with her health, it was time to try something different.

Penny described what came next as throwing the doors open and letting the winds blow through their whole life.

He'd heard somewhere that pigs like to live outside. He thought that as long as they were going to die, they might as well do it in comfort. They might as well have the grass and the fresh air and freedom to roam. He let them out of their cages to finish their days in peace.

Except. ... Except they didn't die. They got better. He started talking and networking with other farmers who raised free range animals and leaned more about caring for them this way. Like that they'd still need some extra feed. They needed shelters, sort of like dome tents, that they could retreat to when it was too hot or too cold.

He eventually started letting the cows out, too. Penny raved about the cheese.

It wasn't all roses, though. The family became unpopular in their small farming community for their strange ways of animal husbandry. They started getting nasty comments from neighbors and fellow churchgoers. Though eventually, their immediate neighbors on four sides went bankrupt. The meatpacking company bought their farms out, and they tried to buy out our newly converted free-range farmer. He said it'd be a cold day in hell.

The plan turned out to be that when all these farmers went bankrupt, their land would be merged into a mega-confinement facility spanning multiple counties. This would evade county ordinances about how many animals could be kept on a given amount of land, which is important to manage because hogs produce solid waste at three times the rate of humans, which means that many large confinement operations have the sewage needs of a small city.

So the way it works is that the meatpackers contract with the producers to slaughter and distribute the meat, but they'd rather deal with as few producers as possible. And they'd far rather those producers didn't have to follow any pesky local laws about how many animals you're allowed to cram into a factory farm. That's how it works these days.

Though at least in those counties, because of that one farm, they didn't get their way. And that farm has ever since pulled out of the agribusiness distribution market. They sell all their meat locally, their cheese goes to a farm cooperative, so they know their customers and their customers know them.

Time Enough And Food

Chris and I don't have a lot of money, but we have things that make that more tolerable.

Like jobs that let us work from home, which we like, and plan travel whenever we want if we can find a way to afford it. We share our chores like Bev and Penny do, so if I cook, he washes up, or something like that, and neither of us has to do all the things that go into making life pleasant and comfortable at a basic level. We both know how to cook, though I'm a bit more of a foodie, so we can spend less on ready made dinners or eating out. We have friends whose kindness, humor and passion are a steady source of delight. And soon, I'll get healthcare coverage again, which will ease our minds considerably.

It's a little Bohemian, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Put that together, and it makes for marvelous meals. Ones where, even if they don't make history, we have great memories to show for them. Meals that are rarely rushed and most often prepared from food we could select with regard to how it was grown. Meals prepared and eaten in an atmosphere of kindness and respect.

These sorts of meals I want for everyone.

So my hope in this new presidency is that more decisions will be made on what politicians refer to as 'kitchen table issues' that value everything going into the meals served there. Did it help a local farm business operating on a sustainable scale and with respect to the environment? Were the vegetables picked with slave labor? Are the people sitting down to eat it too rushed or worried to really enjoy their food and each other's company? Are there pesticides or other toxins in it? If there are children there, did someone have time to teach them how to take care of this basic, human need to eat? Is everyone healthy enough to be their best, most creative selves? Is the food fresh and good?

Archeologists have discovered a long human history of cooking and eating together. Unlike other animals, we found ways to expand the range of things we could eat by cooking our food. This work and its products we've long shared with each other, not typically holing up to eat by ourselves as so many creatures do. Everyone has their own theories on what makes a good foundation for a society, I throw my lot in with those who say shared meals are the rock to build a life, a family, a circle of friends, a good civilization on.

Hope

So I hope that when he and his advisors are designing healthcare programs, labor regulations, nutrition guidelines, and farm policy, they will ask whether those decisions will contract or expand the number of good meals that families and friends have time to share with each other. Because that's where the real action is. That's where the hope is.

I hope our food and other policies can move us towards being a nation that, as they say, works to live instead of lives to work. Where we don't have to be rich to have pleasant lives. Because a lot of us are sick and not getting better. The hogs are dying. We're going broke. Having tried all the conventional advice for so long and living in the wreckage of its failures, it's time to throw the doors open and let the winds blow through our whole country.

Maybe we can even let the people out of their pens more often so they can enjoy each other's company over dinner, as I've heard they like to do in the wild.

(Photo credit: Gene Hunt on Flickr.)