Pretty is as Pretty Does: You Are What You Eat

Where does your food come from?

Did you know that most people haven't the faintest clue as to where they get the food that sustains them? As long as I have consciously been a part of agriculture, I have tried to understand why there is such a disconnect between people and agriculture and implicitly food. I once read an article that dealt with kids living in some large city or another who were so many generations removed from the farm that they thought that chocolate milk came from brown cows. You may think I am joking but it is true. Where we get our food just doesn't register with kids anymore. For the parents out there, how many times have you had a talk with them about where food comes from? If you haven't, chances are good they honestly think it came from the grocery store. That makes some sense right? When you, as a parent, go to the grocery store and come home again, you have food in tow.

Lovely readers, I want to believe that you do know that food comes from the ground and God's hands. Most of the time in America we do not have to worry about finding food like some other countries. We can go out and buy it pretty easily. It is something that most of do about once a week. But how often have you thought about what would happen if we regressed to the point where every family had to have a farm to be able to eat. Could you survive?

Our farmers do not get enough credit for all that they do. Did you know that American farmers are producing more food now on less land than they did just fifty years ago when they had more land on which to produce food?

Lately I've been thinking about why people do not know as much as they should about agriculture and the food they eat. There are tons of books and publications and people whose jobs are to talk about food. There was a best selling book by Michael Pollan called The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals that gives a truly one sided version of the way the food gets from the ground to your plate. This example is taken from the section called "The Feedlot: Making Meat." (page 80)

I told myself not to take it personally; 534 [Pollan's steer] and his pen

mates have been bred for their marbling, after all, not their

ability to form attachments.I noticed that 534's eyes looked a little bloodshot.

Dr. Metzin [feedlot's vet] had told me that some animals are irritated by feedlot

dust. the problem is especially serious in the summer months, when the animals

kick up clouds of the stuff and workers have to spray the pens with water to keep it

down. I had to remind myself that this is not ordinary dirt dust, inasmuch as the

dirt in a feedyard is not ordinary dirt; no, this is fecal dust.

But apart from the air quality, how did feedlot life seem to be agreeing with 534?

I don't know enough about the emotional life of a steer to say with confidence

that 534 was miserable, bored, or indifferent, but

I would not say he looked happy.

This doesn't sound positive to me. Does it to you? Is it the whole story? Is it just half? How is the average Joe supposed to know when this is from a best selling book when there is not an equally popular book giving the other side of the story. Farming is the way that farmers provide for their families, and they love those animals and their jobs more than the general work force here in the U.S. could think about loving their jobs. I challenge you to think about the other side when you read these things and hear about a case of E. coli or BSE (Mad Cow disease).

Off of my soapbox. My point is simple. There really are not books like this best selling book that helps people understand how they get their food from the farmers perspectives. I guess they are too busy feeding the Michael Pollans in the world to have time to sit down to write a book about what they do day in and day out.

Here's what we do have to AGvocate on behalf of our farmers, ranchers, and producers.