Why I Eat at Home

I was recently asked an interview question “Where do you like to eat out?”

I paused.

Between my extreme allergy to canola oil (covered in an earlier article) and living on a nearly 250-acre diversified homestead farm where the food has been called “magical,” I was hard-pressed to give an answer. Because the answer was that I eat at home.

Pizza Farm Days with the smell of hardwood smoke in the air, Chef’s Table Fridays with four courses crafted from the palate of the week’s harvest, brunch with puffy omelets and cinnamon swirl French toast, Bayfield blueberry pie, Kara’s sheep’s milk gelato—there certainly is no lack of delicious choices!

But there is another reason for this choice as well, and that is the lurking, dark, and murky truths about mainstream foods. When I eat foods I’ve raised, I know what they ate, how they lived, how they were even butchered and handled. I know that they weren’t given steroids, crowded in dark pole sheds, or fed antibiotics to keep them alive long enough to make it to the butcher.

I know that my vegetables are spray-free, even if I have to share some of them with the local critter and crawler population. I would rather do this than ingest the repurposed war chemicals used to combat acre upon acre of monocrop farming that is so commonplace today.

It was interesting, then, when the three-word challenge at the Thursday’s Spoken Word event drew words that simply begged to investigate this idea: why I eat at home.

Three-word poetry challenge: bleed, root, beef

Beware the beef at mainstream market
Red as carnations in their nitrogen-pillowed packages
They bleed by the thousand, nameless, crowded together
Ground and packed with meat glue
To simulate a prime cut.

But you know a silk purse
Can’t be made from a sow’s ear.

Beware the limp and lifeless forms
Masquerading as vegetables
Their roots pulled from sterilized ground
No longer worthy of the name soil.
Their leaves bathed in chemicals
That kill by burning nervous systems
Of creatures small and great.

Even if you can’t tell sh*t from shinola
And don’t know me from a bale of hay,

You’ll know the health of my hens
When you see the orange glow of their egg yolks,
Taste the cleanness of aquaponics lettuce
Crispy and sweet, smelling like a bouquet,
Feel the softness of wool from happy sheep
Who yield 10 pound fleeces each
When the industry standard is less than five.

Good fences make good neighbors
But good fences are a must when you’re a grass farmer,
Rotating the wooly and feathered flocks through the field
Like an orchestra conductor.

Beware the shadowy agri-products
Pretending to be food
Real food happens where hands and soil
And hearts and care are intertwined,
Where the dollar is far
From the top of the agenda

And you heard that straight from the horse’s mouth.

***

There’s a reason our tagline is “Know your farmer, Love your food.” So much of what is happening in the food industry is kept hidden—on purpose. Are they ashamed? We want to have no shame with our food raising and growing practices, which is why transparency is so important to us. You can learn about our practices, directly from the folks who toil—not from some polished, industry spokesperson.

You can taste the difference, see it on your plate. I can. So many commercial growers around the world report that they won’t eat the foods they sell. Can you imagine? I hope for a world where everyone who grows food acts with the greatest integrity and compassion. Then we can all be happy to say that we eat at home again. See you down on the farm sometime.