The Ones Who Walk Away From Suzie's Farm

For the past couple of months I have been getting notices for an event in my Facebook feed and I found it quite interesting.  Not that it was anything that I would ever go to, but because of all the event proposed to be and all of the other people who were interested.  If you are in the know and were one of the 1200 or so people who got an invite to this oh so exclusive event, then you got an invite to it then I hate to break it to you, but the event has been cancelled...kinda.  It does not matter really anyway because of lot of the spectacle was in the events leading up to it.

Let me say a few things right off the bat in the interest of editorial honesty.  Let that be the first thing; that this is an editorial and that I am writing this to offer my opinion on things that happened and I fully accept criticism and contrasting viewpoints.  The second thing that I would like to make abundantly clear is that I am not a vegetarian.  I gladly eat meat but more on that in a few moments.  Finally, let me state that I do not personally know anyone in this debate.  That is to say that I have not met any of these people face to face and that is a large part of why I am going to say what I am going to say about this particular happening.

The event was Death For Food At Suzie's Farm and I am sure that you could see from the title alone, it got a lot of objections.  A lot of people were going to get together and serve a gourmet meal of turkeys and lamb and more.  Chefs from all over San Diego were going to lend their talents to this event and the organizers were going to talk about humane killing of animals.  In the interest of editorial honesty I am not going to write in grandiose terms about killing and murder of animals.  We can see that what most telling about this event is not what is said so much as what is not said and how it is not said.  Bear with me.

We have been down this road so many times and this was simply the last straw for me.  This is the culinary industry's collective "jumping of the shark" moment.  The event is ostensibly cancelled and our  feathered friends may get some reprieve but who knows.  Attendees were ready and willing to shell out $150.00 per person to $300.00 per person should you like to participate in the "harvest" of a biodynamically raised turkey to take home.

The initially $150.00 is for a delightful, I am sure, dinner but my frustration and annoyance comes from the additional $150.00 people were willing to pay for the honor of watching their bird slaughtered in front of them supposedly in the interest of education on the origin of your meal.  This is where we get into terminology.  "Slaughter" is the correct term.  This term is conspicuously absent when we are talking about this event.  The organizer uses words like "harvest" so that people feel better about what they are doing all the while couching the event in the idea that people must confront their idea of what it means to kill what you eat.  If it is slaughter, call it slaughter and reclaim the word.

The event is promoted as an educational event, which, in my opinion, is designed to make it more palatable to the attendees. I would have felt more comfortable with it as an event if they had merely said that it was just a dinner and if one so chose, they could slaughter their own and take it with them for Thanksgiving.  Instead, they chose to say that the point was to make sure that people knew where their food was coming from and what went into its arrival at the table.  Here is where I have to take a swing at a few myths.

Myth #1  People don't know where their food comes from...
People know exactly where their food comes from.  The matters that are at issue now is how much they care or can afford to care.  Aside from once hearing that someone thought that mayonnaise came from plants (and I think/hope that was a joke) no one over the age of ten or so does not know where their food comes from.  The question is and should be how to get people to care and put them in a position where they can make the choice to care.  Ironically, that involves making it more affordable.  When the goal is to get your family fed on a holiday and have that big brown bird with the crispy skin on the table few can afford to keep in the forefront of their minds how it got there, whether it had a big field to roam around in or whether it met a peaceful end.  They have mouths to feed and if anything needs to be removed from the table, it is the notion that this was about educating Americans.

Myth #2  That this was not about the money...
I am a capitalist.  I do not believe that people should do things for free and I never will.  I do believe that charity is charity and capitalism is capitalism and the moment that profit exceeds loss  is when that threshold is crossed. Myth #1 is hard to extricate from this also.  Whether or not the organizers were out to get rich, I do not know enough to say.  I do however know that people were coming out ahead and that everyone involved was going to get more out of it than they were putting in.  Again, I have to say that this is not a bad thing but combined with Myth #1 it is problematic.

Myth #3  This is about reverence for the animals...
NO!  Short and simply put, the moment this becomes about people paying to watch what they eat get killed it crosses the line from reverence to spectacle and there are two sub-myths that accompany that.  The fact that there are 700 million people in the U.S. alone and nearly 8 billion world wide.  I am all for baby steps in positive directions but we have to confront an end game here.  Can we honestly say that these events are helping the cause? I have to say no.  I have to say emphatically no.  That leads me to...

Myth #4  This is about awareness...
One of the main reasons I chose to write this is to open the dialogue.  Organizers of this event said that this was one of the main things that they wanted to get from it.  They wanted people to speak about it and talk about where their food was coming from.  At last look 1500 people were invited.  About 100 responded.  52 said they were coming.  I am not sure how many tickets were sold or who was slated to show, but let's assume that Facebook is in this case reliable.  52 people were going to learn about this event.  52 people were going to show up and participate.  Let's look at the demo of that 52 people.  These were 52 people who were in the food industry.  These were 52 people who could afford to pay that kind of money.  These were 52 people who were able to plan that far ahead and were willing commit to this.
Of course, this is just Facebook and I never saw how many tickets were sold.  Even it were half that are we willing to say that this was an educational event.  I have to admit that I used the word "elitist" in a forum about the event and people said that it was not.  I still cling to the notion that this is the epitome of elitist and the irony is that people were not seeing that.
There was a notion that this was a wide ranging event and that there were huge numbers being reached and lives changed etc. etc.  Maybe not that much but let's call this what it is, a bunch of people who could afford two sitting around drinking craft beer and cocktails ruminating on how wonderful this whole thing is and they are for supporting it.

What smacks the event in the face is that when it poked its head up, people were outraged.  There were people who were outraged on a number of levels.  I was in the camp of people who are meat eaters but saw this as nothing but animals dying for what I called "elitist hipster bullshit" in the guise of social commentary and education.  The average person can't afford this nor would they if they could.  There is no educational value; no positive agenda being advanced.  Without any of that, then it really just killing animals for show. You could save a few hundred dollars yet spend more than you would for a Butterball and have a humanely raised bird at home with your family that you know was raised comfortably and killed quickly.

Then there were the vegetarians, vegans, animal rights people, etc. camp.  Again, in the interest of full disclosure, part of me took glee when they got involved because it proved just about everything that I said above.  This event was going great guns when it was a bunch of people speaking amongst themselves.  That is the nature of elitism.  If you surround yourself with people who tell you exactly what you want to hear, you end up thinking that you are a pretty great person and that everything you think is right because well everyone within earshot thinks the same thing.
I took glee because I was one of the few voices on the Facebook pages saying that it was wrong.  I was shouted down by people saying that no it was great and that people everywhere are going to love this and us for what we are doing.  Wrong.
In case you have not noticed, I have been speaking in pretty generic terms mainly because I don't want to advertise for either side.  No links, no invitations for debate, etc. If you want to find it, it can be pretty easily Googled, just look up Death For Food.

That being said, the other faction showed up pretty quickly and in force.  The only kind of force this group musters on a regular basis and that is petition and protests.  The interesting thing is that these petitions, I found, have no force of law.  So, they were not doing anything but making many people aware that many people did not like this.  Overnight, 2000 signatures.  Those are pretty stark numbers when you could only get 52 people RSVP on Facebook.  Overnight, 2000 plus people were disgusted, threatened to boycott Suzie's Farm, and picket the event.  Overnight, the event fell apart.

The legs fell out from under the thing and we are forced to look at the resulting issues.  Again, keep in mind that the petition does not have the rule of law so there would not be police out there stopping them from doing this event.  Essentially, they caved from public pressure.  Suzie's Farm backed out and without a venue, there was nothing to be done.  Go back to what I said earlier, if the the thing itself were so meaningful, shouldn't the event have gone forward?  Is this not the opportunity to take on a fight that "everyone" thinks should happen?

At this point, prepare to enter the spin zone.  What is the outcome of this story?  I doubt even any of the chefs involved will offer their restaurant for the event because even if it is a full house that will be what they are known for.

Some are considering having the event in private but that leads to how do you get people to attend, shell out the money and again it flies in the face of everything that the event purports to be about; education and reverence for the origins of our food.  "Secret rich people animal killings" does not sound like a promising spin.

The man who organized the protest, is he satisfied?  I don't think so.  Some have labeled him an opportunistic food terrorist.  When all is said and done all is not said and done.

I wrote this because it brought to mind one of my favorite stories.  It is a short story called "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula LeGuin (here it is in full.  It is a good and short read) and it poses a very deep ethical question, one that I think is expanded upon here in real life.  Could you live in a town that is absolutely perfect and peaceful aside from one child, sitting alone, starving, crying, and wallowing in its own shit?  In the story, some just walk away from Omelas.

Here, are we ok knowing that every time we eat a chicken nugget, it came from one or several chickens squished together and deep fried not knowing how it/they were treated or do we bring this front and center and charge $300 to see it? Here, some people don't acknowledge it.  Some people walk away.

For more on this CLick!

Why Farm to Table is Dying and We Are Glad To See It Go.

The more that I learn about the farm to table movement and the more that it evolves the more we can see that the bubble is about to burst.  That is a good thing.

Let's be clear, I am not talking about "artisanal" produce and products.  There are some very skilled people out there doing amazing and innovative things.  Even they are going to have to up their game as the sun sets on the basic movement.

See the basic movement was about getting the chemicals out of our food.  The basic movement was about making our food more local and encouraging those local growers to expand their outreach to the people in their local neighborhoods and also encouraging others to get to know them.  The basic movement was about creating a link to our food.  Mission accomplished...kinda.

Whatever else we may believe, we are at the mercy of economics. The result of scarcity is expense and as the movement worked it became more popular and thus less scarce.  Lack of scarcity, lack of expense for the buy means lack of profit and thus those who were out to make a buck are out of line.

What we have ended up doing is promoting something that is so simple and
powerful that it cannot and should not be controlled by a few.  Is Whole Foods going out of business?  Probably not.  Trader Joe's is growing and there are a number of other similar groceries growing also; places where "organic" and "local"

Not to mention the fact that farmers are getting more and more savvy about
what they grow and how to market themselves.  People are growing their own more and they are growing more exotic things, challenging their pallets and their skills, right in their own backyard.

What used to be on the fringe has now become mainstream but unlike Myspace and the pet rock, the movement is not a fad.  It is not like people are getting tired of it and that it is going away.  As is becomes more the norm, it is picking up steam and like any commodity is becoming more accessible and more available to the masses.

We have a long way to go, for sure, but there is a lot of creativity out there.  There are people commandeering abandoned lots and rooftops for gardens and that is a good thing.  There are people who are fighting the system, and who are making it their actual job to advocate for good and healthy food.  It is no longer in the realm of $100 a plate dinners but often in the cost of a seed and healthy soil.

On the other side of this, the pretenders are getting out of the way.  Those who were motivated by profit and fame (such as it is) have to make way for the mother of two who tore up her driveway to make it a garden so that she can feed her children.  Secret underground dining clubs are becoming a thing of the past, in that they are no longer secret.  They are no longer underground.  They are becoming interesting things where people are coming together and expanding their circles; long tables that have water bottles, paper plates and paper cups instead of Spieglau wine glasses and fine china.

When people ask me about farm to table, they speak with a fear. They talk about it like it is something outlandish and in the same vein as driving a Maserati.  Or as if it is something just for the "hipsters" among us.  It just is not the case any more.  Good food is good food and the field is ever widening. So we are seeing the death of "Farm to Table" and the rebirth of farm to table.