We attended a local farm to table dinner at Adam and Melissa Millsap’s Urban Roots Farm recently. The Millsaps began developing their farm a few years ago in one of the city’s economically depressed and socially marginal areas. The farm spans four lots on a main neighborhood street and extends probably 150 feet in the back. There’s a greenhouse, lush garden beds of squash, chives, basil, greens, tall mounds of black compost with a Tonka truck or two, a pile of rocks excavated from the garden beds, a remaining row of apartments kept for interns participating in the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms program (wwoofers) and three twenty foot tall metal frames, one open and two covered in opaque plastic. These high tunnels, Adam explained, are renowned for extending the growing season and protecting plants from harsh sun.
Throughout the pre-dinner tour, children tore around riding tricycles and playing with the dogs and chickens. Melissa carried her cherubic baby boy in a snugli, and by the time the last question was answered, he had fallen fast asleep. The Millsaps and several of their friends and colleagues have young children, and the farm seems to draw the neighborhood children as well.
When dinner was served, we delighted in sweet potato pizza topped with peppery arugula, baby crudités with yogurt dip, vegetable soup, roasted potatoes, grilled carrots, organic local beef kabobs and fresh raspberry dessert. We also sampled new beer flavors from Mother’s Brewery down the street. It was a beautiful Ozarks fall evening, just cool enough, and local musicians played guitar and sang during the meal and into the night.
Our dinner companions are not newcomers to good local food. One recently launched a school garden project at the high school where she teaches biology; one has been writing about food in
The importance of everyone seeking such change came home to me a few days later at my reading circle. We’d read The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball, a memoir about the author’s and her husband’s adventure in creating Essex Farm, an organic farm in upstate New York, one of the country’s first community supported agriculture (CSA) co-ops. Locals buy shares in the farm’s bounty for a weekly box of seasonal goods and produce. Kimball makes the work sound grueling but the emotional payoff huge. She is as much in love with the farm as she is with her good looking and hard working husband. Her experience seems soul satisfying and very romantic.
The reading circle conversation meandered from the book’s details to the difficulties getting farm land into the hands of young people. We considered how starting a vegetable farm from scratch was probably a job for the young, strong and passionate, but everyone agreed upon the importance of local farms in the sustainability of not only our town but of the nation and the world.
Susan, one of our members, works for a local environmental firm, and one of their contracts is to make EPA inspections of industrial farming operations in the area. We live within a hundred miles of some concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in
Of course it’s not just meat production that is unsustainable. It’s corporate food production across the board. With the chemicals, farm politics, monocultures, genetic modifications, oil consumption, high fructose corn syrup, e-coli and empty calories tainting the food system, the only ones benefitting are Cargill, Monsanto and other big conglomerates. That system has to go.
Would it be radical change? Yes. Would it require drastic changes in the way we obtain food? Yes. But would we dine at wild flower adorned folding tables on the farm that grows our food? Would we get to know the couple that milks the
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