Where Our Food Comes From
Chuck and I did the Iowa Farm Crawl yesterday, driving south of Des Moines about 45 minutes to a small group of farms, clustered near each other, which supply much of our food during the growing season. Chuck knows some of these folks well, since he’s out the door at 7am every Saturday to buy their food at the farmer’s market.
We spent most of our time at Coyote Run Farm, where Pat Standley and Matt Russell grow most of the produce we eat in the summer; they also supply the best eggs I’ve ever tasted. We’ll eat one of their turkeys this Thanksgiving. We also stopped by Reichert’s Dairy Air, where about a dozen goats produce 50 lbs of cheese a week.
It was nice to get out of the house on a Sunday afternoon, but even better, it was exciting to see where our food comes from. You’d think that wouldn’t be hard to do in a place like Iowa, but almost everything this state produces gets shipped somewhere else for processing. Ironically, some Iowans are farther (and, perhaps, further) away from their food than people who live in big cities.
That’s what makes the local food movement so important here – it’s a bright spot in the midst of an economy built on subsidized corn, petroleum-based fertilizers, transcontinental shipping, and artificially cheap food.
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