I had duck eggs for breakfast on Sunday. I’m actually quite pleased with myself.
They weren’t just any duck eggs, mind you. I was visiting the Hyper Physicist this weekend, and he steered me on Saturday morning to the tiniest farmer’s market I’d ever seen. Four, maybe five vendors, tucked into a parking lot behind a bakery which was tucked in behind an Italian restaurant, in Eugene, which probably itself counts as being fairly tucked. One stand was inconstantly manned by a sweet hippie girl selling vegetables, another by a rather determined olive-oil producer, and a third by a talkative fowl farmer. We stopped to chat up that last one and discovered some amazing things. A working egg farm that is also a sanctuary for rescued wildfowl? A semi-retired hen who fosters broods of turkeys and geese and quail? An eggery where male hatchlings are raised alongside females and get six months of pasture and bugs before becoming dinner? Six months? This is not your supermarket organic loophole arrangement. There your birds are getting six weeks in a shed, and if they’re lucky it might have windows to the unknowable outside. No, six months on pasture is revolutionary in this industry.
(The Hyper Physicist, on the subject of asking farmers prying questions about their animals: “It’s Eugene. If you asked whether the chickens have access to sacred stones, it probably wouldn’t be the first time.”)
This brings me, as many things do, back to the question of where I can send my dollars out to tell the world what I want and value. What was it that a dairy industry rep said at the end of Food Inc.? “You tell us what you want and we’ll find a way to provide it. If you want two-dollar milk, we’ll give it to you… and you’ll have a feedlot in your backyard.” I get it. I wouldn’t spend so much damn time and energy on special eating rules if I didn’t get it. But getting it doesn’t give me a set of instructions to follow; it barely suggests the questions to ask to build my own instructions. I have to do my own research to figure out what my purchases actually do and who’s getting my dollars in exchange for what, and then I have to walk around the grocery store and the produce store and the farmer’s market thinking, “Here’s Dianna sending a check to these people, and these people, and here’s Dianna send– oh, wait, no, dear god no, here’s Dianna strenuously avoiding sending a check to these people, here I can’t get this item without sending a check to these people, am I sure I want that item? Nah. Let’s forget about that one and send a check to these people for this thing….”
Obviously I find this rewarding in some way, or I wouldn’t do it — and indeed I do find it rewarding. It’s why I have the word CHOOSE tattooed in huge letters across my back: I believe on some basic blind-faith level that humans possess a moral muscle, an astonishing capacity to grasp information and select courses of action with a view to their long-term good and harm, and that to let that muscle wither from underuse is both a travesty and a lie. When something in our human landscape goes horribly wrong, as they do all the time, you might truthfully say you didn’t know or didn’t understand what it had to do with you — but with all that mind at your disposal, could you ever really say you couldn’t know or understand? Doubtful. And I try on a background level all the time to find those bits of information and decision and do them justice, but it so happens that there is one thing I feel especially motivated to research and understand and decide on, and I have a couple of hundred votes about it in my bank account every month, and they have to get spent somewhere if I’m going to continue metabolizing energy, which is to say surviving. I’m already obsessed with food. I may as well obsess over finding the most appropriate food.
This is all background. It’s how I originally got to the point where I decided to take my food dollars away from the dairy, egg, fish, and meat industries, and that’s served me well for a good long time. But, like everything else, it’s just one of many answers and it’s subject to re-examination. Am I doing justice to my sense of morality by eating fresh vegetables and heirloom beans and local artisan bread? I’m pretty certain I am, yes. But am I still doing so by eating high-tech hexane-laced spun soy protein filled with artificial flavors (though they be ever so incredibly delicious) and shipped from Taiwan? On one level, yes; nobody trapped a steer in a feedlot and sent it to be butchered on a brutal production line to make this. On another level, no; there are fuel miles and soy conglomerates and farm debt and chemical runoff to be considered, and if I’m not careful about which soy I buy, I’ll be giving my money to the same company that owns that steer on the production line. So it’s a simple answer, and like all simple answers, it’s not all-encompassing.
One of the things it doesn’t encompass is this: what am I voting YES to? I’ve been paying attention mostly to my NO votes for the better part of a decade. And they’re votes that need to be cast, and they have power, and it’s good to feel that you are helping to wreck something that needs to be wrecked… but it always begs the question, with what do you hope to replace it? And how are you helping to make that thing? If you can imagine an answer to the first question, you can find an answer to the second, and I think mine is taking shape. So what am I hoping to make? One, economic self-sufficiency for people who’ve chosen food creation as their occupation; it’s not in my interest to help bankrupt farmers if I wouldn’t want to be stuck growing all of my own food, and indeed I would not. Two, local distribution and transportation networks. Three, ecological responsibility and efficiency. Four, a scale of operations where you can see whether these conditions are being met. Five, proof that animals can be treated decently even as food makers, because I’m starting to believe that they can.
With this in mind, I’m finding room for different votes than I have been willing to cast in a long time. If there’s a YES on these few just-right eggs, could there ever be a YES on just the right milk? Welllllll, you’d need to know about the cows, or maybe goats, or perhaps even sheep, and their home and their food and their lifespan and their health, and then you’d need to know about their pregnancy and their calves or kids and their homes and lives and food and health, and, being realistic, whose soup pot everyone is going to wind up in and when and how, because that’s a YES vote here that is implicit and important to know about. And I’m doing some looking, and I’m finding… there are people who are happy to tell, or show, their answers. So that’s a check mark on line four, above, a small and transparent scale of operations, and it’s looking good for line two, local networks, and three, ecological responsibility, and five, decent treatment, and of course this makes sense because when do you not need to conceal anything? When you’re doing nothing wrong that you or your observer can think of. And how does one make sure these places are also hitting line one, economic self-sufficiency? Oh right. By paying them.
But which ones? How do I pick where my votes go? Is it appropriate to say that any dairy or eggery that meets Arbitrary Criteria X for humane treatment and Arbitrary Criteria Y for ecological responsibility is a good vote, or do I have to survey the entire field of possibilities and find the very best one? Could I designate a percentile; say, I will buy from within the most ethical 5% of the milk options out there? Is this 5% of the producers or 5% of the milk? I ask because the big producers are the awful producers in this industry, and I’m pretty sure the most ethical 1% by volume of the milk available for purchase in the United States encompasses everything from supermarket dreadful-loophole bare-minimum organic to your crazy neighbor with two happy pygmy goats who sleep in her bed and breakfast on ten acres of native grass. But the closer you get to my ideal, the harder the producers are to find; you’re either in the right town to buy at their farm stand or local market, or you’re not and you’ll never know they exist. Is there someone I can trust to do my research for me? The Cornucopia Institute interviews dairy producers, researches claims, and contacts suppliers, and generates ratings on a scale of one happy cow to five happy cows indicating how ethical they find a producer’s practices. Can I go by their ratings? Animal Welfare Approved audits willing farms all over the country and publishes the (incredibly encouraging and impressive) standards that it uses to approve or disapprove them. My local food co-op buys farmstead dairy cheese and asks its suppliers prying questions about their animals and plants; can I fall back on their research and judgment instead of doing my own? I’m not sure; the food co-op loves Noris, a local dairy with beautiful pastures and an excellent reputation, but Noris turned down Cornucopia’s questionnaire (earning itself a zero-happy-cow rating) and wasn’t encouraging when I wrote to ask about a farm tour. The review organizations and co-ops and farmers’ markets have all revealed promising local farms, but there’s almost no overlap — nobody for sale in the co-op is on the Cornucopia list and nobody with AWA approval is at the farmer’s market. Which list do I decide to trust? My own, I think, until I have a better sense of what these places are that I’m reading about — so now I need only figure out how to get a girl on a bicycle across 50 or 100 miles of highway to visit some.
In short, we have some non-news: overthinking everything makes for a rather exhausting world. Still, I’ve managed to squish and fold it down to one stubborn but fruitful question: how much is my due diligence? Do I owe the world my adherence to a particular unshifting ethical milestone (or, knowing me, many milestones) or is it enough to say “here is a list of things I am going to do regardless, and I shall diligently do them in the most ethical way possible”? Either way, I can at least say I believe these two things:
- Some feta would be absolutely delicious right now, and
- Normal people do not have to write this much to defend thinking that.
