Tag Archive

This is a short keynote address given to the Mill City Farmer’s Market in Minneapolis on Sept. 8, 2013. A dozen years ago, during a semester when I was teaching at Carleton College, I wandered down to the Co-op to see what it was all about. I had never been inside a food co-op and I was curious to know what drove the people who worked there. I found the vegetable guy way in the back stocking the coolers. He had been one of the founding members and he knew a lot about food, the food industry, and how tough it was to compete with the factory farms. He was an older, hippy-type that barely raised his head to look at me as he stocked the lettuce, green beans, squash, and rutabagas. He wore his graying hair in a ponytail with a hair net. “The big food companies just do everything as cheaply as they can,” he said. “That’s kind of the idea isn’t it?” I’d been thinking a lot about business lately and I was sincere in what I said, but he looked up at me with deep exasperation in his grey eyes. “Your view of business is the standard party line: Markets will work everything out.” My comment had touched a nerve. “That idea only works if you add in ALL the costs.” He had a rutabaga in his hand and tossed it up and down like a pitcher contemplating a fast ball. “At the top of Monsanto’s list of crimes, misdemeanors, sins, and oversights is the accounting error of grabbing profits while pushing the costs down the line.” “Like to the next generation.” “Like to the next generation. Bull’s eye.” He was still tossing the rutabaga up and down. “Now take this humble vegetable. It was grown about six miles from here. No pesticides, herbicides to worry about cleaning up. No water stolen from some imperiled fish.” He stopped tossing the rutabaga, held it in front of his eyes like Hamlet considering the skull of Yorick. “This is a rutabaga that comes with no I.O.Us. It is what it appears to be. A simple rutabaga. No future medical bills attached. No animals, plants, or microbes have been abused in its production. The world has not changed because it has come to be.” He tossed it into the air one more time, caught it neatly, and placed it on the growing pyramid of rutabagas. The vegetable guy told me that he had been in the sustainability business since the late sixties when he dropped out of college to join a commune in New Hampshire. “Been at it a long time,” he told me. “Composting, biological controls, organic, free range, local, polycultures, CSA’s, farmer’s markets.” He waived his free hand to indicate there were a lot more labels that he just couldn’t think of right then. “You name it, I’ve been there.” His eyes went wistful and his arms stopped moving.  “Started off working with Caesar Chavez. I ran the mimeograph machine.” He gently picked up another rutabaga and I knew that he was thinking back over the years since he had first peeled himself away from the direction that American agriculture was heading. I wondered how he thought of himself and the choices he’d made. “Are you doing any good?” I asked. He was dreamy again and it took a moment for him to come back to our conversation. When his eyes finally found mine, they could not quite latch on. “I don’t know,” he said. There was a tiny shake of his head. “It depends on the …