Our eldest child thankfully prodded us into watching an episode of Cooked by Michael Pollan last night. She chose the episode called “Water.”
We watched this film for the first time a couple of years ago and are enormously grateful for her to put it in front of us again.
Michael — let’s call him Michael, as if we know him well — puts forth such important questions in this film. “How did we get to this place?”
How did we get to this place of eating food-like substances instead of real food?
Why has the cost of processed food gone down in the last 30 years while the cost of real food has gone up?
How have we gotten to a place where the cheapest food is also the unhealthiest food, and therefore our communities’ poor are eating food that leads to poor health, for which these same people have the hardest time accessing quality health care to address, and thus we have a negative feedback loop/unhealthy cycle?
He addresses all of these issues artfully, deliciously, with moments of depressing realism, trips through historical events, modern day India, his kitchen, and a friends home. (We will wax poetic another day about that friend and her dizzying influence on us.)
He interviews a man who states that for most, if not all, of humanity, the predominant answer to the question “Who will do the cooking?” has always been the same: “Not me.”
We heard Michael most poignantly state that he doesn’t wish to force anyone into the kitchen. He wants to lure us into the kitchen.
We looked at each other over the head of this wise child who wanted nothing more than to spend the evening watching a film about food with her farmer parents. We know lots of people don’t like cooking. We are completely baffled by this, but we know it to be true. We also know that it was the taste of food like we now grow that lured us into the kitchen, and lured us into the field to grow food like it. It was growing up surrounded by this food that lured our oldest child (and subsequent children) into the kitchen. It’s the positive feedback loop created by delicious food and healthy lives that keeps luring us all into the kitchen.
We know it is our job to keep growing food that lures you into the kitchen, and we hope you embrace this radical rejection of the “Not me” attitude. To grow and prepare food that nourishes ourselves and our loved ones is of supreme importance and part of a greater radical transformation of our food system and relationship to health. All that in a day’s work! Thanks for being part of this with us.
Ready to join our Farm Share for 2019?
Farm Shares are available for our main season which runs May through November. Read details here and please sign up to join our farm! We are offering a new *customizable* Farm Share through the new software called Harvie. Choose what you prefer from our harvest for weekly or bi-weekly shares!
Our harvest this week includes:
Arugula, Carrots, Dill, a wee bit of Lettuce, Microgreens, Parsley, Salad, Spinach…and our Organic Hearth Baked Bread (Baguettes, Herb, Whole Rye, Raisin, & Seed loaves for this weekend).
{Our farmstand is open with most of the above items…see here for updated inventory}
Everything remaining after member shares are filled and our farm stand is shopped (plus the bread we bake Saturday morning)… we’ll bring on Saturday to the Farmer’s Market @ St. Stephen’s. Also keep an eye on what we have available via Richmond’s only online farmers’ market: FallLineFarms.com.
Enjoy ~
Janet, Dan, & the whole Broadfork crew
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