Seared almond crusted tuna with a maple ginger glaze served with sliced avocado on top of rice and a red cabbage, onion, and mango slaw with a citrus dressing is what I made for Christmas dinner. I was visiting my family in my hometown of Weaverville, California. Food is always a cultural signifier of almost all holidays and events. Whenever I return to Weaverville now, it always makes me very introspective on how my relationship to food has changed since I was a kid, and subsequently my relationship to culture.

 

My assumption is that like most people in the United States, when buying food my parents shop at stores that offer the perceived lowest price for the quality of product they are looking for. For them this means that much of the staple foods are being purchased at Costco and Food4Less. These were the stores that I grew up going to, bright and clean giant warehouses filled with food, food stuff, and just stuff, processing a huge number of customers with overflowing giant baskets. I think it is a kind of American dream, certainly an ideal that was historically celebrated during the cold war. Shear abundance! The visual epitome of American capitalism.

 

In my life now as a small farmer whose desire is to grow the freshest and highest quality crops possible for a hyper local market, my brain practically rebels when I go into a Costco, Food4Less, or Walmart. It is nearly impossible to see how what I am doing fits into this behemoth of a food system. I question how my farming values around environment and freshness, and quality aren’t being crushed by the weight of American capitalism.

 

Almost everyone decries the rising cost of food. We want good food to be cheap and abundant. I too seek food that I perceive to be affordable and abundant. I am a “sales” shopper, even at my local food co-op where I do most of my shopping. Inherently I want food to be “affordable”, whatever that means. 

 

But when food is inexpensive, really just dirt cheap, the costs have to be borne out in other ways. The outcome is often the degradation or straight up destruction of the environment, horrific animal welfare, and low wage and poor treatment of agricultural workers (as well as everyone else in food systems.) To be clear, as a farmer, this is not me complaining about how much money the farm is making. I am simply thinking and writing about how we value one of the most important, maybe the most important, ways that we choose to spend our money.

 

Our culture is constantly changing, constantly evolving. My hope, my belief, is that our culture is able to evolve to place higher value on the food we eat. If we do this, the food will be healthier for us, the animals we choose to eat will be treated better, agricultural workers will make a better living, and the environment will be better off.