Let Them Eat Kale

I have worked two farm jobs in my career that paid a living wage. Both farms were owned by millionaires. One by the creator and former CEO of a company we all use to buy plane tickets -- their commercials star the former star of Star Trek -- the other by an international playboy restaurateur who owns the clubs and hotels that current stars frequent. The former CEO had sold his stake and made millions, began an investment firm focused on ‘mission based’ investment and bought 3 farms. The ‘mission based’ investment firm poured money into market-based solutions to ecological problems, namely climate change. The playboy built an empire on his reputation for luxury, fine dining, and exclusivity. He dated movie stars. His focus seemed strictly on his image and his brand. I doubt he could be bothered with climate change unless the sea levels rose on Shelter Island and upended his hotel.

What these two had in common, the only thing tying them together besides the off night William Shatner spent in the Boom Boom Room, was their apparent interest in organic farming. 

Why?

Obviously their interest had nothing to do with making a profit. These businessmen had endless avenues of wealth creation at their disposal, they weren’t looking to diversify their portfolio with lettuce sales. There are various tax incentives -- agricultural easements, writing off an investment loss -- but the earnest nature with which these men approached their farms leads me to believe that in their minds, these ventures had very little to do with money at all.
Because ultimately the farms made no financial sense. They invested in infrastructure for purely aesthetic reasons. They raised livestock with zero profit potential -- think llamas, donkies, ponies. They paid their labor force wages that would bankrupt any other farm. They produced boutique quantities of boutique vegetables and sold them to their wealthy friends or to the restaurants their wealthy friends patronized. 

Ultimately what they were creating was the spectacle of a farm, an image, a facade subject to none of the same financial restraints, none of the same burdens faced by real farms. And that facade propped up a greater front — a larger fiction used by these men to justify their lavish lifestyles -- that there are moral, just, decent people behind such indecent sums of cash.

Afterall, how can one claim to value sustainability, to work towards climate solutions and ecological balance while flying private and burning enough jet fuel to rip a farm sized hole in the ozone? One farms.

How to justify such disproportionate wealth that the value of your 3 farms would dwarf developing nations’ GDP? One farms. 

How to anesthetize oneself to the fact that your hobby farm and foray into market sales artificially inflates the market, steals sales away from real farmers and keeps land prices at such levels that only the elite that need not farm can afford the land to farm? One farms.

Or more accurately, one pretends to farm. One creates the image of a properly concerned citizen doing their part to mitigate climate change, investing in ‘green’ solutions, changing the food system, while one profits off a larger economic system driving us headlong into climate catastrophe. Then one hoards the majority of that wealth, buying up land and assets, turning those profits into more profit and accelerating the largest, most disproportionate wealth gap in the history of humanity.

But one farms or puts some percentage of their wealth towards philanthropic ventures so that one can say they do their part. They are concerned with poor people, they care about the planet’s health, they are changing the food system -- when in reality they are doing little more than growing food for a select circle of the wealthy among us. 

Farming and food became a sort of opiate for these two particular former employers. I fear food culture has the same potential for the rest of us. We can become so fixated on novelty and maximizing pleasure, or on nutrition and maximizing performance, or on freshness or local or organic, that we don’t realize the peasants are running out of bread. And I imagine the moment when the bread is gone and the climate keeps us from growing more and the land is all owned by people without the skills or inclination to produce and at that point I fear our energy might be better spent building guillotines than growing kale.