The Wool Over Our Eyes

Spend enough time in the restaurant industry and not much will shock you. Dubious business practices, illegal labor management, the length of time that chicken spent in the walk-in -- with the volume of people passing through the door, the slim margins, the repetition of it all, one becomes numb to no shortage of outrageous practices. It’s just the realities of running a restaurant, we tell ourselves as we throw out enough food to feed a village or serve fish on its very last hour of ediblity. 

Coming from the ostensibly more moral world of organic farming, some of these questionable practices took time for me to digest, but slowly, sadly, my own food ethics became more tolerant of waste, less concerned with sourcing and in due time began a slow inevitable slouch towards bethlehem. 

But there remain a few sins I can count on to set my back straight and bestow me with the moral courage to gripe and groan and blog about. Since my days of farming, one in particular continues to make me bristle -- namely, the inconsistency and absurdity of the “Farm to Table” marketing movement. 

On its face, there is much to celebrate in Farm to Table. A return to a local, agrarian economy. Seasonal restraints mandating technique and creativity. An archaic revival of our countrysides and a realignment of those capitalist carrots-on-a-stick that lead our business decisions. The tenants of the local food movement have inspired many of us to return to the land, to consider the implications of how we spend our food dollars, and at least attempt to figure our way ethically through the dilemma of omnivorous eating -- but this shift in the zeitgeist has also created a new marketing niche to cater to, to exploit, and in this niche hypocrisy lies. 

Afterall, what does “Farm Fresh Eggs” mean exactly? Are industrial hen houses not farms? Is any food on the table not Farm to Table? Are we to assume that only the virtuous among us would dare use bucolic imagery and the holy specter of the Farm to sell? 

A restaurant buys edible flowers or 10 lbs of lettuce from a local farm while 90% of their larder is filled with industrial food. They position themselves perceptually as supporting local producers and use the image and often the names of local farms to fill seats, but can’t conceal the biweekly delivery from Baldor, the literal truckloads of food whose place of origin couldn’t possibly be divined by the chef, the lowest common denominator sourcing that is almost mandated by those wicked realities of the industry.     

Or perhaps a bit more of their sourcing is done locally. Maybe they do make every effort to find the best of what’s in season from producers within their foodshed. By the time the food hits the plate the majority of people living in that foodshed can’t afford it. Certainly the people who produced the food -- the farmers, artisans and cooks -- can’t afford it. An ethical elitism, where in order to eat sustainably you must have profited sufficiently from an economic system which is neither sustainable nor ethical. 

When I was in the thick of my farming career I attended the Young Farmers Conference at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture -- the home of Dan Barber’s bastion of the Farm to Table movement, Blue Hill at Stone Barns. The mood of the weekend was revolutionary. We sang field songs over dinner and attended workshops on regenerative agriculture, land distribution and workers cooperatives. We shared stories of our exhaustion and exhilaration and our commitment to changing the food system. Then the keynote speaker let all the wind from our sails. Adam Davidson from NPR’s Planet Money shared the market perspective of our celebration of local.

“What you represent to the Multinational Food Conglomerates is not competition or an insurrection amassing in the woods, but free market research. You are defining the values which they will market to. And they will do it cheaper than you can imagine. They will reach the majority of people while you all cater to the elite.” Ah what bitter irony that Stone Barns is owned by the Rockefellers. That Blue Hill is only within price range for the illuminati among us. 

Davidson could see that for all our hand wringing and self appointed heroics, we were doing very little to actually change the industrial leviathan. Worse, we were unknowingly feeding the monster with marketing material, creating just enough societal movement for the tyrannosaurus to see us and exploit our ethics for profit. 

The Farm to Table restaurant mirrors this exploitation. It’s primary aim is profit. It’s marketing lie is that it is cooperative. It is subject to the same capitalist pressures, the same unethical realities, the same system at large as an Applebees, and if they source their lamb locally it is just as much for the flavor as it is to pull the wool over our eyes, to create a sense of moral superiority as we dine like nobility while plebs produce in the kitchen and the field. 

In the end, the local food movement is about integrity -- producing honest food, increasing transparency and creating an alternative to industrial ag -- and the restaurant industry is about profit. Perhaps it is time to admit the two are not compatible. Perhaps we can end the moralistic fable and take an honest look at how much work there is yet to be done.