Maveric Report
Rachele Ellena describes her experiences with Pangea (the Youth Food Movement knowledge exchange program between young people and farmers)
I savor an apple pie and brie. You can’t imagine how good it tastes! The aroma of melted cheese, the sweetness of the hot crisp pastry mingling with the rubbery cheese and baked apple.
So much tempting food… It isn’t hard to see why so many Americans are overweight. Every package invites you to open it and have a nibble of the cereal, chocolates or cookies inside.
And you can’t resist. A lot of thought has gone into the design of cans and packaging to suck consumers into a spiral of overeating; everything gets gobbled up in minutes.
We have ancient memories of hunger and are driven by a deep-rooted fear. Well-known food historian, Professor Montanari, talked about our innate fear of having no food.
But it is all in the mind, because we aren’t hungry.
In front of me is a bowl of toasted oats and milk.
The milk comes in a huge pack, ergonomically designed so you can continue drinking while moving around the house. The milk has been in the fridge for two weeks and won’t expire for another two. It has been centrifuged, skimmed and microfiltered. No rBST/rBGH or growth hormones. Its looks and taste are light years away from raw milk. It is watered down and has no consistency. It is Vitamin D Milk: vitamins A and D are added to almost all dairy produce to compensate for their absence in the American diet of the Midwest.
As dietary habits are so different from those I grew up with in Italy, I inevitably make comparisons. We take so many things for granted and only notice when we are deprived of them. The thing that bothers me most is not being able to satisfy hunger with something healthy. Good, but healthy. Food’s attractiveness is also determined by knowing that it isn’t harmful for health. Many Americans seem to have forgotten this and it is of secondary importance.
But Italians shouldn’t rest on their laurels and congratulate themselves on their rich culinary heritage. We need to pass on our gastronomic culture to future generations. It is not our personal merit if we have been brought up to appreciate good food and cooking, but we have a responsibility to pass it on and ensure it is not lost. Italy has always been a leader in food as well as fashion and it is our duty to keep it that way.
It is the first evening I have dined alone after arriving at Maveric Heritage Ranch. My host Arie, has a meeting in town. As usual she was late leaving because at the last moment we realized that a sow had just given birth and had to be moved as there was a risk that the piglets might get hurt by other pigs treading clumsily around the enclosure.
I had to do the 8.30 evening round to check on the animals by myself . I must admit that I got an occasional fright when shapes moved along the path at the sound of my footsteps, the only illumination coming from the large full moon. It took me a good half hour to check both sides of the large barn dividing the farm into two areas. Altogether there are a dozen goats, about twenty laying hens, three horses and almost three hundred pigs of various breeds: Ossabaw, American Guinea Hogs, Spanish, Russian, Wessex and the special American Mulefoot Hog, distinctive for having a single solid hoof resembling that of a mule rather than a normal pig’s cloven hoof.
My life runs at a slower pace here than I was used to before; customs that were initially totally strange become a part of me. A small microuniverse made up of needs, jobs, animals, days in the open air and night-time noises.
Arie Mc Farlen built the entire farm by herself with the help of her husband and a few friends in their spare time. I could never understand how she managed to do everything on her own, given that until a few weeks before my arrival, they also had cattle, guinea fowl and other animals. And as if that was not enough, she also collaborates with Slow Food on the Ark project and endangered species.
Deciding to be a farmer is a choice that affects every other aspect of your life, it demands total dedication. It inevitably becomes the focus of your personal world, you must learn to organize your time and leave the farm during the nine hours between animal feeding times.
In her case it is perhaps no exaggeration to talk about a mission. A professional ballerina for twenty years, whose love for animals and the land led her to move to a state without much stimulation so she could try to save pig breeds. The state of South Dakota is not very aware of issues such as healthy quality food or ecology. Never mind food miles. There aren’t any restaurants interested in buying organic pork so Arie has to sell her pork to states such as Minnesota and Ohio. The state lives off monocultures of crops like corn and soybean, nearly all GM, and mainly used for animal feed, with the rest for biodiesel.
Arie Mc Farlen raises endangered breeds that are gradually disappearing because they do not meet the requirements of industrialized mass production: they produce too little meat per animal, grow too slowly and in particular, have dark meat.
“Consumers will think it has gone off”. So while we are picky victims of our ignorance, thousands of animals disappear.
We might rationally condemn this attitude, but very few people are able to adopt practical responses. Even Arie, when I ask why she puts margarine instead of butter into her fabulous banana fruit cake, tells me: “Butter tends to darken so my cake would look burned and nobody would eat it. I know it isn’t a very Slow Food approach, but it is a forced choice.”
So while we delight our visual senses, we risk losing our taste for wholesome food.
I feel it is more urgent than ever to raise people’s awareness of good food and healthy eating, introducing educational programs starting in schools.
Our increasing detachment from genuine food is leading to a divorce from nature, a lack of both visual and physical contact caused by living in a concrete environment. All we know about nature is that it is green. The dramatic result of this can be seen in our lack of respect and mistreatment of the earth. In our arrogance we feel we can commit all kinds of ignorant acts, which could be self-destructive for the human race. We approach the earth and its produce with a business perspective, finding ways of exploiting it to the maximum extent within ever shorter timeframes. We apply to agriculture the same commercial criteria that are used for any other industry, forgetting that the implications of buying a pair of jeans at a rock bottom price or a tomato are very different. The unstoppable drive for profits overwhelms us all like a 21st century disease and imposes a frenetic pace to everyday life, finally affecting those sectors where its application is dangerous. We no longer have enough time to wait for a crop to complete its natural cycle, or the humility to let it finish its course without human intervention. Our arrogance is turning huge cultivable areas to desert and eroding our Mother Earth.
We must change direction. We need to focus on restoring what has been lost: traditional knowledge, recently demonstrated to be much wiser, and agriculture based on farms, not agribusiness. Is it possible?
We could also begin to adopt a more natural pace of life than we experience today. Learn to have more patience and abandon our Western desire to have everything now.
We need to also find a way of reintroducing future generations to the countryside, providing it still exists.
I think that intercultural exchange projects and temporary work in environments where food is produced can be a helpful way to create a new sense of awareness. The program I participated in certainly succeeded in its aim: “To defend and pass on to younger generations knowledge of traditional agriculture and artisan skills, the result of centuries of history”.
It is time to begin saving the knowledge which until recently was dismissed as outdated and backward: the knowledge of our grandparents, farmers and thousands of occupations which in the space of a few decades will disappear, with nobody able to recover it.
This is why I strongly support the Ark of Knowledge.
History is being repeated but this time it isn’t Noah loading animals onto his ark. It will be us, partly driven by a survival instinct and partly by a hope for a better life for our descendants, who will load our huge ark with an invaluable wealth of knowledge and discoveries.
Rachele Ellena
Pangea - Youth Food Movement
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