Farming is Cooking. Cooking is Farming. By Andrew Toothacker. April 26, 2024

There isn’t any culinary world I want to live in that isn’t directly connected to production. After a decade of working in fine dining restaurants, country clubs, hipster cafes, nouveau steakhouses, an institutional kitchen, and as a cook at a Buddhist meditation center, I feel I've seen what the food system has to offer to a range of concepts in the prepared foods world. This food system produces and sells largely the same commodities on merit of a sales person’s fabricated loyalty to a slow moving shell game of brandnames. At each of these kitchens, the same “product” comes in through the back door and depends upon the cooking abilities present to make the prepared food concept come to life. The ennui of playing make believe with a customer’s food and money made industry life unsustainable for me. Even restaurants at the pinnacle of farm to table dining have substantially larger invoices coming off the truck through the backdoor than they do from local farmers coming through the front door.

The food system producing the vast majority of what we eat is an anti-competitive world operating at full opacity. This food system is much dirtier than we’d like to believe. 2019 saw 2,673,702 million pounds of meat get recalled because of physical contaminants and meat-borne illnesses (this is, by the way, not an issue within the world of local family owned slaughterhouses and butcher shops.) Our food system is also extremely wasteful - some 145 billion meals in the US alone get thrown away every year.

These are the resulting traits of increasingly consolidated food sources and the all gas no brakes trajectory we’re taking towards food monopolies. In the US, just four firms handle 85% of beef and 67% of the pork according to the USDA. This kind of consolidation works to further separate humans from food sources in both labor and as end “consumers.” Living separately from the origins of the food that we eat three times a day amounts to a real loss of connectivity with the world we live in. We mourn this whether we know it or not, and I believe it’s a serious layer missing on a societal level from the wellbeing of our general mental health.

The more I farmed and cooked with things we produced through agricultural practices we felt comfortable with, the more I realized how direct the connection is between the quality of the practice and the quality of the food. We’ve become socialized to think that all raw foods are the same and that only the good cooks get to eat the good food. In reality, as we become better farmers, the cooking gets easier. For example, with heritage pork that gets raised on pasture and fed grains grown in Maine I don’t need to make a sauce to add flavor and mask dryness. A pork leg steak with salt and some dried herbs over coals on the grill makes a meal I can proudly serve to my friends and family.

I don’t offer this contrasting vision of small scale agriculture and farm dinners against the beastly natures of the “free market” food system that we heavily subsidize with our tax dollars as a solution to the problems at large. But more so a reminder that we aren’t powerless when it comes to what we put in our bodies. We do have the agency and the capacity to seek and discover foods that make us feel more human in any sense that we may need. There is hardly a daily choice that reverberates so deeply as what we eat and while Tyson, Cargill, JBS, Marfrig, and Hormel, may salivate over a population with limited food choices, family farms like ours will stubbornly keep producing a wide variety of fresh and delicious foods and continue offering them to anyone who wants them.