This article was the second volunteer article, published in the January 15, 2012 Mansfield News Journal, Mansfield, OH as an Opinion Shaper article.
FOOD CAN BE FRESH OFF THE FARM . . . OR NOT
Although I lived on a farm, I still had a job—at the time working for the USDA as a poultry inspector. I came home from work one day and, on impulse, stopped by a grocery store and bought a nicely marbled steak which I prepared for dinner. I picked a vine-ripened tomato from the garden and a couple of ears of corn and anticipated a nice little feast.
The steak would be tender because of the marbling of fat and the tomato would taste sweet because it was vine ripened, and the corn would taste fresh because I had just pulled the ears off the stalks.
I slathered a thin layer of mustard on the steak for added flavor and put it under the oven broiler for a few minutes each side. The tomatoes were sliced and seasoned a little, and the corn was husked and boiled to doneness and coated with butter and a sprinkling of salt.
I could easily cut the steak with a fork. The tomatoes tasted good on a slice of bread that was spread with a thin layer of salad dressing (my preference). The corn had been picked at the right time, so it was tender and flavorful. It all tasted like heaven.
There is a value to living on a farm where everything is fresh. I happened to live on a chicken farm at the time where fresh eggs were in abundance.
Living on a farm means working daily at the chores of feeding the livestock, gathering eggs, milking cows, fixing up anything broken, plowing up the ground in the spring and buying seed for crops, weeding the garden every few days for so, watering the plants during a dry spell, and making sure animals like rabbits, groundhogs or birds, don’t raid the garden or the fields.
There is a sense of freshness in the air, much of the time. Other scents may pervade the atmosphere when the animal pens are cleaned out. There are pros and cons all over the place, but one gets used to it when one is addicted to country living.
It has to be mentioned that this is where all your food comes from, whether it be a small farm or a huge conglomerate which is in dairy, meat and crop production. Those packages of beef, pork, veal, lamb, chicken, turkey, fresh sausage, smoked sausage, and the delicious rotisserie chicken that some grocery stores prepare—they all come from a farm.
Then you have apples, pears, peaches, cherries—and in warmer climates oranges, lemons, bananas; the list goes on.
My Dad was a great gardener. We moved from farm to farm over the years, and at each farm he laid out a garden to grow lettuce, peas, sweet corn, tomatoes, carrots, celery, lima beans, string beans, bush beans, pole beans, cabbage, red beets, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cucumbers, cantaloupe, squash, muskmelon, watermelon, and ground cherries. He was careful to properly enrich the soil, and spent time hoeing out the weeds—and we kids were involved in that too.
But when the agricultural industry gets larger to feed millions of people, and to deliver to the far corners of the worldwide marketplace, there are other factors that weigh in with the growing, processing, and marketing of food.
For sales appeal, food has to be kept fresh and safe, and look good to the discriminating eye and appetite. In addition, there is canned, frozen and dried food which maintains longevity.
Trying to keep it fresh can be tricky when food is handled by the ton and truckload. There are ways to maintain quality, but it may include inventiveness on the part of the mega businesses, especially when food has to travel thousands of miles.
There are a lot of people involved in getting food to your table who plow the soil, put down fertilizer, plant seed, cultivate, irrigate, harvest (which may include migrant workers), prepare the food for transport to factories or markets, package, determine the price and advertise. And when food goes to a factory for canning, freezing, and processing, there is a whole new dynamic involved in the process.
Processing food involves the use of additional ingredients to give it the proper color, proper consistency, proper taste and nutrition. When food is heated, for example, it can lose a lot of its nutritional value, so that the lost nutrition has to be replaced by added ingredients.
There is a whole barrage of science and technology in use when handling food in order to deliver it to its intended destination in close proximity to the nutritional value it started out with. The duty of the food shopper is to be educated in what that value is.
Maybe this article is a little early to talk about growing food, but food is growing somewhere in the world during all the seasons of the year, and being delivered to a myriad of destinations worldwide 24/7. Bon appétit!
