This Little Piggy Went to the Market – #FarmToPork

I am not a country girl. I don’t even like nature (I value it but I don’t want to loll about in it). I wouldn’t say I’m high maintenance as much as I suffer from a phobia of dirt and bad smells. This is also why I’m not a city girl. I’m what you might call a mid-sized-city-that-feels-like-a-small-town girl. 

I went to a farm once when I was a kid. It was somewhere around Roanoke, Virginia. I was spending the night with a friend whose name escapes me now. I do remember tagging along on her farm chores. The pungent smell of wet barn hay takes me back there. Her mom let me milk a cow. By hand. Just for kicks. Let me assure you that neither I nor the cow enjoyed it. I can still feel the warm squishy teat in my hand and was reminded of this sight and sensation the first time I used an electric breast pump. Suffice it to say that the family got some laughs while trying to give me the full farm experience.

I haven’t been to a farm since.

‘Til now.

I worked with the Animal Agriculture Alliance as a consultant and blogger to follow along on a Farm to Pork journey. I was compensated as a consultant, marking the intersection of my marketing and blogging worlds. I completed my contractor duties and had no obligation to blog about the experience. But I feel compelled to.

Let’s just get a few things out of the way, shall we?

I eat meat. I cook meat. I also eat vegetables, fruit, pie, and ice cream. 

My romanticized notions of farming are fine for waxing idealistically, but the small, local operation ain’t enough to feed a family, much less provide for college educations like the farmers I met. 

The are various paradigms of farming and myriad ways to affordably and safely feed our nation. I pick and choose my battles in all aspects of life, whether it’s food, travel, clothing, anything consumable. I recycle and walk but still fly in planes and buy clothes from the Gap. Color me a hypocrite. It’s easy to become overwhelmed and paralyzed when trying to be responsible and PC. Instead, I do what I can.

First and foremost, farming produces a safe food supply for our nation while providing a living for farmers. We rely on farmers to provide safe, plentiful, affordable food. I feel better knowing that there is genuine love and care put into the pigs that are sent to market. I can incontrovertibly declare this of the farmers I met. Contract farming seems like a brilliant concept to allow family farms to continue their legacy while earning a steady income with little risk. This was a new idea in my limited farm vernacular. 

There are many pillars that comprise the building blocks of our food sources, and I fear it’s nearly impossible to make them all jive in harmony. Animal welfare. Organic. GMOs. Migrant labor. Fair wages. Food safety. Local. Natural. Worker safety. Subsidies. Environment. It doesn’t mean we toss up our hands in defeat. We trudge forward, learning, questioning, tweaking.

I offer my thanks to Prestage Farms and Smithfield for opening their doors to us. They were gracious, honest to a fault, good natured, and kind. The whole food conversation is teeming with heated policy discussions and incendiary politics. Yet, there is a human being touching every thread of those thoughts and ideas that shape our views on the food chain and supply. It’s easy to separate the person from the product in an idealized debate. Food bullies too easily degenerate such discussions to wanton diatribes with no firsthand experience to understand the whole picture. I’m raising my hand here, guilty as charged. But on this tour I saw farm families firsthand, and what I saw touched me and expanded my own admittedly closed mind.

I have a lot to learn. We all do. This farm tour was a start.

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