The Hidden Costs of How We Eat

A conversation about food and covid with Gracy Olmstead

Our reading for this month is Michael Pollan’s essay “The Sickness in our Food Supply” and my guest is Gracy Olmstead, whose first book, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind, will come out next year, and is well worth preordering.

(Publishers decide how much of a push to place behind a book based on pre-orders, so you can be a big help to an author you like by ordering ahead of time).

This week we’re talking about how our own households’ cooking and grocery shopping habits have changed over the course of the pandemic, and touching on what systemic changes we hope for.

Leah: Gracy, thank you so much for joining me this month. Can you give us a little portrait of your own farming background? And how has your family’s relationship with food changed during the pandemic?

In my house, we laid in canned and frozen food in February (much of which we’ve eaten by now!). When the flour disappeared from stores, I bought 50 pounds of King Arthur flour from a restaurant supply store. My husband approved the purchase, but assumed I was ordering five 10-pound bags—the single, massive bag was a much harder haul. It was a big moment when the flour sack finally was smaller than our baby, and we’ve just gotten to the bottom of it.

We signed up for a farmshare as much to make sure we were insulated from further supply chain disruption as to support local farmers. We’d definitely do it again in non-pandemic times. I liked getting the push to cook with veggies I hadn’t tried before and to look to new recipes.

Gracy:  I’m so happy and honored to be a part of this conversation! I grew up in rural Idaho, where my grandfather and great-grandfather were farmers. They had a small calf-cow operation, and grew a variety of crops. But my family’s farmland was sold back in 2010—no one else in our family was interested in farming (at the time, at least), and it was too much for my grandfather to keep up by himself after my great-grandfather died. 

My husband and I both came from homeschool families who regularly bought in bulk, cooked from scratch, and scrimped pennies. We both grew up in a culture of home preserving and seasonal eating, and my husband generally tries to make sure we have a good amount of venison in our freezer each fall. So even though we stocked up on a few things in February and March, I don’t think our relationship to food changed a whole lot early in the pandemic. In late February, I think, I made sure we had a good supply of dried beans, rice, and some basic canned goods. I actually got a wheat grinder for my birthday two years ago, and so we already had a bag of wheat berries in the chest freezer that we were using regularly, and a jar of sourdough starter in our fridge. So thankfully, we didn’t have to worry too much when both commercial yeast and flour grew scarce! (Toilet paper was another matter.) 

By the time quarantine started, I had already started planting seeds in our garden, and we were harvesting radishes and some early greens by mid-to-late March, if I’m remembering correctly. We ended up having a pretty solid supply of fresh veggies and greens through the spring and summer as a result, which we supplemented with store produce when needed. I’m still a novice gardener, and several of my plantings didn’t turn out as well as I would’ve liked. But my sister-in-law and mother-in-law have fantastic green thumbs, and we ended up swapping produce or gifting each other baskets of veggies through the spring. That (along with the copious amounts of banana bread I ended up baking) was one of the greatest pleasures of those spring months. 

I’d love to do a winter CSA this year, if we’re able to afford it. One thing we invested in this fall that I’m really excited about was a quarter cow from a local farmer. It’s a really great way to get high-quality, grass-fed meat at a price that’s actually affordable. My husband’s parents also raised about 100 or so broilers (meat chickens) this summer. My husband helped butcher about 30 of them, and we got to keep several of the butchered, whole chickens in payment. It’s these sorts of highly localized, barter-and-trade systems of food production and sharing that often get me excited.

Leah: I’m glad to hear about your quarter cow! A chef friend of mine just shared the disturbing statistic that just 13 plants process over half of all American beef (and when it comes to lamb, just three plants process more than half of the animals). This kind of consolidation is hailed as a triumph of efficiency, until things shift, and suddenly it’s a massive vulnerability.

We often think of progress opening up more options for us, but while technological progress may have that effect, moral progress sometimes involves relinquishing a capacity we’re misusing. Pollan talks about the changes in our agriculture making “meat, which for most of human history has been a luxury, a cheap commodity available to just about all Americans.” 

He’s suspicious that this is a false economy—we can’t really afford this much meat. The cost is in human and animal suffering.

I hear the same question raised about airplane tickets, gig economy convenience, etc. We feel prosperous because the real cost has been hidden. How do we ask people to shift to a “poorer” feeling lifestyle? Especially when the people doing the asking are the ones prosperous enough to still be able to buy the luxury at its “true” price?

Gracy: Choice is perhaps one of our most prized American freedoms. It is very hard to ask people to give up things that are good or pleasurable, even if it’s in order to seek out some better, longer-term (or hidden) good. “Modesty”—the virtue which suggests we ought to moderate our passions and appetites in the service of some higher good—is decidedly out of fashion. 

Parenting, perhaps, is one aspect of American life in which we still willingly embrace and promote self-sacrifice and limits in the service of a higher good (raising baby humans is incredibly fun and exciting, but it’s also hard work!). The more consumptive, choice-oriented attitude we carry into other aspects of modern life stems in part, I think, from the fact that we no longer see ourselves as “obliged” to a certain mode of action in those areas of life. We more often see ourselves as detached and autonomous, free from obligation. Yet farmer-essayist Wendell Berry suggests in several of his writings that the earth is like a body, of which we are part—and that we must always be seeking the wellbeing of the other parts of this body. 

“The parts are healthy insofar as they are joined harmoniously to the whole,” Berry writes in “The Body and the Earth.” “Healing... complicates the system by opening and restoring connections among the various parts—in this way restoring the ultimate simplicity of their union.”

So I think the first challenge, in exhorting people to shift to a “poorer” lifestyle, lies in helping more Americans see their lives as obligated and indebted to a whole web of life that extends beyond themselves. This fosters an overarching narrative and a moral imagination that can inspire action and change. The second challenge, of course, lies in empowering people—no matter their income or lifestyle—to become better stewards of that web of life.

The answer to the first challenge must lie, at least in part, in reconnecting those dismembered strands of life and connection. I love farmers’ markets, urban and community gardening, school initiatives aimed at nutritional education, and the growth of CSAs for this reason. Each is a small but important effort aimed at helping people see more clearly how their lives are connected to the earth and its produce—and giving them the tools they need to feel like members once more. Books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Cooked, as well as Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, are also interesting, I think, in the way they help “foodies” connect their culinary passions with ecological responsibility.

Next week, Gracy and I will conclude our conversation, moving from the personal to the systemic.

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How have you been making changes to your eating and purchasing in the midst of the pandemic?

Are there modern conveniences you’ve found it necessary to take a step back from, because the hidden cost outweighed the outward convenience?

(All book links this week are to Bookshop, not Amazon)

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