One of the reasons we moved to the farm was in search of a slower paced life that allowed time for “one another”.  It was seeking meaningful relationships and finding the time to invest in other people’s lives.  In short it was looking for community.  Not the old Cheers theme of community, you know the one, “Sometimes you want to go where everyone knows your name” – it was more than that.  It was to know, more than to be known.  It was to serve but at the same time having the stability and certainty that others would also serve you in a time of need.

As I compared those goals that we had as a family to the stated goals of the “Slow Food” movement web site; Slow Food USA, I found myself in substantial agreement with many of the ideas they put forward.  Check out the Slow Food Manifesto:

• Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.
• We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.
• To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.
• A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.
• May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.
• Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food.
• Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.
• In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.
• That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects?
• Slow Food guarantees a better future.
• Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters who can help turn this (slow) motion into an international movement, with the little snail as its symbol.

That is a pretty fair statement of the conditions of the modern man both churched and un-churched as they say.  But in reading this I was faced with several questions.  Isn’t that what we lost when the South was conquered by the Union?  Isn’t fast food the crowning symbol of progress – the promised utopia the industrialist, forced upon a once contented slow paced Southern people?  Is the manifesto really “progressive” or is it merely recognizing some truth prophesied of long ago.  As I processed these thoughts I reached for my copy of “I’ll Take My Stand“.  I’ll give you a quote from the introduction by Louis D. Rubin, JR. which I think speaks to the heart of the fast food, fast life issue many are seeking to overcome today.  In 1962 he wrote his first introduction for the second edition:

…the Agrarians were not economist.  They were humanist…  And the real values they were asserting in 1930 were not those of “material well-being” or of neo-confederate nostalgia, but of thoughtful men who were very much concerned with the erosion of the quality of individual life by forces of industrialization and the uncritical worship of progress as an end in itself….

Humanism, properly speaking, is not an abstract system, but a culture, the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel.  It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition.  And, in the concrete, we believe that this, the genuine humanism, was rooted in the agrarian life of the older south and of other parts of the country that shared in such a tradition… We can not recover our native humanism by adopting some standard of taste that is critical enough to question the contemporary arts but not critical enough to question the social and economic life which is their ground.

This in a nut shell is where Slow Food will fail.  It wants us to pretend to slow down and attend our Slow Food meetings on Tuesday night, but the reality of our age is that all those who do will be at the drive through window for breakfast as they rush off to their city jobs on Wednesday morning.  We can’t be critical of our cuisine without recognizing the economy that drives it.  It is one thing to call for local food, organic food, or “humane” food; but it is another thing to live in an economy that allows one to pay the farmer for his labors.

I guess the short of it is this; we not only need sustainable farms but we need a sustainable way of life.  This global economy consumes us until we are gone and then it sets it’s sights on our children.  The Twelve Southerners fromVanderbuilt detailed our departure from a sustainable life and foretold with alarming accuracy the challenges we face today when the work was originally published in 1930.  The Twelve Southerners were able to put forward a holistic work examining multiple facets of our culture and the challenges industrialization brought in the areas of art, education, economics, politics, family life and structure, and many more areas that are tied directly to the community we no longer enjoy.

It is certain that our diet has changed, but what is less evident is the changes that take place within a man, his beliefs which make up his faith and practices.  To say it simply, the reason we have a hard time finding community today is our priorities have changed.  They are not based on our belief in God, but what brings us pleasure in this economy.  Or as some have said, it is based on what is good for our “personal peace and affluence”.  The real challenge lies ahead.  It is one thing to see the challenges, but it is another thing to swim upstream to attempt to make the changes needed to reclaim a sustainable life.  Many will fall pray to the allure of money and the wealth this economy can promise.  But the answer is not to have more money to invest in making changes.  I would bet that Slow Food USA has a good fund raising machine.  But yet the reality of their lives, even the structure of the organization, works against their stated goals.  The answer is to be a people who are not swayed by money, but driven by principles.  God places value on family and relationships long before wealth.  To finish the quote from Rubin:

It was not their (the agrarians) assumptions that one first achieved material well-being, then used it to further “the more spiritual side of a good, full and happy life”; on the contrary, they insisted that any attempt to divorce economics and labor from “the more spiritual side” of one’s life brutalized the labor and cheapened the humanity.

Let us not sell our soul to a faceless nameless corporate economy that is always promising morebetterfaster of what ever it is we think we need.  This new economy, this idea of slow food or eating local produce, is really the old economy, of relationships, time redemption, and of being close to the land that God gave as a gift to sustain our very lives.  It’s agrarian at its core and it’s hard work.  But, it is worth every moment when you consider the community being developed as we order our lives in a simple honest and just manner.

Feed corn, winter snow and boyhood farm work are beautiful sights!  The boys went up to a new feed store that just opened up in town.  They bought some bags of corn for $5.75 for a 50 lb bag.  They were doing good to get the trailer unloaded and the feed put away in the barn with the down pour of snow we were having.  After they unload and stack feed bags, they bolt in the back door wanting hot cocoa.  They take the layers of  coats and gloves off  as I fix them a warm mug of raw milk hot cocoa…something our family loves on cold days like today!  I love hearing them talk about how many pounds they lifted and watch them compare muscles.  Boyhood farm work is so good for young men!

If we were real agrarians, we would have a corn crib full of corn and hay piled high in our hay loft that we grew in our fields this summer.   But we aren’t experienced agrarians yet.  We’ve experienced a lot of what not to do.  (like the example we give here)

When you start living on a farm, you quickly realize how inadequate your farming efforts really are.  It’s good to put your hand to the plow so to speak and start somewhere and be grateful for the work you do get done.  However, as spring turns into summer….summer to fall….and fall to winter….the grass disappears, it gets cold and your animals get hungry!  A real farmer would plan to store up enough food for the winter.  Just like a real farm wife would still have a pantry full of wonderful food stores conveniently stored away for the winter blasts.

We’re grateful for the lessons we are learning on the farm.  We’re grateful for the challenge, for the growing and the stretching.  We’ve come to understand the completeness and depth of the words provision and preparation.  Our 24 hr. Stuff-Mart cultural mindset is completely opposite of the agrarian life where forethought and preparation are vital to survival.

Ideally, we would love to find a resource for buying bulk corn and mixing it ourselves.  It’s too cold to think about that now though.  We’re collecting the last pieces of firewood and hoping to hold out until spring so we can start over and try preparing for winter again!

I found some other “When It’s Cold Outside” posts I’ve written in the past.  Here are just a few.  There are a ton more:

When it’s Cold Outside and the Natives are Restless

The Not So Glorious Agrarian Life in the Winter Time

Ice Weather

Farming Frustrations

Farm Boy’s Birthday Saga

While I’m very thankful for the tractor and all that it can do - the actual impact of progressive farming was exactly opposite of what this old film clip portrays.  In fact, Beth recently quoted from “The Hind Tit“, Andrew Nelson Lytle essay published in 1930 on this very topic.  Check out this little clip for the story that was sold:

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 Then you might contrast that with this quote or the entire essay to see what was purchased:

Industrialize the farm; be progressive; drop old-fashioned ways and adopt scientific methods. These slogans are powerfully persuasive and should be, but are not, regarded with the most deliberate circumspection, for under the guise of strengthening the farmer in his way of life they are advising him to abandon it and become absorbed.  Such admonition coming from the quarters of the enemy is encouraging to the landowner in one sense only: it assures him he has something left to steal.  Through its philosophy of Progress it is committing a mortal sin to persuade farmers that they can grow wealthy by adopting its methods.  A farm is not a place to grow wealthy; it is a place to grow corn.

 It is telling him that he can bring the city way of living to the country and that he will like it when it gets there.  His sons and daughters, thoroughly indoctrinated with these ideas at state normals, return and further upset his equilibrium by demanding the things they grew to like in town.  They urge him to make the experiment, with threats of an early departure from his hearth and board.  Under such pressure it is no wonder that the distraught countryman, pulled at from all sides, contemplates a thing he by nature is loath to attempt . . . experimentation. 

 If it were an idle experiment, there would be no harm in such an indulgence; but it is not idle.  It has a price and, like everything else in the industrial world, the price is too dear.  In exchange for the bric-a-brac culture of progress he stands to lose his land, and losing that, his independence, for the vagaries of its idealism assume concrete form in urging him to over-produce his money crop, mortgage his land, and send his daughters to town to clerk in ten-cent stores, that he may buy the products of the power Age and keep its machines turning.

The entire essay can be read here.  For the record I do not believe there is a more revealing work anywhere that has so completely captured the decline of the family and the family farm in the last 150 years.  I don’t believe it is about technology and the age of the tractor as much as it is the philosophy that came with the equipment.

Thomas Moore, the chairman for the Southern National Congress, wrote a great essay late last month, that is well worth sharing.  He gives a great high level fly over of the root problem in the corporate food industry.  It doesn’t matter if the new laws, such as the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2009 or the Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act, intend to curtail an individual’s right to purchase, trade, or consume healthy food grown from their own land, that is the effect.

In fact, we are already seeing many tyrannical “enforcement” activities on other less intrusive laws that are being used to intimidate and curtail the efforts of small family farms.  The existence of an organization called the “Farm to Consumer Foundation” who’s sole purpose is protecting small family farms against this abridgment of our rights by the federal and state government should tell us something of the times in which we live.

In fact Mr. Moore, declares that in these times planting our garden is a revoutionary act:

Today I committed a revolutionary act. It had nothing to do with firearms or marksmanship training. I didn’t organize a protest march or join the Underground. In fact, it had nothing to do with politics, except in the broadest possible sense. But it was revolutionary nonetheless. Today I finished spring planting.

How can such a benign activity be revolutionary, you may ask. In a sane and normal world it wouldn’t be. People have grown their own food from the beginning of the world. Agriculture has always been the foundation of civilization and the farmer a benefactor of mankind. But today we don’t live in a sane and normal world. The criminal Regime we live under is not content just to rob us of our liberty, our property, our dignity and humanity. It also seeks to control us by controlling the food supply. It seeks to strip us of food self-sufficiency and make us dependent, first on the central state, through food stamps, for example; and second, on the state’s real masters, the giant agri-businesses who determine Federal food policy. I call this process food fascism.

Read more of this revolutionary article here and commit your own revolutionary act by planting your garden today!

Here’s a Food INC. movie review from some friends of ours:

Well, we just got back from the movie. Their answers to the problem seemed to rely too much on government, interestingly the same people they place a large portion of the blame on. I have put a review on my blog here. 

Update from Paul:

Tony, did indeed post a great review of the movie that I was intending to comment on – but haven’t had the time.  My thought was, that it seems like Fresh, The Movie, is going to be the answer movie and Food, INC. is the movie that highlights all the trouble!

It would be great to hear if anyone else has seen either movie.  We are going to be hosting a local screen of Fresh as soon as we can make the arrangements.  We’ll let you know what we think.

Ok – so in the absence of much writing, maybe you’d like to see what we’ve been reading.  In addition to our family reading story, Every Farm Tells a Story by Jerry Apps, and my private study time book, Arator, by John Taylor of Caroline here are a few links to some good on-line articles.

1. How do you turn a chicken into a nugget?  Here is the answer.
2. Even Walmart is able to read the dollar signs on the real food movement – no more rBST in their milk.
3. And to wrap it up, here is a great article about Joel Salatin.  He is featured in both the films we posted about recently: Fresh the Movie, and Food, INC.

Here is another movie that just opened on the 12th, called Food, Inc.  We haven’t seen the entire movie yet, but we will.  Based on this interview, I’m sure there are parts of the movie that we will disagree with, such as a solution to the problem which includes “Changing Walmart” or other corporations.  Having said that, it sounds like the producer does a great job of identifing the problem with our food supply.

Check out this interview:

Then you can check out the trailer of the film here:

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Then you watch the trailer and buy your tickets here: http://www.foodincmovie.com/