Hello and welcome

So what's a nice girl from New York City (by way of Boston, South Africa, Uganda, and, originally, Long Island, though I don't like to admit it) doing in Farm Country?

The quick answer is that I wanted to learn where my food's from-- really learn it, understand the labor involved in growing and harvesting, and transporting, food from farm fields to my dinner table. The origin of this desire, how I got from a non-profit desk job in New York City to part-time work on a farm in Columbia County, New York, is a much longer story.

In February of 2007 (only a year and a half ago?), on a weekend cross-country skiing trip to Vermont, I broke my wrist as I tried to negotiate an ice patch. (I was a rookie. Hopefully such things wouldn't happen to me now.) Back in New York, my orthopedist set the bone and told me that he thought I should get a bone density scan, since he only saw this particular kind of break in women with osteoporosis.

Well, long story short, I did indeed have osteoporosis. After numerous blood tests, consulations with two different doctors, and an endoscopy, I learned that it was caused by Celiac Disease, an autoimmune disorder that's triggered by the ingestion of gluten proteins. This disorder was also the reason I've spent my life with periodic anemia, very low energy, constant digestive issues, and, in a newer but very scary development, a phenomenon known as "Celiac Brain Fog". (It made me miss whole conversations and forget things like my fiance's last name.) Here's a link to the Celiac Disease Foundation if you want to know more.

Pretty serious for a disease caused by the food I was eating. Gluten is present in wheat, rye, and barley, so every time I ate bread, pasta, cookies, cakes, beer, etc., I was triggering a systemic autoimmune reaction that, in the short run, made me tired, and in the long run was destroying my small intestine and my ability to absorb nutrients from any food I ate. The only thing to do now was eliminate all gluten from my diet. Immediately.

Easier said than done. When I started to look, I discovered gluten-- usually wheat or barley-- everywhere. It's in soy sauce. It's in packaged sauces and soups. Even gluten-free foods, like nuts and some grains, are often processed or packaged on machinery that also processes wheat products, so those are off-limits as well. (The gluten is on everything. Trust me. I've accidentally ingested gluten that way and gotten sick.) Of course, a variety of gluten-free products have come on the market recently, as the food industry has noticed that gluten-free can be profitable. But a lot of this stuff is expensive, and has essentially replaced chemical junk containing gluten with chemical junk that's gluten free. Read labels some time and tell me if you can even pronounce half the stuff in the ingredients lists.

The best thing to do, it seemed, was to go back to really basic cooking-- lots of fresh vegetables, grains cooked from scratch, and the elimination of meals in a vacuum pack. And so for the first time ever, I had to learn to cook-- and pay attention to what I ate, noticing flavors and ingredients. And I started to notice the difference between the vegetable-shaped cardboard you get in most supermarkets and fresh produce from the farmers' market. Besides, once I started looking at the labels and ingredients of the processed, convenience food I'd been eating before, I realized that there was very little food in my food.

While all this was happening in my little corner of the world, a growing chorus of writers and environmentalists were sounding the alarm about our unsustainable food system and the consequences that factory farms and processed foods have for our environment and our health. I was particularly influenced by Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and the musings of Tom Philpott on the Grist Magazine web site. I started reading everything I could about food policy and the dilemma of sustainability.

There are so many issues caught up with the methods we choose to feed ourselves: the pesticides that poison the earth. The factory farms that raise miserable animals on a diet of corn, which they were never meant to eat, and them pump them full of antibiotics to counteract the health effects of such an unnatural life. The exploitation of immigrant labor in slaughterhouses and other food processing plants. The more I read and thought about these issues, the more I wanted to adhere to the local food movement-- ensuring that my food did not have to travel across the world to get to my plate.

But the issue is not that simple, and the paradox comes down to this: local food buying and the elimination of factory farms would make our food system healthier, more sustainable, and more humane. But how do we get there from here?

The green revolution is rightly hailed as a miracle that allowed many countries in Asia (including India) to feed themselves. Only now are we learning the consequences of green revolution practices: farmers dependent on the market to buy seeds that cannot be saved year to year. Reliance on pesticides that are sickening people living in agricultural areas. And on and on. (See here for some examples.) But what would happen if, one day, we simply stopped using these modern methods and everyone went back to organic farming on family-sized farms? Actually, there's a lot of controversy about that, but most people agree that, at least in the short term, yields would fall and people would go hungry. Like it or not, we've created a huge behemoth of a system that we now depend on for our very survival. How do we get out of this mess?

Obviously, I'm oversimplifying many issues. The food system mess we're in is much too complicated to be summarized in one blog post. I haven't even touched on the huge role of "King Corn" in this system, or food aid to poor countries, or the contributions our food system makes to global warming, or the train wreck that is, was, and always will be the federal Farm Bill. But it does give you an idea of what I'm struggling with.

It seemed logical to me to try to explore some of these issues by beginning at the beginning-- learning how to actually grow food in the way I think it should be grown. Organically. Sustainably.

In the meantime, I had recently gotten married and my husband and I were looking for a new life. We were tired of the New York crowds, pollution, noise, and lack of bicycling options. (Personally, I don't like darting through Broadway traffic, dodging buses and breathing truck fumes, at 25 miles an hour. But that's just me.) Moreover, since I went gluten free I was feeling like a new person-- one who really didn't want to spend her life behind a desk in a climate-controlled environment. So we found a farm I could work at (not for pay, but never mind), in a place we thought we could live. And here we are, at least for now, in Columbia County, New York, about two and a half hours north of the city and pretty close to Albany. It's as good a place as any to start looking at the food system.

I don't know what I'm going to find, but I'm writing this blog to invite readers to come on this adventure with me. I'll try to describe the smell of tomatoes in the greenhouse, and the satisfying crunch of fresh snap peas. And explain about what vegetables are available when and how your mixed greens are grown. And read and think about any comments you choose to send me.

I started this journey because my health depended on it, but I'm discovering the joy in good food and heightened awareness. In the coming months I hope to share that.