by Eric Blokland
Writing from the Northeast Kingdom, Garret Keizer recently contemplated the crisis in the Episcopal Church over gay rights. He concludes with this passage:

What the church in crisis shows to an America in crisis is how very silly we can start to look when we debate such important but minor “sacraments” as gun rights and copyrights and abortion rights and not the major sacraments of bread and roses and building the kind of society in which a woman’s reproductive freedom is not pinched in the forceps of her income bracket and a young man can find better employment than supplying his name to a murder board.

What the comparison captures is the casting of our cultural focus: we’re too fixated on a crisis-culture, too inculcated with a minute-to-minute run-down on what debacle razed the coast of Indonesia, or how many dozens of Pakistanis the Israel army killed, or what set of diplomatic repartees were traded between Iran and the US with all the finesse of the year’s first moon-shine barn-stomp. I don’t mean to be callous or flippant regarding the familial and social tolls collected in human life by these disasters; I mean only to suggest that we’re so busy rubber-necking the news that we’re prone to miss the forest for the trees.

Who has, and doesn’t? Let the Frankfurt school and neo-Marxists hash out their paper battles in the journals of academia - journals that would do just as much good were they folded in to paper air-planes and launched at the sun, as far as I’m concerned. The fundamental question remains, and may be a fixture as long as we focus our attentions everywhere - anywhere - but directly at it.

Who eats, and who doesn’t? Who struggles to find water, and who needn’t? Who sleeps in the rain? Who suffers the pain and disfigurement of elephantiasis, and who drops $500 a month on health insurance so s/he might purchase a pharmaceutical fix?

Much of those who struggle to find water, food, shelter and good health reside out of the looming borders of the United States - borders that can be understood, alternatively, as buffers of exoneration for many of us within. But let’s not forget the remnants of Hurricane Katrina - and by remnants, I mean the permanently dislocated poor who live in trailers hundreds of miles from their former homes and lives. Or the hundreds of thousands of native Americans struggling through poverty only to discover their lands are carcinogenic; or the millions of homeless increasingly unable to find safe harbor, or those “illegal persons” who crossed into the southern US and hole up in those fetid corners of industrial townships we’re mostly content to ignore.

Most importantly, let’s not forget the ways that these global and national issues play out here, in central Vermont. As the popularity of local foods and farmers’ markets soars, so does the price of heating oil; as our awareness of climate change climbs almost daily, so does the price of bread - a loaf now tops out around $6.

But it is also here, between the price of wheat and the price of a loaf of bread, that some of the most exciting work on affordable food occurs. We in the Northeast have become accustomed to importing our wheat from the Midwestern US, or Canada, or even the Middle East. The cost of transporting wheat is wrapped up in the price we pay. Our local bread is local only insofar as the bakery is located within a bikeable distance, not because the ingredients were grown here in Vermont.
Except that, in the past few years, a few Vermont farms - slowly, carefully - have begun to grow wheat, oats, and other grains. Butterworks Farm, perhaps best known for its cream-top yogurt, has experimented with wheat for years now, and even had enough of a crop to sell to Red Hen for a special localvore loaf during the 2007 Go-Local challenge. Tio Grain Farm in Shoreham recently received grant money to explore grain crops for various oils, and the Trukenbrod bakery uses wheat grown close to their business.

I work on a farm in Barre Town, about five miles from the localvore capital of the Northeast, Montpelier. It is a vegetable farm, and last year I counted 60 different crops - a practice that the farm has kept up for three decades now. This year, with the energies and enthusiasm of a new apprentice, the farm cultivates a crop of grain among its traditional vegetables: wheat, soybeans, oats, flax and quinoa - not enough to expect local quinoa at the Hunger Mountain Coop this fall, but the prospect of local grains in future years is no longer a pipe-dream.

Our settler ancestors certainly saw local wheat as more than a pipe-dream. Vermont was once the breadbasket of New England, supplying wheat and barley and corn to Boston and New York. Frontier expansion and a vaster transportation infrastructure allowed Midwestern growers to corner the market (and catapulted Vermont’s bovine population over that of its human population), and Vermont hasn’t had a grain crop to speak of since.

So while the cool, sometimes stiflingly wet climate keeps Vermont grains under the thumb of the drier, more cost-effective Midwest, the costly, sometimes stiflingly expensive fuel market helps bring all options back to the table - including local grain.

A few farmers growing wheat in Vermont is certainly a step (though not as strong a step as a lot of farmers growing wheat in Vermont); bringing our consumption back home is a means by which we can ensure that we’re linked directly to our growers, and, in turn, ensure that we’re less directly tied to the rising costs of long-transport shipping.

Local wheat is by no stretch of the imagination an entire solution: homelessness, poverty, hunger and sickness won’t disappear with cheaper bread, and the discrepancies between haves and have-nots will remain the sordid underbelly of our pastoral state. So while local wheat may bring some amount of food-security and lowered (or at least stable) prices to bread in Vermont, I’d go so far as to say that it may be even worse, even more dangerously naive, to take this baby step only to sit back for some smug back-rubbing because we’re such scions of self-sufficiency.
Let’s rub our backs - backs that should (should is definitively the right word) ache with the soreness of well-used muscles - as we figure out how to keep our water public, and rebuild the topsoil that’s never truly been the same since the early Europeans set foot in Vermont. Let’s settle into some smug self-congratulations after we’ve ensured that all families can expect to stay reasonably warm through the winter months, and well-fed throughout the year. A burgeoning wheat crop may be in our future, but let’s keep working to ensure our daily bread.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Perspectives, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.