Small Victories Should be Celebrated

Like using all the vegetables in last week's CSA share. Including the turnip greens that came attached to the turnips. My German immigrant great-grandmother would be so proud of me. (And my mother, who left the farm for college and never looked back, is rather bemused that her daughter both lives on a block with a population many times greater than that of the entire town in which she grew up and goes to such great lengths to recreate the experience of feeding a family from the kitchen garden because there will be no spare cash for food until the harvest comes in. Except, you know, for the aged sherry vinegar. And the imported Parmigiano-Reggiano.)

Another small victory: posting something here three days in a row. I'll see if I can keep this up.

Saving Family Farms with Yummy Butter

This article in the New York Times was particularly relevant for me because my mother grew up on a dairy farm in Central Wisconsin. My grandparents sold their cows when I was still quite young, but one of my aunts had her herd until several years ago, and one of my cousins married a farmer and still lives on a farm. Which is to say that the challenges dairy farmers face are quite personal to me, even apart from my desire to consume fantastic butter and yummy cheese.

On the one hand, I'm really happy about a lot of the trends in this article, but on the other hand, I'm worried that this will be too little, too late to save the sort of farming communities where my mother grew up. Specifically, while most of the affluent consumers who will happily pay a premium for local, handmade dairy products are concentrated on the coasts, most of the farming communities that are deeply hurting are in the midwest, far from the potential markets from their products.