Changing to a truly local food economy won't be easy. It might not even be completely possible. But the advantages of moving in this direction are very clear. When consumers know once again how their food is produced, they are naturally going to want it produced in the cleanest, most humane and environmentally healthy ways. Eating locally is also an act of conservation. Keeping local farms in business keeps the countryside from being overrun by cities and suburbs.

"Eat Your View!" takes work. It means not being able to buy a tomato in December. It means giving up many processed foods. And once you give up processed foods, you have to learn to cook, a skill that is disappearing from many American homes. Are we prepared to go that far?

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL EAT.

On my last day on the farm, a soft June Friday afternoon, Joel and I sat talking at a picnic table behind the house. A steady stream of customers dropped by to pick up their chickens. I asked Joel if he believed the industrial food chain would ever be replaced by a local food system.

"We don't have to beat them," Joel patiently explained. "I'm not even sure we should try." I guess I would sum up his view as: "If you build it, they will come." He believes that more and more consumers will make the choice to buy local, "beyond organic" food. The rest will take care of itself.

I think he has a point. We may need a great many food chains that combine organic food and slow food and local foods in different ways. There may be other food chains we haven't even thought of yet. Nature produces diversity. Polyface Farm is home to diversity. Maybe the food system should be diverse too.

Sitting on the porch with Joel, watching his customers buzzing about, I could see part of that new food system taking shape. It certainly seemed like a good start.

17.

My Gra.s.s-Fed Meal

A WEEK'S PAY Before I left the farm Friday, I gathered together the makings for that evening's dinner. I had originally thought about filling a cooler with Polyface meat and bringing it home with me to California to cook there. But after all of Joel's talks about eating locally and short food chains, that didn't seem right. So I decided to cook dinner for a few old friends who lived close by in Charlottesville. We would eat the food within a short drive of the farm where it had been grown.

From the farm's walk-in cooler I picked out two of the chickens we had slaughtered on Wednesday. I also took a dozen of the eggs I'd helped gather Thursday evening. Then I stopped by the hoop house and harvested a dozen ears of sweet corn. Joel refused to accept payment for the food, calling it my pay for the week's work.

On the way into Charlottesville, I stopped to pick up a few other items. I tried as best as I could to look for local produce. As much as possible I wanted this meal to be bar code-free. For my salad, I found some nice-looking locally grown arugula. At the wine shop I found a short shelf of Virginia wines, but here I hesitated.

EATING LOCALLY.

Virginia is known for many things, but wine isn't one of them. Did buying local have to include the wine too? I hadn't had a sip of wine all week and was really looking forward to it. Then I spotted a wine for twenty-five bucks, an awful lot for a bottle from an area not generally known for its wines. I decided the wine makers must have been confident it was good, so I added the bottle to my cart.

I also needed some chocolate for the dessert I had in mind. The state of Virginia produces no chocolate to speak of. Since there was no local product, I was free to go for the good Belgian stuff. I did it without guilt, since even the most extreme eat-local types say it's okay to buy goods that can't be produced locally. That meant coffee, tea, sugar, and chocolate were safe. (Whew . . .) During the week I'd given some thought to what I should make. Working backward, I knew I wanted to make a dessert that would feature Polyface eggs. All those chefs had said the eggs were magical. So I decided to try something that calls for a bit of magic-a chocolate souffle. For a side dish, sweet corn was a no-brainer. No one had tasted corn yet this year. But what meat to serve?

Because it was only June, Polyface had no fresh beef or pork or turkey. Joel wouldn't begin slaughtering cattle and turkeys till later in the summer. He wouldn't get to the hogs until the fall. There was frozen beef and pork, but it was last season's. I wanted to make something fresh. Rabbit seemed risky. I had no idea whether my friends Mark and Liz liked it, or if their boys would want to eat bunny. So that left chicken. Which, truth to tell, left me feeling a little queasy. Was I going to be able to enjoy chicken so soon after working in the processing shed and gut-composting pile? I was about to find out.

POLYFACE CHICKEN A LA POLLAN.

When I got to Mark and Liz's house, there were still several hours before dinner. I had decided to brine the chicken-a soak in salt.w.a.ter brine causes meat to absorb moisture and breaks down the proteins that can toughen it on the grill. My plan was to slow roast the chicken pieces on a wood fire, and this would keep the chicken from drying out. So I cut each of the two birds into eight pieces and put them in a bath of water, kosher salt, sugar, a bay leaf, a splash of soy sauce, a garlic clove, and a small handful of peppercorns and coriander seeds.

To be honest, there was another reason I chose the brining and grilling method. Once the chickens were cut into pieces, they wouldn't look quite so much like the birds I had helped kill and gut on the farm. Soaking them in brine would change their taste and aroma. That would help cancel out the scents I remembered from the processing shed. Cooking changes the animals we eat and gives us some distance from the reality of the slaughterhouse. In the same way, when we buy a package of hamburger at a supermarket, we rarely think of the living cow. (There are, of course, those who prefer their fish, poultry, or pork served with the heads still on.) After soaking them in the brine for a few hours, I removed and rinsed the chicken pieces. Then I spread them out to dry for an hour or two. Drier skin would brown and get crispy on the grill.

Mark and Liz had a gas barbecue, but I wanted some smoke and flavor of a wood fire. I snipped a couple of twigs off their apple tree and stripped off the leaves. Then I placed the twigs on top of the grill, where the green wood would smolder rather than burn. I turned the gas down low and, after rubbing a little olive oil on the chicken pieces, arranged them on the grill among the apple branches.

POLYFACE EGG SOUFFLE '

While the chicken roasted slowly outside, I got to work in the kitchen preparing the souffle. I was a.s.sisted by Willie, Mark and Liz's twelve-year-old son. Willie melted the chocolate in a saucepan and I separated the egg whites from the yolks. The yolks were a gorgeous carroty shade of orange. They were so firm that separating them from the whites was easy. After adding a pinch of salt, I began beating the egg whites. Beating whites makes them turn white and stiff. That's when you begin adding sugar and turn the beater on high. The beater forms billions of microscopic air pockets and stiffens the egg proteins. A souffle grows in the oven because the heat causes these air pockets to expand. At least, that's the way it's supposed to work.

The egg whites doubled in size, then doubled again. Once they formed into stiff, snowy peaks, they were ready. Willie had already blended the yolks into his melted chocolate. Now we gently folded my egg whites into the thick syrup, then poured the airy, toast-colored mixture into a souffle dish and put it aside.

Willie and I brought the corn out on the deck to shuck. The ears were so fresh that the husks squealed as you peeled them back. I explained to Willie that the corn had grown in a deep bed of composted chicken manure. That was probably not the sort of detail you'd want to mention on a menu. (Polyface corn a la chicken c.r.a.p?) But Willie agreed there was something pretty neat about it.

I also told him that the variety of corn we were eating was called Golden Bantam. It dates back over a hundred years, before all corn was just "corn." Today's hybrid corn is bred to keep its sweetness over long-distance transport. At the same time, that breeding has made it lose a lot of its earthy corn flavor. Our corn had been picked that morning, just a short drive away. Since it didn't have to stand up to the stress of a cross-country trip, we were able to enjoy this corn the way it was supposed to taste.

GRa.s.s, NOT GRAIN.

I had made pretty much this same meal several times before. The list of ingredients looked the same. Yet I knew this wasn't the same food at all. That was because the chickens had spent their lives outdoors on pastures rather than in a shed eating grain. When cattle, chickens, and other animals eat gra.s.s-and not just corn or other grains-they are actually healthier for us to eat. So is the milk or eggs that come from gra.s.s-fed animals. This is no accident. Humans evolved to eat meat from wild animals, animals that ate little or no grain. Animals raised outdoors on gra.s.s have a diet much more like that of the wild animals. It makes sense that their meat, milk, and eggs would be better for us.

Green gra.s.s has large quant.i.ties of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid. These natural chemicals are important for a healthy diet. Animals that eat gra.s.s have high levels of these and other important nutrients. (It's the beta-carotene that gives the Polyface egg yolks their carroty color.) Animals raised in pastures have less fat than grain-fed animals. Part of this is because pasture-fed animals get exercise. Not only that, but the kind of fats in pastured animals are the ones that are healthier for us to eat. For example, they have higher levels of polyunsaturated fats instead of monounsaturated fats. They also contain more omega-3s. These are essential fatty acids and they are very important for human health. Among other things, omega-3s are important for the growth of brain cells and other neurons.

Omega-6 is another fatty acid essential to humans. Our bodies need both of these and they need them in the right balance. (Omega-3s are made in the leaves of plants. Omega-6s are made in the seeds.) There is a lot of evidence that a healthy diet has a pretty even balance of omega-3 and omega-6. And that's exactly the balance in the meat of wild animals. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Human beings evolved to survive and be healthy on a diet of wild meat and plants.

Now go one step further. The meat of gra.s.s-fed cows also has the same healthy balance of omega-3 and omega-6. Why? Because gra.s.s-fed cows are eating the same diet as their wild ancestors.

It turns out that corn-fed cows don't have the healthy balance of omegas. Their meat has a ratio of about 14 omega-6 to 1 omega-3. Some scientists think this imbalance might help explain the high levels of heart disease in our society. In other words, it's not eating meat so much as eating corn-fed corn-fed meat that is bad for us. meat that is bad for us.

The point is that all beef is not the same. All salmon is not the same. All eggs are not created equal. The type of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you're eating has itself eaten.

Once shoppers know this, they begin to look at food costs differently. Polyface Farm's eggs at $2.20 a dozen might be a better deal than supermarket eggs at $0.79 a dozen. Polyface gra.s.s-fed chickens produce eggs with more omega-3s, beta-carotene, and vitamin E. And they do it in a way that's better for the environment. Doesn't that sound like a bargain?

THE MEAL.

Okay, so a pastured chicken might be better for you, but how different does it actually taste? It certainly smelled wonderful when I raised the lid on the barbecue to put the corn on. The chicken was browning nicely, the skin beginning to crisp and take on the toasty tones of oiled wood. The corn, on which I'd rubbed some olive oil and sprinkled salt and pepper, would take only a few minutes. All it needed was to heat up and for a scattering of kernels to brown.

While the corn finished roasting, I removed the chicken from the grill and set it aside to rest. A few minutes later I called everyone to the table. Ordinarily I might have felt a little funny hosting a dinner in someone else's home. But Mark and Liz are such close friends, it seemed perfectly natural to be cooking for them. That's not to say I didn't feel the cook's usual worries about whether everything would come out right. Liz is a great cook too, so I was anxious to measure up.

I pa.s.sed the platters of chicken and corn and proposed a toast. I offered thanks first to my hosts (who were also my guests) and then to Joel Salatin and his family for growing the food before us (and for giving it to us), and then finally to the chickens, who in one way or another had provided just about everything we were about to eat. This was my non-religious version of grace, I suppose.

We dug in and, as usually happens during a good meal, there was little talking at first, just a few murmurs of satisfaction. I don't mind saying the chicken was out of this world. The skin had turned the color of mahogany and the texture of parchment. The meat itself was moist, dense, and almost shockingly flavorful. I could taste the brine and apple wood, of course. But even more important, the chicken held its own against those strong flavors. This may not sound like much of a compliment, but to me the chicken smelled and tasted exactly like chicken. Liz agreed, saying it was a more "chick eny" chicken. What accounted for it? I know what Joel would have said: When chickens get to live like chickens, they'll taste like chickens too.

GRa.s.s-FED MAGIC.

Everyone was curious to hear about the farm, especially after tasting the food that had come off it. Liz and Mark's older son, Matthew, who is fifteen, asked a lot of questions about killing chickens. (He's currently a vegetarian and would only eat the corn.) I didn't think it was wise to go into detail at the dinner table. But I did talk about my week on the farm, about the Salatins and their animals. I explained the circle of chickens and cows and pigs and gra.s.s. I managed to avoid the details of manure and grubs and composted guts.

Slowly the conversation drifted off from my adventures as a farmhand. We talked about Willie's songwriting (he is, mark my words, the next Bob Dylan), Matthew's summer football camp, Mark's and Liz's writing, school, politics, the war in Iraq, and on and on. Being a Friday late in June, this was one of the longest evenings of the year, so no one felt in a rush to finish. Besides, I'd just put the souffle in to bake when we sat down, so dessert was still a ways off.

While we talked and waited for the souffle to complete its magic rise, the smell of baking chocolate seeped out of the kitchen and filled the house. Though I had avoided talking about it, my mind went to the long chain from manure to gra.s.s to cow to grubs to chicken to eggs. The chain didn't stop there, for I had turned the eggs into something else-at least I hoped I had. When at last I told Willie the time had come to open the oven and cross your fingers, I saw his smile blossom first, then the great crown of souffle puffing out from the cinched white waist of its dish. Triumph!

There's something amazing about any souffle, how a half dozen eggs flavored by nothing more than sugar and chocolate can turn into something so air-like. (Souffle, "to blow," comes from the Latin word for breath. When done right, it's more like a breath of food, rather than something solid.) This particular souffle was good, not great. Its texture was slightly grainier than it should have been, which makes me think I may have beaten the whites a little too long. But it tasted wonderful, everyone agreed, and as I rolled the rich yet weightless confection on my tongue, I closed my eyes and suddenly there they were: Joel's hens, marching down the gangplank from out of their Eggmobile, fanning out across the early-morning pasture, there in the gra.s.s where this magical bite began.

PART IV.

The Do-It-Yourself Meal: Hunted, Gathered, and Gardened Food

18.

The Forest

SURVIVOR: FOOD.

There was one more meal I wanted to make. It was the meal at the end of the shortest food chain of all. What I had in mind was a dinner made entirely from foods I had hunted, gathered, and grown myself. Now, there are some people in the world (not many anymore) who make that sort of meal three times a day. I am not one of them.

The growing part was the only part I knew I could handle. I've been a gardener most of my life, and have made countless meals from my garden. That left hunting and gathering.

I had never hunted in my life. Indeed, I had never fired a gun. (Unless you count cap pistols.) I've always thought of myself as pretty clumsy. Walking around with a loaded gun never seemed like a good idea.

Thanks to my mother, I did have some childhood experience as a gatherer. During the summer she would take us to the beach at low tide to dig for clams. We'd walk along the sand, looking for the airholes the clams made. Then we'd dig them up, until they squirted us in self-defense. At the end of summer we would pick beach plums that she would make into a delicious jelly the color of rubies. All winter long her beach plum jelly brought back memories of summer vacation: August on toast.

What I most remember from these early foraging (food-gathering) trips were the scary warnings from my mother. Some mushrooms and berries have poisons in them, and she made sure I knew exactly how terrible it would be to eat one of them. When she was done I thought eating wild mushrooms was as dangerous as touching a downed power line. As a result I only gathered fruits I absolutely knew, like blueberries. And I never, ever touched a wild mushroom.

But I was determined to have wild mushrooms on the menu of my do-it-yourself meal. I think that's because mushroom hunting seems to be a perfect example of the omnivore's dilemma. Is that mushroom good food or is it poison? I'd have to learn to tell the difference.

THE FIRST FOOD CHAIN.

Why go to all this trouble? It's not as though we can bring back hunting and gathering as a way of life for most people. There's just not enough wild game and fruit to feed everyone. Of course, if we did did go back to that way of life, some of us might really enjoy it. Ancient hunter-gatherers worked much less than modern-day humans. It took them about seventeen hours a week to hunt and gather enough food for them and their families. Compare that to the forty-hour (or more) workweek we have today. And you'll be surprised to learn that hunter-gatherers ate better, grew taller, lived longer, and were healthier than "civilized" people. It's only in the last century that modern society has been able to match the health of its hunter-gatherer ancestors. go back to that way of life, some of us might really enjoy it. Ancient hunter-gatherers worked much less than modern-day humans. It took them about seventeen hours a week to hunt and gather enough food for them and their families. Compare that to the forty-hour (or more) workweek we have today. And you'll be surprised to learn that hunter-gatherers ate better, grew taller, lived longer, and were healthier than "civilized" people. It's only in the last century that modern society has been able to match the health of its hunter-gatherer ancestors.

But whether we'd like it or not, we are clearly not returning to those days. So why did I want to make this last meal? Because it was as close as I could get to the original food chain, the way people fed themselves for the tens of thousands of years before agriculture. It is the food chain we evolved to be part of. I thought this meal might take me back to a time when the omnivore's dilemma wasn't as complicated, when we had a more direct connection with our food. It would give me a chance to look at the omnivore's dilemma in a new (or rather old) light.

It has often struck me that even though modern Americans don't ever need to grow, hunt, or gather our own food, a lot of us still do. We garden, we hunt, we pick wild mushrooms or berries. Even if all you can do is grow a few tomatoes in your backyard (and even if those tomatoes end up costing twice as much as the ones you can buy in the supermarket), you do it anyway. Why? I think it's an effort to be connected once again to our food. We don't want to be pa.s.sive consumers, sitting at the end of a food chain and eating what we are served. My meal would be an extreme experiment in being an active and conscious eater.

I had been part of three different food systems-industrial, industrial organic, and beyond organic. Now I was going to be be the food system. There would be nothing between me and my food, from start to finish. the food system. There would be nothing between me and my food, from start to finish.

POLLAN THE HUNTER.

I have to confess that there was more behind my desire to go hunting. Hunting is one of those skills that the all-American boy is supposed to have. (At least in some parts of the country.) Even the writer and philosopher Henry David Th.o.r.eau said so. "We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun," he wrote in his famous book Walden. Walden. This idea had always annoyed me. Was I less of a boy (or man) because I had never been hunting? This idea had always annoyed me. Was I less of a boy (or man) because I had never been hunting?

Now I was finally going to hunt. Yet deciding to hunt was one thing; doing it was another. How was I going to learn to fire a gun, let alone hunt? Did I need a license? What if I actually managed to kill something-then what? How do you "dress" an animal you've killed? ( what? How do you "dress" an animal you've killed? (Dress is the word used to skin and gut an animal. A pretty weird choice of words when you think about it.) And what about those killer wild mushrooms? Would I be able to learn enough to overcome my fear of eating them? is the word used to skin and gut an animal. A pretty weird choice of words when you think about it.) And what about those killer wild mushrooms? Would I be able to learn enough to overcome my fear of eating them?

What I badly needed, I realized, was a kind of hunter-gatherer tutor. I needed someone skilled in the arts of hunting and gathering who also knew a lot about the animals, plants, and fungi of northern California. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that. On the eve of this experiment I had just moved to northern California, far away from the New England woods and fields I knew. I was going to have to learn to hunt and gather and garden on what amounted to a different planet, full of animals and plants I didn't know. What did people hunt here, anyway, and when did they hunt it? What time of year do the mushrooms mushroom around here, and where? I had a lot to learn.

MY FORAGING GUIDE.

As luck would have it, a perfect tutor appeared in my life at exactly the right moment. Angelo Garro is a stout, burly Italian with a five-day beard, sleepy brown eyes, and a pa.s.sion about getting and preparing food. Shortly after we moved to California, I started running into Angelo.

We'd be invited to a dinner party and there would be Angelo among the guests. Only unlike the other guests, Angelo always had some story to tell about the meal. Maybe he'd gotten the halibut from a fishing boat that morning. Or he'd picked the fennel along the highway on the drive over. Or he'd made the wine or the ham himself. And unlike the other guests, Angelo always wound up in the kitchen cooking the dinner or pa.s.sing platters of his famous fennel cakes. Meanwhile he would explain the proper way to make pasta or salami or balsamic vinegar. (Hint: For the last one, you need at least ten or twelve years and the right kind of barrels.) The guy was a one-man traveling Food Network.

Angelo Garro with a chanterelle.

After a few of these dinners, I began to piece together Angelo's story. He's a fifty-eight-year-old Sicilian who left home at eighteen, following a girl to Canada. Twenty years later he followed a different girl to San Francisco, where he has lived ever since. He makes his living forging wrought iron items like garden gates and fences, railings, stairs, and fireplace tools. He lives in a forge that has been a blacksmith shop since the time of the California Gold Rush in 1849. Yet his consuming pa.s.sion is food. He seems driven to recapture the flavors of his childhood back in Sicily. A successful dish, he will say, is one that "tastes like my mother."

Several months after I met Angelo he appeared again, this time, strangely enough, on my car radio. He was being interviewed on public radio for a story about foraging. The reporter followed Angelo on a porcini mushroom hunt and then into a duck blind at dawn. While he waited for the sun and the ducks to rise, Angelo spoke in a whisper about his past and his pa.s.sions. "In Sicily I could tell by the smell what time of the year it was," he said. "Orange season, oranges, persimmons, olives, and olive oil.

"I have the pa.s.sions of foraging, pa.s.sion of hunting, opera, my work," he told the reporter. "I have the pa.s.sion of cooking, pickling, curing salamis, sausage, making wine in the fall. This is my life. I do this with my friends. It's to my heart."

Even before the radio segment ended I knew I had found my guide. The next time I b.u.mped into Angelo I asked him if I could tag along on his next foraging trip. "Sure, okay, we go hunt chanterelle in Sonoma. I call you when it's time." Feeling bolder, I asked about going hunting too. "Okay, we could hunt one day, maybe some duck, maybe the pig, but first you need license and learn to shoot."

The pig? Clearly there was even more to learn than I had thought. Clearly there was even more to learn than I had thought.

HUNTING FOR DUMMIES.

It took me a couple of months to sort out the rules for getting a hunter's license. They involved taking a hunter education course and taking a test. It seems they'll sell a high-powered rifle to just about anybody in California, but it's against the law to aim the thing at an animal without a fourteen-hour cla.s.s and a multiple-choice exam. The next cla.s.s was on a Sat.u.r.day two months off.

Once I knew I would be going hunting and gathering, something strange happened. I started looking for food everywhere I went. Suddenly a walk in the woods wasn't just a walk. It was now a search for supper. Woody Allen once said as a joke that "nature is an enormous restaurant." Maybe he was right.

I started dividing everything I saw into two groups. Some things were probably good to eat. Others were not. Of course, in most cases I had no real idea which was which. Still, I began to notice things. I noticed the soft yellow globes of chamomile flowers on the path I hiked most afternoons. They're used to make chamomile tea. I spotted clumps of miner's lettuce off in the shade. That's a tasty green I had once grown in my Connecticut garden. And there was wild mustard, another green, growing out in the sun. There were blackberries in flower. I even saw some wild birds that were good to eat: a few quail, a pair of doves. I began looking at field guides to help me identify all the different unfamiliar species.

Okay, maybe I went a little overboard. You don't really want to turn nature into a big restaurant. But looking for food did change the way I looked at nature. It made me look more closely at everything. It made me pay attention in a way I hadn't in years.