| Joanne and I went out back to visit the goats, who were hanging out in a pen alongside several chickens. The goats came up to us at once to check us out. Goats are an awful lot like puppies, except worse-smelling and more eager to eat your clothing. As we were petting the goats, we noticed that one of them had a beard. I think we both assumed that she was a he. But - if you take a look below - she was a she. Hmm.
We went back into the cheese area to wash our hands (my fingertips were literally brown) and ask about the goats. What breed were they? What about that one with the beard? Is she a different kind? That's when the conversation got interesting. Valentine - that's her name - was born on Valentine's Day along with two twin brothers. She pees like a girl, but she's got male hormones in her - enough to give her some male traits.
Our hostess told us that she wasn't going to try to have Valentine mate with any of the males, so she wasn't going to ever produce kids or milk. However, Valentine was surprisingly useful because she let the farmer know when the female goats are in heat. Valentine's got enough male in her that she gets pretty excited when the females go into heat. My two companions, who know far more about livestock and farming than I ever will, began chatting about how sometimes animals turn out useful for reasons you might have never anticipated, even if they aren't good for the purpose you intended them for.
Meanwhile, my mind flashed back to the 700 cow dairy farm I visited out east a few weeks ago. The farmer had a female calf who was born as twins with a male. He told me he was selling her along with any bull calves who were born, because she would have been exposed to male hormones in the womb that made her less useful as a dairy cow. He wouldn't have any use for a cow like Valentine, because he had computerized equipment that let him know when his cows were in estrus. On his farm, uniformity, productivity, and efficiency were key. The farmer clearly cared about his animals' comfort and he wanted to make ethical decisions, but the market he competed in demanded that every decision be made with money in mind.
To me, this showcased a major facet of our food system. Uniformity, productivity, and efficiency. Those are the magic words. In the book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, you read through the 1961 hearings on the standards of identity for orange juice, and the industry's focus on uniformity, even over and above quality. They insisted on this even though the homemakers who spoke at the hearings clearly did not demand uniformity. It seems that industry would prefer to have a uniform product with mediocre or poor quality than a non-uniform product with high quality. A non-uniform product is harder to mass market.
As I've been traveling the country and hanging out on farms, I've been really struck by how much the livestock farmers I've met LOVE animals. Whether it's Judith and Mike in Austin, or the dairy farm I visited in northern Vermont, or Joanne's farm and the fromagerie yesterday, it's so prominent in the farmers' attitude toward farming and their animals that it just hits you in the face: They LOVE animals. They appreciate their animals individuality. Uniformity would detract from the joy of farming for them. Productivity would be nice, but what's the point of farming if you can't have the parts that you enjoy most from it? With all of the hard work of a farm, special animals like Spot the emu rooster and his sexy lady Sheila (who was displaying her feathers in the sexiest way she could muster yesterday) or Puddy the Araucana hen who lays blue-green eggs and likes to ride around on Joanne's arm bring joy to a job that might otherwise be all drudgery.
The dairy farmer in Vermont loves cows the way I love cats, and he names each and every one of his cows. A study this year found that cows with names give more milk than cows without names, so even though his approach was born out of love, it's actually scientifically validated as a successful way to produce more milk. With the price of milk as low as it is, the farmers I've met are not willing to spend extra on things like grain or growth hormones to produce a few extra bucks of milk. Better to just name the cows, since that doesn't cost you anything.
Time after time, farmers say to me (unprompted by me) that you can't treat an animal like a machine. Even the farmer with the large dairy farm said to me, "You can't take milk from a cow; she has to give it to you." To me, there is a sense of Daoism in all of this. You need to "go with the Dao" - to work with the animals in the way that nature intended, not to fight against nature. It's a losing battle if you want a chicken to just lay eggs and stop acting like a chicken. Sadly enough, some people don't get this.
Shamefully, Adam Shriver of Washington University in St. Louis (my alma mater), suggested that we should alter cows not to feel pain in order to continue factory farming. Factory farming might provide efficiency and uniformity, but little else can be said in its favor. The meat is low quality, and we humans have a health epidemic on our hands as a result. This year a study linked daily red meat consumption to increased chances of dying within the next decade. And then there's the environmental consequences of factory farming, not to mention the economic plight of the farmers who produce our meat. Even if the cows felt no pain at all, there's no justification for factory farming.
Valentine the androgynous goat goes against everything we've been told about how to run a successful business. She's not adding direct monetary value to the farm by producing kids or milk, and therefore she has no place on the farm (like the female calves born as twins with bulls on the dairy farm). Yet the farmer loves her and finds her useful in her own way. The product, the goat cheese, is also not the uniform, mass marketed product that we all know as goat cheese either. Yet there's a market for it, as it's a treat to eat a special kind of cheese made lovingly by a woman who makes cheese as a craft instead of eating uniform cheese made on an assembly line.
The last hundred years has gone a long way to reducing food prices and increasing food production, but at the expense of our joy in making and eating food, not to mention our health, rural economy, oil, air, water, soil, and biodiversity. For all of the extra food we're producing, we aren't even solving world hunger, even though we produce enough calories to feed everybody in the world. Perhaps inefficiency has something to teach us, after all. |
