simply “wanted better food and taught themselves how to grow it. Can this be duplicated in other environments? I think it can. Almost all of us should be doing it.” She’s currently writing a book titled From Scratch. With organic gardens and farmers’ markets spreading, “this is a promising time,” Andrew Plotsky ’00 declares. People like him, alarmed that “we have the fewest farm- ers we’ve ever had in this country” and eager to fix “a broken system,” are picking up shovels and, in his case, going online. Serving small farmers around Washington’s Puget Sound, he works for a local butchering company and also owns FarmRun, a media and marketing business. A self-taught pork connoisseur, he also raises a few her- itage-breed pigs for himself, focusing on healthy, natural husbandry, humane slaughtering and hand-butchering, and old-fashioned, artisanal curing. “There’s a lot of romance flying
around in portrayals of small-farm life,” Plotsky cautions. “My friends and I know how it really works—how freakin’ hard it is—but we’re committed to the economy and well- being of our small group.” He believes their paradigm has real promise to contribute to “a radical revisiting of classi- cal agrarian society, which doesn’t go backward but uses modern technology to forge a new agrarian system.” He acknowledges that when he started out, “the imme- diacy of taking life—and pigs are very charismatic— was difficult. But I’ve learned that it’s possible to love both pigs and pork. The heartbreak and labor are worth it, to participate in a farming communi- ty.” In fact, true sus- tainable agriculture, he argues, is more than raising the food; it also includes “blacksmithing and carpentry and all the other jobs that make a farming life -
style possible.” Plotsky wants his niche to be media, for communicating the value of small-farm products com- pared to cheaper, mass-produced supermarket fare. “The key for industrial meat processing,” he says, “is low price and high profit; for us, it’s quality. We scald and scrape the hide, rather than skinning the pig and losing good fat and flesh. Leaving the skin on also supports the biology
of traditional curing for prosciutto and other meat.” Along with butchering, his company teaches curing and sausage-making—spreading natural pork cultures into the nearby human culture.
Food cures
The spread of food cultures is of special interest to Rangil, both as an academic and as an expat from Argentina. “I grew up eating seasonal food and local game and fish,” she recalls. “On my great-grandfather’s farm, after a pig was butchered in the winter, we kids would help with cooking and preserving the pork.” On sabbatical this past year, Rangil re- searched “Latino foodscapes,” interview- ing people who emigrated from Puebla, Mexico, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, to live in New York City. While Rangil’s study subjects usually want to cook their familiar recipes, and
many can’t afford not to cook, for nutrition consultant Marti Wolfson ’02 a big hurdle can be convincing people to cook. With a culinary degree from the National Gourmet Institute and experience teaching at a holistic health and lifestyle center, she’s a from-scratch fan. In place of eating packaged food or take-out, “cooking does take time, but it’s much healthier,” she says. “I also believe the act of cooking is very healing, and cooking with your family is quality time that’s nourish- ing on many levels.” Wolfson has been pleased to see that the Food Network and other TV cooking shows seem to have revived Americans’ interest in preparing whole, unpro cessed food at home. Of course, food choices reflect not just social influences but basic biological adaptation. Raveret- Richter says, “For hu- mans in the wild, op- timal foraging would draw us to sugar and
fat and meat.” For 21st-century urbanites trying to stretch a paycheck and also honor their heritage, it might mean beans and grains, to afford enough for everyone at the table. In her research, Rangil has noticed “a strong sense of duty around nourishing the family—primarily among women, who are typically the cooks and shoppers.” Rangil proposes that food both distinguishes cultural
20 SCOPE SPRING 2013
BRUCIE ROSCH
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