Local food and the rural working-class
As someone who has left my hometown and come back with more perspective and more tools to analyze what I see here, I have frustrations and heartaches on a near-daily basis.
I see brilliant young people told to go to community college to save money, and I know that they're unlikely to ever make the connections that will boost them up in the world—which is, after all, the true goal of most first-generation college students.
I see young professionals moving into the area who don't bother to ask what the land their new townhouses stand on used to be used for, who don't bother to learn about the lives of those who have lived here for generations, who don't bother invest their money or time into the community unless there will be a party, alcohol, or tax break involved.
I've seen gay teens, young women, working-class geeks, high-school-educated working mothers, and the underemployed be convinced that they are worthless, that they are less, that they are not worthwhile to society because there is no one embracing them and celebrating their talents in this place. If you have not seen it, it is awfully hard to be it here.
I have heard a chorus of voices telling me and others that you have to leave this place if you want change in your life. You have to go to a city, you have to go somewhere where people don't make assumptions about you because they know your parents and grandparents, and you have to be somewhere worthwhile, because it is so obvious to many that there can be nothing truly worthwhile here. To stay here if you were born here is to fail, and to settle, and to disappoint yourself and others.
All these things are deeply frustrating to me, but probably the most frustrating to me is when I see people I love not living their values.
Today's heartbreak is about local food. I'm part of a working-class community of people raised here, who took Agriculture classes in middle and high school, who go to the county fair every year without fail, and who are upset every time another apple orchard, centuries-old farm, or cow pasture is turned into a messy subdivision or shopping center. [This McSweeney's piece making fun of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury hits a nerve with me as a result.] These people obviously care very much, in fact, about agriculture and a strong local economy of food production.
But on the other hand, those same people grew up impoverished, working-poor, or at the best working-class. They were taught by their mothers to buy food with coupons and only buy the cheapest of produce, if to buy it at all. (It's usually grown, subsistence style, by families for canning.) They've heard all about those fancy city people and how they'll pay out the nose for "gore-may oar-gan-ick" foods, and they don't want none of that.
Every time I try to gently broach the topic of splitting the cost of half a hog or steer with other family friends to my mother, the main foodbuyer, she is against it. The meat would be more expensive or take up too much freezer space that we could use for free deer meat, she argues. Today I found out about a CSA that would provide rabbit, one of her favorite rural-food delicacies. Still, she said the cost would be higher, and she couldn't pick out the cuts herself. I walked away, took a few breaths, and then came back into the kitchen.
"It just doesn't make sense to me how you care so much about having farms around here, but you won't pay a little extra for food raised here in order to keep them here."
She told me I didn't get it. I am young, and I don't understand how things work, and if I care so much, why don't I put my own money where my mouth is? I could see her going on the defensive: a woman who has made sacrifices to feed her family and avoid debt, challenged by her over-educated daughter who has the deadly combination of champagne tastes, a beer budget, and a bedroom across the hall.
In a way, she's right: I have no right to walk into her life and criticize her. I should get my own place and my own life before I tell her what I think might work for her. But I also am close enough to her to see the inconsistencies in her values and her actions. And if an activist can't change things in their own families when they have the energy and the chance to, how do they have any credibility trying to change things in other people's families?
Just another day of frustrations and knowing that I'll wake up again tomorrow, still pushing people to match their walk to their talk and their talk to their hearts.
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