Blessing the Hands that Feed Us by Vicki Robin Page A

bastion of willful disregard for the consequences of my actions: food.
    I was a bit nervous, very curious, and strangely relieved, like when you finally square your shoulders, march into your garage, and start cleaning out everything that’s been long forgotten but not gone. The task has been waiting for you. The effort to ignore it has worn you down. It got so that when people admired your home, you thought, Ah, but you haven’t seen the mess in my garage.
    Now, to stock my fridge and freezer for September.
    Satisfying My Meat Tooth
    In late July, driving over to set up for Britt and Eric’s wedding, I passed some green fields I’d always admired in an “Isn’t my island just the prettiest place?” kind of way. A small hand-painted sandwich board by the driveway read, M EAT S ALE T ODAY 10–2 . I was no longer a casual Sunday driver. I was driven—and I swerved in. It turned out to be the Long Family Farm.
    The 200-acre farm has been in the family for five generations. It all started in 1912 with a Dutchman, Claus Brower, who came to those very fields in Maxwelton Valley where I was about to “score” some protein for September. Claus eventually married the widowed Nancy Long, who arrived from Montana with three sons in tow. The boys purchased 300 cull chickens from Percy Wilkenson’s hatchery in Clinton and started their own farm next door. Over the years, the flock grew to 5,000 laying chickens and some cattle. After Claus’s death, Joe Long grew the operation further to 130,000 chickens and more than 100 Angus cows. His son Leland and his grandsons, Robert and Loren, dropped the chickens, kept the cows. They now raise healthy 1,200-pound, two-year-old, grass-fed, and corn-grass-finished animals. A mobile slaughter truck humanely slaughters them, and then the carcasses go to be aged, cut, and wrapped by the nearest USDA-approved butcher (forty miles and a ferry ride away). Some is sold there and some is sold locally to restaurants, grocers, and individuals—like me that Saturday.
    This five-generation history is part of the hope of our island. It reaches back to a time when we could actually feed ourselves with local foods—and did. Even New York City, if it went back five generations, would find similar hope—maybe not within ten miles, but certainly fifty. My own life began on that other island—Long Island—before Levittown transformed Nassau County’s potato farms and pine forests into one of the first large-scale, low-cost subdivisions. I remember how they heralded Levittown as a miracle for the middle class, part of the optimism and rising affluence after World War II. No one at the time thought they’d miss those potato farms—and we haven’t. Yet. But if feeding ourselves without access to cheap, easily produced oil means we all need to eat foods grown closer to home, it’s good to know the lawns and parks and estates and hobby farms of Nassau County are still, in essence, soil that a new crop of young farmers—with support and education—could farm to help feed the city folk. The fact that farming close to where we live was once normal means it can be once again.
    Go back further in time on Long Island and you’d meet tribes like the Canarsee, Rockaway, Merrick, and Manhasset. You’d see them gathering clams along the shore, fishing from their canoes and hunting in the forests for wild game. Much of their food was harvested without being cultivated, a rarity now, a reality for most of human history.
    You’d see the same on our West Coast “long island”—Whidbey. The Duwamish, Snohomish, and Snoqualmie tribes flourished along this whole coastal region 1 —mostly summering here on Whidbey, following the seasonal foods—until the white settlers came 150 years ago, logging the island like a barber would give a buzz cut. With skirmishes and raids, the settlers gained ground until they