Blessing the Hands that Feed Us by Vicki Robin Page B

drove the natives out. A road connecting south to north was built, then the bridge connecting Oak Harbor to the mainland, while ferries connected the south to Everett. A naval air station was built on some of the best farmland—because it was flat. Zoning and land-use policy, combined with the relatively cheap land on the island compared to the mainland, eventually dotted the countryside with five-acre hobby farms amid the remaining forests, small cities, and developments and a few large farms like Greenbank Farm and those on Ebey’s Prairie, now preserved as a historical—and farming—reserve.
    For most of human history, cities have been intimately involved in food production. Architect Carolyn Steele became fascinated with the relationship between food and human settlements. In her well-researched, highly original book
Hungry City,
she explains, through recounting the history of food eaten in London, that food production was once integral in cities and could be again. Before fossil fuels and internal combustion engines, the best way to get meat to the city was on the hoof. Abattoirs within the city—terrible places according to all reports—did the butchering, and the butcher himself was but a few blocks away. Vegetables grew in and close to the city. With fossil fuels, all the messiness, stench, and toil of farming, ranching, and processing food could be banished to the hinterlands. Out of sight, out of mind—and isn’t that how it is for us today? If we give credence to peak oil, economy itself says we need to call all those cows and hogs and vegetables back home. Later we’ll talk about urban agriculture—the many ways people are growing their own at home in the cities. For now, it’s enough to see from the Long Family Farm how close we still are to that way of life. We are food rich compared to many, but the fact is that every road, every parking lot, every skyscraper sits atop soil. It isn’t gone. It’s just out of sight. And starting to come back to mind.
    But when I saw the little meat sign and swerved into the Longs’ driveway, I wasn’t thinking about all that. I was thinking about red meat, which always brings out a bit of the hunter in me. As I selected my meat from a cooler by a card table under a shade tree, I got to know a few of the Longs. After I paid, Stephani, Leland’s wife, took me around to the side of the house to give me one of the slugger-bat-sized zucchinis stacked on the back porch like firewood—but considerably less useful. As we chatted about the farm I mentioned how much I liked beef liver and tongue, but, with the amount of chemicals fed to factory-farmed animals, I just wouldn’t eat them anymore. She disappeared, returning with frozen packages of liver and tongue, which, at that moment, didn’t interest their customers. I went home rich in tongue, liver, roasts, hamburger, and enough zucchini for a week. Infused with a disproportionate sense of huntress-prowess, I filled a freezer drawer in my eco-fridge with meat, knowing that in September I would not die from a lack of protein. Plus I’d made back-porch friends with the people who tilled the fields I’d admired as a tourist. I was already eating my way into the heart of the place.
    Milk: Telling the Udder Truth
    Several years earlier, wanting to expand my repertoire of rural skills, I volunteered as an alternative milker for a friend’s goat co-op. At the time I assumed only that it was a lovely way to learn a skill and share some milk.
    When I began the hunt for local milk, I asked that friend about her supply.
    â€œSorry, no can do. You’d have to come and milk the goats yourself because selling milk is illegal. And I’m full up with milkers.”
    I was confounded. How could anything about milk be illegal? Milk. What about that “Got milk?” campaign where stars wear milk mustaches? Isn’t milk like Mother and apple