The primary purpose behind NPOV's Beef Steer is to give members an opportunity to establish guidelines for how their food is raised. Quality meat is readily available to all of our members, but after reading "The Omnivores Dilemma," it is clear that how animals are raised, fed, and slaughtered might be cause for concern.
The employees here at Maple Edge Farm are heading up the Novel Point of View Beef Steer project to address these concerns and to provide details of the life of a beef steer from birth to slaughter.
The secondary purpose is education, both for consumers and farmers. We all know how much a pound of hamburger and a pound of New York strip costs at the grocery store, but how much would it cost directly from the farmer? If consumers buy directly from the farmer, what assurances do they have that they are getting what they paid for?
From a farmer’s perspective, how much are we really gaining by implanting calves with hormones? Is the idea of sustainable beef really that unattainable? What kind of liability are we assuming when we exclude the very processes that are meant to keep our food safe?
On a more philosophical level, this beef project is an effort to provide its members an opportunity to tend the resources that sustain them. We encourage everyone to pose, discuss, and answer questions about the food on our plate; we also encourage people to stop by to see their beef steer, to participate in its care, and to share in the ownership of the land.
In his essay The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes about the idea that "as many as possible should share in the ownership of the land and thus be bound to it by economic interest, by the investment of love and work, by family loyalty, by memory and tradition. How much land this should be is a question, and the answer will vary with geogrphy." We hope to provide a portion of this land to our members.
Long Term
Pollan addresses many problems with our current food-supply system, but one that stands out in particular is the problem of sustainability. The idea of sustainability is nothing new, but it is definitely an obscured concept.
The main purpose of this project is to illustrate what exactly goes into providing food for people nation- and world-wide. We have so many people to feed that it is impossible to raise enough food locally to meet this demand, and that demand is rising so rapidly that all of the emphasis has been put on raising lots of cheap food. This begs the questions, "how long can we keep this up, and at what point will this system implode?"Ultimately, any supply of food needs to be sustainable, so the longer term purpose of this project is to examine ways to meet this goal for just one beef steer. As this blog and our process progresses, we'll try to evaluate processes and practices for sustainability.
One final note: nothing about this process claims to be or is aimed toward organic. As we learned in Pollan's book, organic can be a misleading label. We are simply providing information about how your food is raised which, conveniently, is one of the guidelines set forth by our club members.
2 comments:
You stated one of your purposes was for consumer education. I'm curious as to whether you hope an NPOV or another consumer will purchase a cow directly from you?
Maple Edge Farm is supplying everything for this project except for the delivery of the final product. The participating members are responsible for this detail. It is our hope that the quality of the final product is high enough and the costs reasonable enough that we can supply this kind of beef on a larger scale. So to answer your question, no, our current beef steer isn't technically for sale. But yes, it'd be kind of fun to sell custom beef directly to consumers in the future.
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