Cooperative Small-Farm Restaurants

øCooperative Small-Farm Restaurants

The Small-Farm Restaurant System, continued

Now for some differences. Unlike the typical CSA, SFR involves a number of farms acting together, along with the restaurant, as a collective. The relationship is quite formal, with the farms and restaurant working in concert to design and grow the program from the very beginning. In order to support a viable, self-sufficient restaurant business, and to maximize efficiency, all farms agree to grow only for the SFR, creating their farms and cropping patterns for that purpose. Wholesale or retail sales outside the system, at farmer's markets and food co-ops, for example, is not an aim. The singular focus of the restaurant paradoxically entails that there be a marked variety in the type of crops each farm produces (though of course some products, such as grains, will need plenty of redundancy). SFR farms each are more broad-based in themselves than is the typical farm, addressing the needs not only for standards like bread wheat, salad vegetables, and potatoes, but also for products like mushrooms, soy beans for soy sauce and tofu, seeds for cooking oil, hops for beer, Camellia Sinensis for tea, etc.

Unlike CSA, SFR is whole-diet oriented. It does not aim merely to produce some salad veggies and side-dish material. It aims to produce, as nearly as possible, a full array of pieces in a diet that all members can not only survive on, but which they can thrive on and thoroughly enjoy. It is likely that a vegetarian/vegan restaurant will have the best chances of success, with this primary, total-diet goal in mind. I take as an example of this truth applied in the world the lives of Helen and Scott Nearing; they on their vegetarian/vegan diets were able to survive and support themselves completely and comfortably by each doing four hours of "bread labor" six days a week. They would not have been able to do that if they had grown their own eggs, milk, or meat (or if they had maintained any farm animals at all, in fact). Not to mention the great deal of evidence that a vegetarian diet, with a focus on grains and grain products, is more conducive to human thriving than is a meat-and-dairy-centered one. (An active and deliberate Scott Nearing chose to fast himself to death at the age of 100; Helen died at 94 when she accidentally drove into a tree.)

Finally, an initial difference worth touching on is the simple fact that the products from the farms of an SFR are sold "value added" only; in fact, a list of SFR-system products includes not just restaurant food stuffs but the inviting social atmosphere of the restaurant itself, the overall service of cooking and waiting, and other intangibles. Not only does this end-use-ready emphasis have to do with keeping the SFR economically viable--by eliminating middle people completely and widening the "profit" margin--but, as noted, it also has to do with offering something of a solution to Orr's social atomization.

One of SFR's basic premises is that food and eating are still, as they have always been, essential to the formulation of our perceptions of our place in the world and of our relationship to the biotic community in general (of which humans make up only one, small, albeit powerful, part). Food issues, food production, problems with food systems (e.g., negative externalities), food itself--these represent a primary realm in which people can come together and contemplate the most basic human dilemmas, dilemmas which tie them together practically, historically, culturally, and nostalgically.

In this day and age, many of us simply don't have time to cook the vegetables we might pick up from a CSA anyway, let alone incorporate them regularly into a well-balanced diet. And many of us also find ourselves wanting more ways to interact with members of our community and potential friends. SFR--with its orientation toward local, environmentally-sound production and provision of high-quality, nutritious meals for enjoyment in friendly, community surroundings--has great potential to better these and other postmodern atomization- and anomie-related dilemmas.

More Background

The words "civic renewal," which have been at the center of this discussion so far, are reminiscent of the transformative era of the 1960s. In particular in that era were the back-to-the-land and commune movements, which ultimately led to a good many failed attempts at reconnection with nature and failed attempts at revitalizing human communities through self-sufficiency. As Hal Rothman puts it, "The back-to-nature mythology of the 1960s ran hard against the fundamental day-to-day grind of machinery-based and borrowed-capital rural life." The SFR idea, in contrast, stares this dilemma squarely in the face, and recognizes the historical significance of the penetration of capital into agriculture and agriculture's ultimate, total commodification by way of patents on seed genetic information itself.

Looking at U.S. agriculture over the past 250 years, there are two major eras that distinguish themselves. In the first, from roughly 1750 to 1900, what was Jefferson's agrarian nation, with independence and self-sufficiency at its core, became much more urban, and many more of its citizens became involved in work outside of agriculture. The overall thrust of this labor transformation, of course, was that much more of the population became dependent on others to produce their food necessities; and obviously the flip side is that those who did remain in food production moved from production mostly for sufficiency to production exclusively for surplus.

The second era, from around the turn of the century to the present, has been the era of mechanization, or in more general terms, the era of capitalization. In this broader sense of capitalization, there has been further labor displacement from agriculture--less than 1.9% of the population is now employed in agriculturally related areas. This labor displacement has been integral to not only mechanization, but also to the introduction of pesticides and petroleum fertilizers, and ultimately to the introduction of bioengineered seeds tailored to shareholder needs.

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