What Is Honest Food?

I started Honest Farm and this blog to talk to people about good, honest food raised by small farmers in a way that sustains the land. Too many food sites I’ve visited, purportedly about sustainable food and the green lifestyle, seem too focused on products for my taste — and pricey ones at that — and the celebrities who buy them. Is that really what caring about the environment is all about? 

Of course, if you are a ’strictly business’ site, you need to sell ads to exist (something I should consider) and to attract that you have to create content that would be appealing to advertisors and reviewing a lot of products is an obvious way to do that. I do like certain food products and may discuss them in the future, but I’d rather devote the time I have for blogging to sharing recipes and stories, and writing about issues like the recent spinach epidemic.

So just what is "Honest Food" you may ask? Honest Food is food grown using sustainable farming methods. Since not everyone knows what that is I tell people who visit the farm that the food we raise is planted and cultivated the same way our grandparents grew their food. In other words, without synthetic chemicals and with a lot of composted horse manure, which we have in spades here in Kentucky. We rotate crops and plant cover crops of clover and buckwheat once something is turned over to add nitrogen and organic matter to the soil. This creates the healthiest and richest soil for crops and the customers say, the most delicious food they’ve tasted

Flowers and herbs are planted between rows of vegetables to attract beneficial insects and we concentrate on those crops that we can grow successfully using organic methods (not eggplants!).  These are common organic practices and my grandparents also sewed zinnias and love-in-the-mist between their rows of beans and corn. Probably because their grandparents had done so. So many organic practices are rooted in the past and it’s funny to me when people think of it as a new trend. But like so many things, what is old is new again and that is a bit true for small scale agriculture.

The farm is in transition to becoming certified organic but I’m still unsure about going through with the certification. The label means less to me now than it once did.  The organic food business has gotten highly industrialized and a lot of it is processed food — including TV dinners and junk food. The thing is, when there’s certified organic pasta sauce and cereal with the same sugar grams as the conventional products I don’t feel like lumping my prize beets into that same category. The organic label, in this context, refers to a process of combining ingredients that meets the national standards as they exist, not that it’s any more healthy for you or that the company operates in a sustainable fashion the way an organic farmer does.

So I’ll just stick with my own "Honest Food" non-label and continue to talk about the importance of local food and creating local food systems.  When I worked as a food editor for the late Organic Style magazine, people seemed to have a mixed reaction to the term ‘organic.’ For some, there was this blind belief that anything called organic was automatically healthier and better for them, no matter how much it cost. For others, organic food was akin to bad tasting hippie macrobiotic cuisine (if that’s the right word for grains, greens, legumes, and sprouts) and probably vegetarian. Not everything organic is good for you unless it’s fresh of course. And my shopping list for organic, humanely raised protein is far from vegetarian.

I have to say I also don’t care for the trend in turning sustainable cuisine into just more food porn. Artisanal foods grown and raised by farmers (vegetables, dairy, meat and poultry) is something to savor and celebrate, but some chefs still feel the need to prod and manipulate it into submission. Of course, that will get them in magazines and the fancy food blogs…

It’s probably obvious that I’ve now gone whole-hog, head first in another direction, trading in my Prada boots and dinner at Per Se for rubber garden clogs, Carthart jeans, and rolled up sleeves. Instead of magazine test kitchens I work outdoors. There are less dishes to wash. And less trendy recipes to obsess over.

And I purely enjoy cooking the food I grow. The recipes are a lot more simple and to me, a lot more delicious because of the blood, sweat and love that went into it. Now it’s about keeping it honest.