They know, trust those who provide the food
Cincinnati Inquirer
By Polly Campbell
The responses to this summer’s well-publicized accounts of eggs making people sick range from a demand for more and better government inspections to increased attention to handling and cooking food at home.
And some consumers have adopted the strategy of avoiding food produced by large farms and companies as much as they can. Their strategy: buy local.
Neighborhood farmers markets are cropping up in more places in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. More consumers are now attracted to the idea of buying directly from the people who raised the food, from produce to poultry and beef.
The markets are increasingly popular for a lot of reasons. Some of us like the way such food tastes, and some of us want to support local businesses.
Kris Elter of Wyoming goes to farmers markets for a different reason. “I’m not a foodie,” she said. “I do it for health.”
She said that during the growing season here, she buys all of her fruits, vegetables, eggs and a lot of her meat at the Wyoming farmers market on Tuesdays.
Elter extends her locavore habits into the winter. She buys eggs and meat from an Ohio small-scale producer and produce from a market of farmers who use hoop houses to extend the growing season. She also freezes a lot of produce. And she buys pantry staples through a natural and organic food-buying co-op.
She believes safety comes from knowing and trusting the people who raise the food.
“I don’t want to buy from agribusiness,” she said. “I don’t know who grew the food, don’t know their mind set, whether they had my health in mind. But at the farmers market, I can ask each farmer I buy from about what chemicals they use, about their growing practices, how they take care of their animals. If I wanted, I could visit the farms and see how they grow.”
“I buy meat and eggs from Mohr’s Animal Acres (of Urbana, Ohio),” Elter said. “She has a much smaller operation, not on an industrial scale. If one of her chickens was sick, she’d know, she wouldn’t just ignore it until it died.”
Sarah Anthony of Over-the-Rhine, a board member of Slow Food Cincinnati and a frequent Findlay Market shopper, believes that the larger a food producers gets, “the harder it is to have good quality control.”
Trudy Mohr, who runs Mohr’s Animal Acres and sells eggs, chicken, lamb and beef at the Wyoming and Hyde Park farmers markets, said her eggs have been selling out quickly at those markets for the past few weeks.
“I have noticed that questions from customers go in cycles,” she said. “Right now it’s about eggs and how we raise hens. The big movies that have come out (“Food, Inc.,” and “Fresh”) have shown people what the big producers look like.”
She makes no claims that all locally grown food is 100 percent safe for consumers.
“All eggs have the possibility of having salmonella,” she said. “I would dissuade people from eating any eggs raw. But the story I’m getting about the egg scare is that the farms that were affected have a pretty nasty environment for growing animals.
“It’s not like that on most small farms. Our chickens run around, they’re in the sun and open air, not cooped in small cages on top of each other.”
Smaller-scale production is attractive to some people, but those who buy local food also appreciate the shorter, more direct link between the producer and the consumer. Mohr said her animals are slaughtered at a small processing facility, so she sells only the meat she raises.
It’s the trust that can exist between customer and farmer that really matters to dedicated locavores.
“The farmers I buy from produced their food. They’re proud of it,” said Anthony.
“They have a personal stake in how safe it is.”
Britt Hedges started the Wyoming farmers market, and she believes that transparency is the most important reason local food is safer. “If I buy spinach from a farmer I have a relationship with, I know they’re laying their livelihood, everything on the line.”
She thinks efforts to overhaul government safety procedures could be helpful, but the problem is systemic and needs to be approached in a more general and basic way.
“We’re looking at the wrong end of it. We’re trying to make food quick, fast and cheap, but we’re treating the land and animals in a way that’s unsupportable. We shouldn’t be trying to make bad food safe, we should be producing clean food in the first place.”
