I Am Not Hamlet

Man lives by plants. Plants live in the soil. The soil is a kind of factory in which the life force of plants, using plant food from earth, air, and water, and assisted by bacteria and the elements of the weather, changes these natural elements into forms that we can eat and wear, manufacture and burn, or use for building material. This precious soil from which we have our physical being is only a very thin skin upon the earth. --J. Russell Smith, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture  

I love autumn.  Inevitably, when September cools down my thoughts turn to Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Puritans.  The colorful chlorophyll withdrawal, the migrations, the difference in the smell of the air: all of these contribute to my favorite season, capped off by the high holy day of Thanksgiving.  The one drawback (that I can think of) to fall, in Michigan anyway, is the shuttering of farmers' markets.  The growing season comes to near standstill in Michigan by late December, but the markets have been closed since the beginning of the month (I believe Ann Arbor's is open through December) and that means the end of humanely slaughtered meats free of hormones and other Big Ag commodities.  No more fresh lettuce, peppers, squash, and apples.  No more diversity in size, taste, smell, and shape of the same kinds of produce.  Even though I might be able to find "organic" produce in grocery stores, it just isn't the same....

I'm reading Gary Holthaus' (mostly) excellent From the Farm to the Table: What All Americans Need to Know About Agriculture and find myself burning with anger at stuff I already kinda sorta knew.  "Studies show that each year of rising agricultural exports has shown a corresponding net decline in U.S and Canadian farm prosperity" and "The traders and the corporations make more from it [farming] than the farmer does" (128-29). That, of course, is only the beginning, he goes in to treatment of migrant workers, GMOs, and the joke that is NAFTA, WTO, and other puppet master organizations.  "Of all the grain that goes down the Mississippi on barges from the Midwest, only a tiny fraction goes to least developed countries, where hunger is the greatest...These grains are shipped to those who can best afford them, not to those most in need" (158). "What can a layperson make of all this?  At least this: as farmers or consumers, we have to take with ...