Where does our food come from?
(Note: This is Part 3. If you haven’t already ready Part 1 and Part 2 of our series “Building a Better Future with Buy From Friends,” please do so now. And then, jump back in with Part 3).
Drive through rural Georgia, and you can still see the remnants of multi-generational farms far and wide, now but sprawling pastures laid vacant but for the dilapidated, caved-in bodies of old wooden farmhouses with collapsed tin roofs, reclaimed by nature.
These homes whisper of a time when household staples like rice, flour, salt and seeds were packaged in patterned “chicken linen” fabrics, which could then be tailored into children’s school and dress clothes. A time when you’d go down to the nearby feedlot or school/churchyard where the weekly farmers market would be underway, a meeting place for neighborhood gossip and revelry, burlap sacks in toe filled to the brim with goods harvested and hand-made by your neighboring homesteaders.
Here, those fallen farmhouses stand upright and sturdy, holding in the heat of a hard day’s work, rug beaters and wood-burning stoves, and root cellars packed with mason jars of canned fruits, pickled veggies, potatoes, preserves, salted butters and a small supply of butcher-bought meat, cured for the coming winters.
Please note: This isn’t to gloss over the human atrocities of race and gender inequality pervasive at that time. It’s meant as a call back to a pre-industrial growth period, when there was one or two degrees of separation between you and the food that nourished your family. It was fresh, oozing with the flavor and aromas as mother earth intended; tended to by hands you shook regularly, prepared by people you knew by name.
This chart from the US Department of Agriculture shows that acres used for active farmland in the U.S. has plummeted since the 1950s, and the distance between the consumer and the food consumed has widened exponentially.
Don’t forget to water the burger!
In turn, first-hand exposure to food production and processing is an exception, not the rule; and food blindness is increasingly pervasive. To wit: A 2021 study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that 40% of schoolchildren aged 4-7 believe bacon, hamburgers and chicken nuggets comes from plants (Source). If only that were true for money as well!
By industry standards, “food travels an average 1200-1700 miles from farm to plate in the U.S. while 50% of U.S. fruits and 20% of vegetables are imported. Also, 2026 marks the first year in the entire 164-year history of the US Department of Agriculture that meat labeled as “Product of the USA” truly means raised from birth in the USA and not – as was previously the case – shipped from other countries like Brazil and Australia and processed and repackaged here.
This means, most people don’t actually know where their food is coming from; Nor do they know how it got here, or how the people responsible for getting it here were treated.
Our family had to ask ourselves: How many times do we blindly buy a food item and just hope for the best-case scenario regarding its origins?
