Farm-to-Table is Dead

TikTok, of all places, brought me to this realization.

It started with a video of a guy walking through a market and complaining openly about the price of tomatoes. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen someone suggest that farmers market fare was overpriced… but it was the first time I saw a massive chorus of people agreeing (in the video’s comments).

This simply wasn’t done ten years ago when I became a farmer. Back then, complaining about prices was something you did under your breath, muttered to a partner or trusted parent, or simply didn’t say at all. Because there was no price you could pay then that the farmer didn’t deserve.

2010–2020 may have been the Golden Decade of American farming where the likes of Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin (yes, THAT Joel Salatin) launched the (so-called) plight of the American farmer out of the margins of farm-aid concerts and into mainstream popular consciousness in a way that I describe in my book:

Even as we condescend them as simple, unsophisticated folk from flyover country, we hold for them a kind of nefarious reverence: the Noble Hayseed to the Indian’s Noble Savage, a piece of American lore fading into the setting sun as they are overtaken by the unstoppable march of progress — in this case that progress being “corporate” farms, robotics, and the securitization of farmland. The…