Summary: The Farm-To-Table Movement

Throughout the piece, the underlying message was that farmers needed support. The essay mainly focused on why the farm-to-table movement failed to give the farmers the help they needed. This paradigm is confirmed in Lynne Curry’s Has Farm-to-Table Helped the Actual Farmer Yet? published in the L.A. Times. Curry narrates her experience meeting an acquaintance who is a farmer, saying “I ran into a farmer I know in December. “I'm not going to make my operating loan in February,” he told me, meaning he might lose his farm to foreclosure. A grower of organic vegetables for 50 of the top restaurants in farm-food-obsessed Portland, Ore., he had lost 4,000 pounds of his carrot crop during a bitter fall cold snap” (Curry 1). Despite partnering with top restaurants, …show more content…
If the goal of the trend is “true agricultural sustainability”, as Barber says, we can follow the microbrewing trend’s pattern. Valuing barley has helped Martens, as selling it for beer earns him 30% more than selling barley for animal feed (Barber 4). Martens utilizes cover crops to send nutrients into the soil. These cover crops can also be great for food, as Barber discovers. Trying sweet pea shoots grown for soil quality, Barber begins to think of the farm’s abundant cover crops less as culinarily unusable, but instead as a fresh salad bowl (Barber 4). After returning to the restaurant, Barber creates “Rotation Risotto”, a dish he describes as “a collection of all of Klaas’s lowly, soil supporting grains and legumes, cooked and presented in the manner of a classic risotto” (Barber 4). One waiter described the dish as a “nose-to-tail approach to the farm—an edible version of Klaas’s farming strategy” (Barber 4). Personally, I think Barber’s idea is a great start to the problem of low support for farmers. Increasing variety of ingredients in dishes can let farmers make money off cover crops while also reaping the agricultural