the Ripening

Notes & Quotes: Setting the Table by Danny Meyer

The following are my favorite notes from Danny Meyer's Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business.

Within moments of being born, most babies find themselves receiving the first four gifts of life: eye contact, a smile, a hug, and some food. We receive many other gifts in a lifetime, but few can ever surpass those first four.
I've learned how crucially important it is to put hospitality to work, first for the people who work for me and subsequently for all the other people and stakeholders who are in any way affected by our business--in descending order, our guests, community, suppliers, and investors. I call this way of setting priorities "enlightened hospitality."
You may think, as I once did, that I'm primarily in the business of serving good food. Actually, though, food is secondary to something that matters even more. In the end, what's most meaningful is creating positive, uplifting outcomes for human experiences and human relationships. Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It's that simple, and it's that hard.
My discoveries have also convinced me that there's always someone out there who has figured out how to make something taste just a little bit better. And I am inspired by both the search and the discovery.
Hospitality is the foundation of my business philosophy. Virtually nothing else is as important as how one is made to feel in any business transaction. Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. The converse is just as true. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions--for and to--express it all.
I was judged not just for the food, but by how well I cleaned the pans and plates, put out the fire, refilled the pit, and--most important--by whether I would be able to "leave the campsite neater than I had found it." (That concept remains, for me, one of the most significant measures of success in business, and in life.)
Learning to manage volunteers--to whom, absent a paycheck, ideas and ideals were the only currency--taught me to view all employees essentially as volunteers. Today, even with compensation as a motivator, I know that anyone who works for my company chooses to do so because of what we stand for. I believe that anyone who is qualified for a job in our company is also qualified for many other jobs at the same pay scale. It's up to us to provide solid reasons for our employees to want to work for us, over and beyond their compensation.
The beautiful choreography of service is, at its best, an art form, a ballet. I appreciate the grace with which a table can be properly cleared. I admire the elegance with which a bottle of wine can be appropriately opened, decanted, and poured. There's aesthetic value in doing things the right way. But I respond best when the person doing those things realizes that the purpose of all this beauty at the table is to create pleasure for me. To go through the motions in a perfunctory or self-absorbed manner, no matter how expertly rendered, diminishes the beauty. It's about soul--and service without soul, no matter how elegant, is quickly forgotten by the guest.
To this day, Union Square Cafe remains the purest expression of me and most clearly represents the mission of all my restaurants: to express excellence in the most inclusive, accessible, genuine, and hospitable way possible.
It's human nature for people to take precisely as much interest in you as they believe you're taking in them. There is no stronger way to build relationships than taking a genuine interest in other human beings and allowing them to share their stories. When we take an active interest in the guests at our restaurants, we create a sense of community and a feeling of "shared ownership."
I urge our managers to ABCD--always be collecting dots. Dots are information. The more information you collect, the more frequently you can make meaningful connections that can make other people feel good and give you an edge in business.
I realize that I don't have to do this kind of thing, but there is simply no point for me--or anyone on my staff--to work hard every day for the purpose of offering guests an average experience.
Our job is not to impose our own needs on our guests: it's to be aware of their needs and to deliver the goods accordingly. In hospitality, one size fits one!
I will throw myself into a new venture only when certain criteria are met: I am passionate about the subject matter (i.e., early American folk antiques, modern art, jazz, barbecue). I know I will derive some combination of challenge, satisfaction, and pleasure from the venture. It presents meaningful opportunities for professional growth for my colleagues and me. The new business will add something to the dialogue in a specific context, such a luxury dining (Gramercy Tavern), museum dining (The Modern, Cafe 2, and Terrace 5 at the Museum of Modern Art), Indian dining (Tabla), barbecue (Blue Smoke), or burgers and frozen custard (Shake Shack). Financial projections indicate the possibility of sufficient profit and returns on our investment to warrant the risk we're undertaking.
Know Thyself: Before you go to market, know what you are selling and to whom. It's a very rare business that can (or should) be all things to all people. Be the best you can be within a reasonably tight product focus. That will help you to improve yourself and help your customers to know how and when to buy your product.
The company learned to superimpose its blueprint onto thousands of locations north, south, east, and west, while also conveying the sense that each Starbucks belonged to its particular community. It was brilliant entrepreneurship to grasp that selling excellent coffee is secondary to creating a sense of community. Coffee sells (and is habit-forming), but performing a daily ritual with a self-selected group of life-minded human beings also sells. A business that doesn't understand it's raison d'etre as fostering community will inevitably underperform.
The only way a company can grow, stay true to its soul, and remain consistently successful is to attract, hire, and keep great people. It's that simple, and it's that hard.
We searched high and low for the rare employees who love teaching, know how to set priorities, work with a sense of urgency, and--most important--are comfortable with holding people accountable to high standards while letting them hold onto their own dignity.
We don't believe in pursuing the so-called 110 percent employee. That's about as realistic as working achieve the twenty-six-hour day. We are hoping to develop 100 percent employees whose skills are divided 51-49 between emotional hospitality and technical excellence. We refer to these employees as 51 percenters.
To me, a 51 percenter has five core emotional skills. I've learned that we need to hire employees with these skills if we're to be champions at the team sport of hospitality. They are: Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full). Intelligence (not just "smarts" but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning). Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be done). Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel). Self-awareness and integrity (an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment).
When an employee does not work out, the problem more often stems from an attitude of "I won't" rather than "I can't".
It's pretty easy to spot an overwhelmingly strong candidate or even an underwhelmingly weak candidate. It's the "whelming" candidate you must avoid at all costs, because that's the one who can and will do your organization the most long-lasting harm. Overwhelmers earn you raves. Underwhelmers either leave on their own or are terminated. Whelmers, sadly, are like a stubborn stain you can't get out of the carpet. They infuse an organization and its staff with mediocrity; they're comortable, and so they never leave; and, frustratingly, they never do anything that rises to the level of getting them promoted or sinks to the level of getting them fired. And because you either can't or don't fire them, you and they conspire to send a dangerous message to your staff and guests that "average" is acceptable.
It's critical to be a champion at retaining top staff members. A business owner can too easily squander the winning edge that comes from fielding a great team by not treating its members with respect and trust, teaching them new skills, and offering clear challenges.
I learned how critical it is to manage expectations--and to plan for success, not just for failure. Too often, we've made mistakes by not anticipating what the consequences would be if we were to win.
Previous success in any field invites high expectations and scrutiny the next time around. People are less forgiving when a winner falters than they are when an up-and-comer stumbles. But a mark of a champion is to welcome scrutiny, persevere, perform beyond expectations, and provide an exceptional product--for which forgiveness is not necessary.
I ended the memo by quoting something my late grandfather, Irving Harris, always used to remind me. "People will say a lot of great things about your business, and a lot of nasty things as well. Just remember: you're never as good as the best things they'll say, and never as bad as the negative ones. Just keep centered, know what you stand for, strive for new goals, and always be decent."
Three hallmarks of effective leadership are to provide a clear vision for your business so that your employees know where you're taking them; to hold people accountable for consistent standards of excellence; and to communicate a well-defined set of cultural priorities and nonnegotiable values. Perhaps most important, true leaders hold themselves accountable for conducting business in the same manner in which they've asked their team to perform.
Wherever your center lies, know it, name it, stick to it, and believe in it. Everyone who works with you will know what matters to you and will respect and appreciate your unwavering values. Your inner beliefs about business will guide you through the tough times. It's good to be open to fresh approaches to solving problems. But, when you cede your core values to someone else, it's time to quit.
Ultimately, the most successful business is not the one that eliminates the most problems. It's the one that becomes most expert at finding imaginative solutions to address those problems.
Poor communication is generally not a matter of miscommunication. More often, it involves taking away people's feeling of control. Change works only when people believe it is happening for them, not to them. And there's not much in between. Good communication is always a factor of good hospitality.
The biggest mistake managers can make is neglecting to set high standards and hold others accountable. This denies employees the chance to learn and excel. Employees do not want to be told, "Let me make your life easier by enabling you not to learn and not to achieve anything new."
You can get the best productivity from your employees when they believe that their leadership is open-minded, is accessible, and welcomes input.
You cannot be a great leader unless a critical mass of people are attracted to following your lead.
A great leader must repeatedly ask himself or herself this tough question: "Why would anyone want to be led by me?" And there had better be a good number of compelling reasons.
For some reason, when certain people gain more authority and power, they tend to demand respect from those who work for them. But what got them their promotion in the first place was their natural ability to command respect. Demanding respect creates tension that can make it very tough to lead, and very uncomfortable to follow.
Stanley [Marcus] set his martini down, looked me in the eye, and said, "So you made a mistake. You need to understand something important. And listen to me carefully: The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled."
The best companies are those that distinguish themselves by solving problems most effectively.
I like to think of our staff members not at servers, but surfers. Surfing is an arduous sport, and no one pursues it involuntarily. No one forces you to become a surfer, but if you choose to do it, there's no point in wasting energy trying to tame the ocean of its waves. Waves are like mistakes. You can count on the fact that there will always be another wave, so your choice is to get back on the surfboard and anticipate it. The degree to which you ride it with better form than the next guy is how you improve and distinguish yourself.
The Five A's for Effectively Addressing Mistakes:

Awareness
Acknowledgement
Apology
Action
Additional generosity

There are five primary stakeholders to whom we express our most caring hospitality, and in whom we take the greatest interest. Prioritizing those people in the following order is the guiding principle for practically every decision we make, and it has made the single greatest contribution to the ongoing success of our company. Our employees. Our guests. Our community. Our suppliers. Our investors.
Mutual respect and trust are the most powerful tools for building an energetic, motivated, winning team in any field.
Hospitality starts with the genuine enjoyment of doing something well for the purpose of bringing pleasure to other people.
I have always believed that you can tell as much about a company by the deals it does not make as by those it does. Much of the success we have had has resulted from saying "no, thank you" to opportunities that, while initially compelling, would not have been wise to pursue.
The "Yes" Criteria for New Ventures:

The opportunity fits and enhances our company's overall strategic goals and objectives.
The opportunity represents a chance to create a business venture that is perceived as groundbreaking, trailblazing, and fresh.
The timing is right for our company's capacity to grow with excellence, especially in terms of our having enough key employees who are themselves interested and ready to grow.
We believe we have the capacity to be category leaders within whatever niche we are pursuing.
We believe our existing businesses will benefit and improve by virtue of or notwithstanding our pursuing this new opportunity.
We feel excited and passionate about this idea. Pursuing it will be an opportunity to learn, grow, and have fun!
We are excited about doing business in this community.
The context is the right fit. Our restaurant and our style of doing business will be in harmony with its location.
An in-depth pro forma analysis convinces us that it a wise and safe investment.

As my company's leader, I have certainly learned to be decisive with an appropriate sense of urgency, but I always prefer to make my decisions after first building consensus among various colleagues, whose unique vantage points give me further confidence to move forward. This process can be lengthy, but so long as the spirit of any decision is consistent with what I'd want, bringing others' views to the table allows us to move forward with a more fully realized plan supported by those who are responsible for its execution. Our decision-making about whether or not to pursue new deals is always sharpest when I call on members of my advisory board to advocate on behalf of their primary role in our company.
At about this time, my assistant, Jenny Dirksen (now our director of community investment), shared a priceless expression her grandmother had taught her: One tuchas can't dance at two weddings. It's nice to be invited to a lot of parties. But as much as you may want to attend them all, it's important to acknowledge that you can be in only one place at a time, and do one thing well. My grandfather used to express similar wisdom: Doing two things like a half-wit never equals one thing like a whole wit.

Notes & Quotes: One Blade of Grass by Henry Shukman

The following are my favorite quotes from Henry Shukman's One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir.

My gaze fixed on the wall in front of me--a wall of adobe, glowing in the light of a lamp. An intense love for the wall welled up, almost as if I were falling in love with it, and it with me. All of a sudden, with what felt like a seismic jolt, the room seemed to blow wide open, the whole scene became an infinitely broad expanse, and it was as if I was sucked into that expanse myself and became part of it, so that the desert hills outside, which reached down to Gallup, in the valley two miles away, and on beyond, were my very own body.
It was true, as the Buddhists said: I was one with the world. I was one with everything. The whole world was my body, my mind. And because of that, I was beloved, I belonged, I was healed in all possible ways. All had been well, secretly well, all along.
Speedy didn't have a home, or a kitchen, or a bedroom. He basically just had himself, that was all. That and the land. He was at home anywhere. He was his home.
I had thought I wanted to go out and see the world. Instead it was the other way around: the world opened its arms and pulled me in.
This is a story not only of awakening but of healing. Perhaps the two can't, or shouldn't, be separated. No healing without a wound.
Help is always at hand. We just may not know where to look for it.
The change of location, the new job, the therapy, the publishers, quitting the PhD: they had all happened once I took up meditation. Was it possible that just sitting still twice a day could bring order to a disordered psychophysiology, and regulate a dysregulated life?
I had a diagnosis now: dysthymia. Persistent, low-grade, shame-based depression. It was tricky, because one of the symptoms was a denial of symptoms prompted by shame at they symptoms--the shame itself being one of the symptoms. Cleverly circular.
I began to do zazen daily. Over the weeks I grew to love it: a sense of clarity, a watery quality to everything, would come on.
How could it be that zazen--just sitting and watching one's breath--allowed all these old feelings to come up and work themselves out? Was it possible that all the human heart really needed was time? Give it time and it would sort itself out? You just had to be patient, allow it its period of grace each day.
He told me about the discipline of living as an artist, the need to practice your art every day without fail, how you should get up early each morning to work before you did anything else. You needed to trust your instincts and cultivate wonder.
Death unites us, love unites us, and grief unites us.
It was suddenly clear that all my life I had been assuming these many stimuli happened to a being called me. They were connected to one another by virtue of happening to me. But there was no thread connecting them. Each arose independently. They were free.
Without me, there was no past or future. Every phenomenon that arose was happening for the first and only time, and filled all awareness entirely. That made it an absolute treasure.
After any retreat, there was always a sense of having been cleansed, absolved even, and of returning to the world with new eyes.
I began to learn from other writers at the college. I had been so much my own man, I hadn't realized there were people willing to help. Perhaps the wisdom of Zen was creeping in bit by bit, touching the way I lived, not guarded but ready to give and receive help. One could feel goodwill toward just about everybody if one wanted.
This is part of Zen training. There is the sudden side--the unbidden revelation of the nature of self and world--and the gradual: the soil prepared through long cultivation.
I saw that meditation was not just meditation. It was a means, a vessel, a vehicle. Through daily sitting, through going on periodic sesshins at Cold Ash, a retreat center on the Berkshire Downs where three dozen of us would sit with John for a week, it was possible to undergo much more than a calming of the nervous system. In meditation we could pursue the fundamental investigation of a lifetime: the search for our identity.
I was slowly beginning to understand that Zen wasn't just about meditative absorption and insight, nor was it something done alone. It was about activity, about how you lived and interacted, how you treated others. It wasn't enough to "be enlightened," whatever that might mean; what counted was living it.
If Zen training is a kind of parenting, we are being stripped down more than built up, shown how little we need, not how much.
Could anything matter more than the present moment? Somehow that was where life itself was always waiting to meet me, if only I could remember.
My existence was a gift, and its unspeakable generosity had been hidden from me, by nothing but a mirage of grasping and aversion, by a basic ignorance that consisted in taking a mirage as real.
Zen may undermine false assumptions, but its goal is to help us live more helpfully--not in servitude to an imaginary tyrant called "me," but in the service of others.
Nothing matters more than finding that our "real self" is absolutely inclusive. And learning how to live it is the journey of a lifetime.
This was what Zen existed for: to bring a human being to a condition that, impossibly, resolved everything. And to pass it on.
The further you go in Zen the less you understand. That's how it is. You end up feeling a bit like Socrates, who said he knew only one thing, namely that he knew nothing. Although in Zen you don't even know that.
Zen: the only way to keep it is to give it away.
In the end it's all a fairy tale. In the end, all Zen saves us from is ourselves. It may be a little inaccurate but not unreasonable to say that in the end, all Zen is is love.
To bow to circumstance, not to set oneself up in any way, is crucial if we are to have any chance of receiving the liberative beauty of the teaching and passing it on.
Zen is soteriological. It therefore must be conceded to have an agenda of sorts. It seeks in some ways to "save" us, if only by relieving us of the baggage of our assumptions and preconceptions. But it saves us not from malign superhuman forces, nor into the arms of a heavenly being, but simply from ourselves. Its tagline might be: "How to get saved from yourself." It seeks to free us rom a mistaken perspective generated by a misunderstanding about our sense of self: namely, that it's a thing, that me is a fixed entity. On the other hand, it doesn't seek to replace wrong views with right ones. Rather, it seeks to free us of all views.

Notes & Quotes: A Bold Return to Giving a Damn by Will Harris

The following are my favorite quotes from Will Harris's A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food.

Reasonable people can probably agree that the way our food system has evolved--into one based on mass-produced industrial inputs; monocultures of foods that nobody, not even animals, should gorge on, unspeakable conditions for animals and undignified conditions for animals and undignified conditions for humans, and corporate monopolies controlling almost every link the chain--ain't working too good.
At White Oak Pastures, what fuels us is an attitude we call "a bold return to giving a damn."
I made myself a set of commandments about what I will do. I will treat the animals that I husband with respect and dignity, providing them with an environment that allows them to express their instinctive behavior. I will study the cycles of nature and learn how to not obstruct them. I will implement practices that leave the soil, water, and air better than I found it. I will heal the damage that my family's previous farming practices have inflicted on the land that I tend. I will provide a comfortable and wholesome life for my family. (This includes my biological family and the many at White Oak Pastures that I have come to accept as family.) I will provide the abundance that our land and herds produce to nourish those who need and appreciate it. I will nurture the village that we live in. I will get off my ass, seven days a week, and work as hard as I can, and invest all that I have to make all of this happen. I will openly teach what I have learned about these things to those who want to know.
I rethought things and now have a farm that's a living system that follows nature's principles. This system, based on holistic land management and owning every step of the supply chain from field to fork, retains the value of everything it creates and regenerates rather than degenerates the land it occupies, and it has helped my farm become one of the largest pasture-raised livestock operations in the country. We've evolved backward in a way, going all-in on the des: de-industrializing, de-commoditizing, and de-centralizing agriculture.
Though anybody that is worth a damn has a church, in my opinion, it's not necessarily in the form of a chapel, or synagogue, or mosque. Oftentimes, it's very different from that--it's a passion that they are fiercely devoted to, that is freely given for the benefit of others.
Everything I was spending so much time and money on was actually just a symptom of deeper problems I was inadvertently creating by my farming practices. And you seldom solve problems by attacking the surface while ignoring the root causes.
If you just sit still and shut up and pay attention, nature will tell you everything you need to know. She will provide you with everything you need to make your farm work. Nature knows everything, forgets nothing, and bats last.
I zoned in on what was really going on with my cattle and my pastures as I never had before. When I looked more closely, with a little less of the bravado and bluster that had driven me until then, I saw that all the things I'd been doing to pull more productivity and more success from my farm were destroying the basic operating principles of nature.
Cultivating food using the modern industrial system is like pissing your pants to stay warm. It's okay in the very short term but a terrible strategy for the long term.
At some point, you figure out what actions you are taking that are doing your land and animals harm, so you quit doing them. You suffer the withdrawal pains of giving them up for a while, then you start using the tools available to you to try to make the conditions around you a little better. And when what you do the first time doesn't work, you make a new plan and try that one instead. One step at a time, by planning, implementing, failing, and replanning and reimplementing over again, you start to figure out how to fix your farm.
We are truly the most destructive species that has ever resided on this magnificent planet.
Presented with the same systemic problem, the soil biologist will diagnose that the bacteria-to-fungi ratio is off; the plant geneticist says the genetics are awry; the livestock specialist says I should purchase the seed stock they've got on offer; and give different people give five different solutions based on their discipline. None of them are thinking of the farm as a complex organism in which every part is interconnected and influencing the next. They're watching the whole ball game through a sliver of missing plank in the fence. I get why that is--our land grant agricultural colleges have been teaching this approach for decades. But I think when you get focused on your silo of knowledge, you learn more and more about less and less until you know all there is to know about almost nothing.
Instead of scanning for what's wrong out there on my farm and in my fields, I'm looking for what's right. I'm looking for the biological activity that I can support and will maximize production, instead of killing biological competition to try and reach the same goal.
Somehow, my craziest ideas have had a way of actually working out. My dad used to say, "Will, I do believe you could shit in a swinging bucket." I have done the business equivalent of that a number of times.
These folks had never been told that what they thought they were buying when they picked up "USDA-inspected" supermarket beef--an all-American, small-town product steeped in feel-good special sauce--was no such thing. No wonder they were confused. The beef industry doesn't exactly label its product as "confinement-raised, pesticide-laden, soy-bean-finished beef." It had never occurred to them that there were hidden costs to the cheap meat they enjoyed, and that the cruelest of these costs were heaped onto the animals themselves.
Authenticity is the deal. Folks recognize it when they see it. So they listened.
When you see a living creature as a product, when you produce meat instead of raise meat, and when your holy grail is efficiency, you can rationalize a lot of sins.
As a consumer, you rub right up against this when you shop for food in your local store. A budget-cost pork loin or bargain-priced skirt steak, wrapped and ready to toss in your shopping cart for dinner, can make even the most miserable meat appear pretty good. I have compassion for that--when you don't know where that meat came from, why wouldn't the price tag be the main thing you consider? But I can't help but think, if you could taste the suffering in that underpriced meat, you might not want to eat it at all.
It's pretty simple: cows were born to roam and graze; chickens were born to scratch and peck; hogs were born to wallow and root. Deny them that right, and you have poor animal welfare.
Think about it: through confining animals and restricting their natural movement and exploration and socialization, we've inflicted on them the level of punishment that in human society we would inflict only on those who had committed terrible crimes. But somehow it's a perfectly accepted way of raising livestock.
I believe that if I want to take full responsibility for the welfare of my animals, I must also be responsible for where and how they die.
Nothing that dies stays dead. It goes on to provide nutrition for another living thing. From death springs decay. From decay springs new birth, and then growth, and then death again. This is how nature works. I feel better about my own death when I think about it this way.
I think the animals that we dispatch suffer less than almost any animal raised for food today. I've seen a lot of animals die in nature, too, and I think the animals we dispatch suffer less than the animals killed by predators. The fish grabbed by the spike-taloned ospreys from my pond, the rabbit mauled by a coyote--those creatures suffer, too.
Improving the welfare of farm animals falls on a different group of people: the consumer. You. Do you care enough about the animals that provide you with nourishment to go out of your way to look deeper? If you don't, then carry on buying the cheap, factory-farmed meat. But if it does matter to you, even just a little bit, then you've got to find and support a different kind of farm.
I stopped paying for pesticides, chemical fertilizers, hormone implants, subtherapeutic antibiotics, and the like, and instead I started paying for local labor. The labor builds the community. Instead of my money going to Wall Street and Silicon Valley and wherever else the entities behind industrial ag may be today, the money stays right here in the poorest county in America.
Our employees make nearly twice the county average, and they get benefits and health insurance. I believe you have to pay people fairly, because one thing I've learned is that a dog that is so hungry he's hunting food for himself is not going to hunt for you. I also believe in compensating people fairly for their skill sets, which is why some of my employees make more than me. I think when the founder or owner works shoulder to shoulder with the skill set provider, he or she appreciates those contributions a helluva lot more than when they're worlds away from those providers, trying to run the operation from a stock company boardroom. Another reason I hate big companies.
If you seek out nutritious food to build up your kids' health and your own, but if what you're buying leaves a trail of degradation on the people and towns that work so hard to produce it, or even wipes out the towns entirely, can you really call it "healthy"? That opens a can of worms.
If you're not willing to take risks in your farming operation, then you're gonna follow the path laid out before you by someone else with their agenda--and that's never gonna be the best path for you. It's gonna be what's best for them.
I have always taught my children that the God that I worship is generous, but relentless. He--or she--gives us opportunities, but when he does, he expects us to make them work. God wants to see you push the ball as far down the field as you can before he gives you the next one. So I've learned to milk the shit out of every opportunity I've been given. My God makes you prove you are worth it, every step of the way.
Closing loops means meeting your farm's needs by using the resources already available to you instead of depending on outside providers to supply them. It also means keeping as much as you can inside your system, like using waste materials to support the life cycle on the farm--not tossing them out for other entities to deal with--just as my ancestors did two, three, and four generations ago.
Any time a part of your business is out of your full control, you've got a vulnerability.
The entities making the most money are not interested in letting the truth about the harms they are well aware of, nor the benefits of alternatives like us, be known. They have big platforms and loud voices and myriad ways to ensure they dominate the conversation. But if we don't try to remedy this, we'll be stuck with a system that rewards and incentivizes the wrong things in the ceaseless quest to make ever more abhorrently cheap food.
When you put yourself in a position in which there ain't but one way out, you are free to quit worrying about future decision-making. You also change your idea of what winning even is.
I've come to understand that meaningful change will result not from tidal waves but from bubbles--individual examples of independent and resilient food systems dotting the rural fabric of our country.
Natural systems evolved to have redundancies built in so if one part of the system gets compromised, another part catches the slack. We need to be thinking about how to set up our small food systems to run the same way.
Are you willing to rip the curtain back and see the impact of your food choices? Can you look at it and still continue to empower these destructive forces?
If you want to make a difference, see a difference, or feel a difference, does it make any sense that you can continue to operate in the same way you always have? Do it different. Get out of the armchair, get out on the land. Touch the dirt. Connect.