[Content Copyright © Adam Gottschalk 1999]

My background in related fields:

(a) About 10 years working in restaurants and bars up an down the east coast and in the Pacific Northwest, every position from busboy to head chef

(b) About 10 years of "micro-farming", and numerous related educational experiences:

• worked as in an intern on organic farms
• studied with John Jeavons, head of Ecology Action and author of How to Grow More Vegetables (than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine)
• worked with Eliot Coleman (on the board of a food cooperative), organic-farming guru and author of The New Organic Gower, and other books
• worked as a TA for the Agroecology class at Huxley college of Environmental Studies at Western Washington University

(c) Starting in 1994,wrote widely on topics related to agriculture, with articles appearing in the newsletter of John Jeavons, Whatcom Watch, Whatcom County, Washington's environmental monthly, and elsewhere. Lectured widely on related topics as well, in a variety of contexts.

(d) About 15 years as an active member and worker at both CSA farms and cooperative groceries.

The Member-Supported Small-Farm Restaurant System

Introduction

The following are initial thoughts on the creation of a farm-restaurant system. This idea is simple, but deceptively so. The program seeks in fact to have a profound and broad impact. The vision loosely outlined here draws on already-successful alternative food-system models (e.g., Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA)) for inspiration. The quest is for yet further new ways of addressing simultaneously the social and the environmental negative externalities associated with agricultural labor displacement.

"Agricultural labor displacement? Wait a minute; this is 1999," I can imagine the reader thinking. One premise that serves as a backdrop for this exploration is that the social costs in particular still have not been considered sufficiently (at least not in popular forums) as compared to the benefits of the near complete shift in U.S. employment away from food production (and other primary sector work). Though that shift has origins deep (and very deep) in the past, the total obliteration of agriculture as a social organizing principle is new-fangled, and still quite fresh in the minds and memories of many. ( The environmental costs of, for example, fossil-fuel and chemical substitution for human labor on farms are somewhat more widely recognized than the social ones are, and are integral to this discussion as well.) The Member-Supported Small-Farm Restaurant System, or Small-Farm Restaurant (SFR), addresses these and other issues from a perspective that is both hyperdisciplinary and very practical.

SFR is, as noted, inspired by CSA. In SFR, though, the focus of the system is a cooperatively-run restaurant; the restaurant is supplied entirely by a collective of small farms, while the two in turn are supported entirely by member diners who purchase "shares" by buying meals in advance. By bringing together into direct relationships (i) the value-adding members (restaurant staff), (ii) the primary-producer members (farmers), and (iii) the consumer members (diners), SFR aims to minimize the full costs associated with the industrialization of food production and distribution, while increasing benefits throughout the system (i.e., not just to one segment).

Fundamental Goals of the SFR system:

(a) to help "save the American small farm" by allowing sufficient livelihoods, deeply rewarding work, and an egalitarian work environment for the value-adding and primary-producer members

(b) to make a positive contribution, at a reasonable price, to the whole-diet health of consumer members

(c) to ensure self-perpetuation by designing into the system both (i) a respect for and adherence to the opportunities and limits set by local ecology, and also (ii) a strong system of training by which no one member has "proprietary" knowledge, knowledge without which the cooperative might suffer should a given member leave

(d) to provide a neighborhood-level, unthreatening arena for the rejuvenation of everyday social interplay and public discourse.

Supplementary aims include:

(e) to act as an educational force (with classes, school field trips, etc.), and as a model for creative development and "civic renewal," especially drawing attention to the overwhelming importance of food systems

(f) to encourage others to adopt and adapt SFR ideas and principles in their localities.

SFR does not seek to deny categorically that there have been any benefits at all from the lengthy process of deagriculturalization; the broader scope in life pursuits allowed to most people because of agricultural labor displacement, and the shift toward service in general, is significant. But industrialization in agriculture is fundamentally unlike that in other realms. (Witness, as one example, how long it took from the beginning of capital penetration to arrive at the final step of patented transgenic seeds.) With farming, extreme environmental damage (soil erosion at 70%+ nationwide, polluted water and depleted aquifers, tainted produce, etc.) is not merely an unfortunate side-effect of concentration and capitalization; it is in fact an inseparable part and parcel. The nature of the monopoly-capital process, with shareholders calling the shots, and with its aim to both create and satisfy wants in one fell swoop, leads to cost externalization at every turn. Negative externalized costs related to the production of food, though, are of a higher, more critical order than those related to, say, the production of Barbie dolls.

The near total displacement in the U.S. of human labor from food raising has not been entirely voluntary by any stretch of the imagination. (Indeed, many are now actively discouraged from (re-)entering the field). The compensating advantages that we were all supposed to derive--not just the economic ones, but the more qualitative identity- and character-related ones as well--have not been universal or egalitarian in their distribution. Nor have they necessarily outweighed the many costs we have incurred that we could never have imagined before the changes took place (anthropological changes of monumental proportion causing unpredictable physical and intangible effects alike.)